You’ve decided to migrate your SAP environment to the cloud, and you’ve chosen Microsoft Azure to increase business agility and reduce costs. Now, you’re looking at a potentially complex migration that your organization has a lot riding on. Relax. SAP may be the central nervous system of your company – mission-critical in every way – but, with Azure and Azure NetApp Files, we’ve got your back. SAP migrations, even enormous environments, are in our wheelhouse.
We specifically designed Azure NetApp Files to meet the core requirements of running high-performance workloads, such as mission-critical databases, in the Azure cloud. Azure NetApp Files provides a simple, fully managed cloud service to help you migrate faster and optimize your SAP operations. In addition, Azure NetApp Files is the first storage service certified for use with SAP production databases.
You may be thinking about how to migrate to Azure and upgrade to HANA or S4/HANA at the same time. The good news is that now you don’t have to. You can migrate your current Business Suite/R3 landscape on Oracle (AnyDB) directly to Azure and then upgrade to HANA or S4/HANA in a secondary step. (AnyDB is the SAP term for any supported database management system aside from SAP HANA). Azure gives you multiple migration paths.
With the certification of Oracle 19c under SAP, you can stage your upgrade to HANA or S4/HANA to minimize migration complexity. Upgrade after your migration is complete and the heavy lifting is over. You can find step-by-step directions here, as well as links to the two SAP notes providing support for deploying SAP AnyDB (Oracle 19c) with Azure NetApp Files.
Just prior to the pandemic, IDC reported that 55 percent of SAP Partners were still in the early stages of maturity in the digital transformation process.[i] We get it. SAP is important to every aspect of running your business. But we have lots of experience. Even SAP has gained significant benefits by using Azure NetApp Files in their SAP migration to Azure:
“We are able to reduce the total amount of outages by 80% because of the stability that Azure NetApp Files provides. Customers are looking for flexibility, stability and a better TCO. NetApp is the market leader there.”
– Lalit Patil, CTO, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud[ii]
At NetApp, we’ve had an ever-deepening relationship with SAP for more than two decades. We know storage, the cloud, and SAP. We can help you migrate your most complex SAP workloads to Azure faster, more efficiently, and with less risk.
The upside is huge. You gain on-premises or better performance, increased agility, and reduced costs. In addition, that same IDC study revealed that SAP partners with a fully integrated digital strategy had experienced 43 percent revenue growth.[iii]
Azure NetApp Files delivers high performance, sub-millisecond latency, and high availability (99.99 percent SLA guaranteed). With Azure NetApp Files, you can achieve instant file performance shared across multiple compute nodes for the first time, ever.
Oracle databases are frequently sized to meet peak performance requirements, which means they are over-provisioned during non-peak times – an inefficient and expensive use of resources. Azure NetApp Files allows you to scale both capacity and performance dynamically. Our three performance tiers reflect the real-world range of IOPS demands, allowing you to scale up on-the-fly to Ultra to handle peak workloads and scale back down instantly to Premium or Standard for non-peak periods. Both scale up and down are fast and simple.
With Azure NetApp Files you can reduce backup runtime by 99 percent and reduce restore and recovery times by 70 percent. Azure NetApp Files’ snapshot copies protect your data with fast, reliable backup and recovery. Since snapshots are point-in-time images and do not copy data, they do not impact performance and take up no additional data storage footprint. Using local snapshots for day-to-day backup and recovery increases the efficiency of your organization. Recovery from a snapshot is much faster than from a backup, reducing recovery time to just minutes. You can store up to 255 snapshot copies per volume, providing up to 255 separate restore points. Azure NetApp Files also complies with the Oracle Doc ID 604683.1 third-party snapshot requirements.
No matter what database you are currently using, you can trust Azure NetApp Files to help you before, during, and after your SAP migration to Azure. We are hearing from customers every day who tell us we helped save their complex migration projects. Gain on-premises or better performance in the cloud and the easiest SAP migration possible – no matter what database you are running.
Find out more about how Azure NetApp Files can help you migrate SAP to Azure, no matter what database you are using.
Learn more here.
Footnotes:
[i] IDC Study Revenue Opportunity for SAP Partners | Digital Transformation
[iii] IDC Study Revenue Opportunity for SAP Partners | Digital Transformation