Recently, SAP announced a new program called RISE with SAP. This subscription-based offering includes infrastructure from a chosen hyperscaler, cloud-managed services from SAP, and application services from a systems integrator, packaged together nicely in a single contract. This program attempts to solve an ongoing issue of moving to S/4HANA by reducing some of the associated complexities. The offering also embeds intelligence directly into business processes at the time of design for better analysis of your custom solution performance.
A relatively small number of SAP customers have moved to S/4HANA. This jumpstart program may be especially appealing if you had to push off major IT initiatives in 2020. SAP realizes that getting its customers to the public cloud removes a major headache and complexity of their landscapes: infrastructure. Thus, you can concentrate on the hardest part of the journey—the business process redesign. But while infrastructure as a service in a hyperscaler platform does help remove some complexity, it doesn’t solve the whole story.
Data drives everything in an SAP project, whether you’re configuring the chart of accounts for day one of the project or creating sales orders using numerous master data elements. Without data, your SAP system can’t function. While public cloud can provide the infrastructure to house your data, it doesn’t offer the capabilities to do the types of things with your data required for a complex, expensive SAP project.
How Can You Fill the Public-Cloud Gaps?
At Pure Storage®, we understand the value of the cloud. Instead of competing against it, we embrace it and offer complementary solutions. I’m constantly talking to people about how they can gain true application benefit from their infrastructure. A lot of them tell me that a move to the public cloud is scary and brings up fears, including:
- Losing control over the infrastructure
- Not having even three-nines of availability
- The infrastructure becoming a commodity controlled by a public-cloud provider
But it doesn’t have to be scary. With Pure, you can get the same benefits in the public cloud that you can in your data center.
With Pure Cloud Block Store™, you can leverage the same types of capabilities in the public cloud (AWS and Microsoft Azure) that you can on premises. For example, you’ll get the same time-saving snapshot and data mobility features that I highlighted in a previous post.
I discuss how snapshots can solve the common challenges in an SAP system. But how does that work in a public-cloud model? It simply doesn’t. Moving business objects between landscapes requires using the provided replication tools. (SAP Test Data Migration Server (TDMS) has taken years off my life!). You get seamless data mobility with Pure Cloud Block Store.
You’ll also get Pure’s fantastic data-reduction and compression algorithms. Given that you’re paying for every byte of data in the cloud, Pure Cloud Block Store can help you save money by decreasing your TCO. Pure storage is thin-provisioned, compressed, and deduplicated. In fact, Pure guarantees 2:1 data reduction for SAP HANA workloads. This means you’ll need half the space in your public-cloud environment than without Pure Cloud Block Store.
Risk Mitigation in the Move to the Cloud
A company’s journey to the cloud for its SAP platform is filled with inherent risks. Pure Storage and Pure Cloud Block Store can help you mitigate these risks. With the data mobility that snapshots provide, you can move workloads off an on-premises Pure array and into a Pure Cloud Block Store instance in the public cloud. If you’re not happy with the way things are running in the cloud, you can simply move it back—with all your data intact.
Figure 1: Pure Cloud Block Store delivers seamless bi-directional data mobility and a consistent experience across all data domains.
And if you want the agility of the cloud infrastructure for development and test environments—but want to keep production data in your own data center for security or performance reasons—Pure Cloud Block Store is the perfect solution. This hybrid model has really started to appeal to SAP customers—especially those with an SAP ERP that is the most important IT asset in their company. With snapshots or Pure’s data-replication services, you can easily move data from an on-premises data array to the public cloud and back. Because we deduplicate the data so well, you’ll only need to move what’s necessary. That’s usually delta data that didn’t exist when the snapshot was taken. This helps you avoid costly egress charges when moving data out of the public cloud.
Moving to the public cloud doesn’t have to be scary. Pure’s software solutions can help complement the journey as you look to adopt Rise with SAP. For more information, please contact Pure Storage.
