Migration of Old archived data in ECC on Premise to Standalone ILM in SAP RISE environment

[Kailash_Bhatnagar]

Introduction - In today's scenario of digital transformation when all SAP customers are adopting the hyperscalers on cloud, converting there ECC system to S/4HANA. There are various challenges and hurdles during the transformation journey.

One of the hurdles is moving the old Archived data into new cloud environment that too if SID changes it further adds to complication.

In this blog i will provide you the detailed steps for migrating the old Archived data from ECC to standalone ILM system.

Scenario Description - In the customer environment ILM was embedded in the ECC and it was connected to SAP IQ system as a database store (on Sybase) for archiving.

When this customer was migrated to cloud and converted to S/4HANA on RISE with standalone ILM they were facing the challenge of accessing archived data in new environment using standalone ILM system. 

AS-IS Landscape

On Premise IQ system was connected to On-Premise ECC system for Archiving

To-Be Landscape

ECC was converted to S/4HANA, standalone ILM system was introduced in the landscape and SAP IQ was migrated to cloud.

Solution Description - In order to access archived file in ECC, created before S/4 conversion in new landscape via standalone ILM system with SAP IQ on cloud following steps were followed.

1) As the project was on SAP RISE, we got the standalone ILM installed by SAP.

2) Then we configured SAP ILM system using below document

Quick Configuration Guide for the ILM Store (sap.com)

High level flow diagram from Archiving client to SAP IQ via SRS and standalone ILM Store

The system landscape may be configured in various combinations, such as:
● Using archiving client, SRS, and ILM Store on the same system.
● Using remote SRS to isolate the archiving client and the SRS.
● Using archiving client and SRS on the same system and using ILM Store on a separate system.

We followed the 3rd option

1) In this scenario Archiving client is ECC

2) We used local SRS on ECC

3) ILM store was local in AS-IS but in TO-BE ILM store was moved to standalone ILM system. 

4) SAP IQ was moved from On-Premise to cloud environment using Backup Restore.

Below is the whole Architecture diagram

But now the challenge was to access archived files saved before conversion in new environment.

For that i adopted two step approach to retrieve the metadata of old archive files from ECC and saved it to new ILM system using File conversion functionality.

Step 1

In this step we connected converted S/4 system to SAP IQ on cloud directly and using the retrieve functionality of ILM retrieved the file to the staging area (maintained in FILE transaction under Global Archive Folder) of the S/4 application server. Here the uri of the archived file was still showing the old SID.

Step 2

Then we connected the S/4 system to IQ on cloud via standalone ILM store using an HTTP destination pointing to new ILM system in ILMSTOREADM transaction.

After that we used the file conversion process of ILM and by this the old files with original uri got converted to new files with new name and new uri with changed SID, along with that old replaced files were also deleted automatically.

Now we followed this process for all the files in batches (based on archived object) and were able to migrate the whole data and metadata from ECC-IQ environment to S/4-ILM-IQ environment.

Hope this blog will help many customers to move their archived data from old archive store to new ILM store using these two-step file conversion process. 

If you face any issues in this process you can connect with me for the details and if this blog seems to be useful to you then please don't forget to put your comments .

Regards,

Kailash Bhatnagar