SAP Hardware Sizing and benchmarking

SAP Sizing : Business capacity benchmark in SAP usually use SAPS number. 1 SAPS means around 10 transactions/hour business hardware capacity in an SAP system. The sizing is important in SAP upgrade and new SAP installation.



List of hardware are certified and benchmarked by SAP in SAPS number:
http://www50.sap.com/benchmarkdata/sd2tier.asp
For sizing, you can use Quick Sizer tool from SAP from http://service.sap.com/quicksizer

Referring to processor product, example of SAPS power per CPU and their certification from SAP (CPU saps):

• Sun Fire E4900, 2-way SMP, UltraSPARC IV 1.2 GHz; 1620 SAPs or 810 SAPs/CPU; cert http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/pdf/cert0504.pdf
  
• HP rx7620, 8-way SMP, Intel Itanium 2, 1.5 GHz: 7530 SAPS or 941 SAPs/CPU; cert http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/pdf/cert4503.pdf
  
• HP ProLiant DL585, 4-way SMP, Dual-core AMD Opteron: 8900 SAPs or 2225 SAPs/CPU or 1113 SAPs/Core; cert http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/pdf/cert1705.pdf
  
• HP ProLiant DL580 G3, 4-way SMP, Intel XEON MP; 4700 SAPs or 1175 SAPs/CPU; cert http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/pdf/cert1205.pdf
  
• IBM eServer p5 Model 570, 8-way SMP, POWER5; 13020 SAPs or 1627 SAPs/CPU; cert http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/pdf/cert4104.pdf
• other hardware and platform available in SAP Hardware cerification site and also vendor competency center that can be used for upgrade or new installation
  

SAPS in ECC (e.g. sap ecc 6 sizing, sap nw 7 sizing) will have different sizing with saps number in BW/BI and other netweaver system. SAP Netweaver sizing is very basic without considering functionality inside the platform. 

related resources for SAP sizing and hardware:
Sizing SAP Systems
SAP Hardware Solutions: Servers, Storage, and Networks for mySAP.com
What Every Business Needs to Know About SAP (Prima Tech's SAP Book Series)
Supporting Sap R/3
Adaptive Hardware Infrastructures for SAP
SAP(R) R/3 Implementation Guide
Anticipating Change: Secrets Behind the SAP Empire
Hardware-Lösungen für SAP-Systeme - Server, Speicher, Netzwerke in einer integrativen Sicht (SAP PRESS)
SAP Consulting and Project Management (Book/CD-ROM package)
SAP: An Executive's Comprehensive Guide
Implementing Sap R/3 : How to Introduce a Large System into a Large Organization, 2nd Edition