Do we need to Upgrade existing BI 7.0 to EHP1 for BPC 7.0 NW.

Question

Can BPC 7.0 NW be installed as App Server with EHP1 and then use our existing BI 7.0 as the database.  Or will our BI system need to be upgraded to EHP1?

Answer 1

Tania,
There are two basic configurations of BPC NW with regard to BW at customers:
1. Install BPC on the existing/common Netweaver BW platform (with Ehp1 and at least SP03/05 - depending on version) - this is most common at customers that are either quite aggressive with their application of BW support packages and enhancement packs, or customers who do not have an existing BW installation and are primarily installing BW to support BPC version for Netweaver.
2. Support two BW instances: One for the datawarehouse and one for BPC version for Netweaver - this is the most common architecture at customers who already have a mature BW installation and who wish to manage BW support pack and enhancement pack application without being constrained by BPC's requirements.
Another reason we see this type of architecture (#2) is because of incompatibilities between add-ons - for example SEM requires the FINBASIS add-on that is incompatible with Ehp1, so you can't run SEM-BPS/BCS on the same system as BPC version for Netweaver. I hear that technically you can do it by overriding the Ehp1 installer but it is not supported and should not be attempted. The release of Netweaver Ehp2 complicates the matter even further, since it is unclear if BPC is compatible with Ehp2.
As far as the question of whether it is too much overhead, that is a question that is going to need to be answered on a customer-by-customer basis. It depends on your budget, the maturity of your datawarehouse, your basis and BW management practices, and the maturity of your support organization, among other things.
If you had a separate BW instance for BPC, then you would still need to load data into that instance directly in order to load to BPC. You would probably want to think of your BW instance for BPC as a datamart separate from you main BW datawarehouse.
Hope that helps,
Ethan