Thank you Deepak,
Keeping the ERP system down and bring it up when needed is certainly an option to be considered, I have to investigate with my client's SAP account manager the financial aspect of it. I mean that at the moment we have an ERP license covering us for thousants of users and I do not know what level of charging SAP will apply for us if we have the system down and bring it up on demand with only a handful of key users accessing the system.
The cost of this has to be compared with the cost of a new SAP ERP ILM license plus the cost for SAP certified external storage from a 3rd party provider or SAP Integrated Database store plus ILM project costs (at the moment, we do not even have archiving in our ERP system)
I have the feeling that the first option will be much cheaper. Please let me know if you have any input on this.
Many thanks
Andreas