Businesses worldwide utilize SAP systems to streamline their business workflows, and with the new prominence of the cloud, many SAP users are migrating to use SAP in the cloud. As this shift occurs, more and more SAP users are looking for ways to ease the transition into the cloud and make full use of the latest cloud capabilities. Cloud Volumes ONTAP answers this need, providing powerful solutions for migrating and optimizing SAP cloud databases.
In this blog post we introduce some SAP uses, SAP HANA—a popular SAP database—and take a deep dive into the benefits of integrating SAP systems with Cloud Volumes ONTAP, including several customer success stories.
SAP (Systems Applications and Products) is one of the largest business software companies in the world. Serving 91% of Forbes Global 2000 companies, SAP has become a market standard in the industry, catering to businesses of all sizes. While its flagship product is SAP ERP (enterprise resource planning), SAP also offers a variety of other management solutions such as SAP CRM (customer relationship management), SAP SCM (supply chain management) and SAP PLM (product lifecycle management).
SAP HANA is an in-memory relational SAP database management system which enables SAP users to store and retrieve data for applications. Along with these capabilities, SAP HANA provides analytics, business services, IoT capabilities and more. It is particularly useful for handling big data, supporting data lakes, machine learning, and processing and generating insights from live data in real time.
With so many diverse and widespread SAP uses, transferring SAP to the cloud has become an important milestone for many companies on the cloud transformation path. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP data management platform for hybrid and cloud storage can enhance the performance of SAP in the cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP eases migration of SAP into the cloud, and infuses SAP systems with benefits that aren’t available natively in the cloud, including high availability, data protection, storage efficiencies, automated backup and DR processes, file sharing, and efficient data cloning to help speed up development cycles.
SAP currently has over 200 million subscribers in its cloud user base. Many SAP users started their journey to the cloud by initially migrating their development and test environments. In recent years, more and more users are inclined to migrate their complete SAP infrastructure, including production environments. Cloud Volumes ONTAP can significantly ease this process by providing:
Backing SAP databases can be an arduous and costly process which can negatively impact SAP HANA performance. File-based backup can take hours to complete and cause a heavy CPU load and can thus typically be run only once a day. With Cloud Volumes ONTAP, backup and restore operations become fast, seamless, and efficient:
Since files are typically a core part of business operations, most SAP users require a shared file system. Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports all file-sharing protocols (NFS and SMB /CIFS) whether files are stored on-premises, in the cloud or in a multicloud or hybrid environment. Many enterprises enhance their file sharing in the cloud by using Cloud Volumes ONTAP’s:
SAP lifecycle management can frequently become cumbersome, expensive, error-prone, and time-consuming. SAP landscapes often overflow with system copies for testing and development. These copies take up extra space and capacity, take time to create, and often pile up, making them challenging to manage and refresh. When DevOps, who are charged with this task, lack efficient tools for this process, delays are created which affect the entire product lifecycle. When integrated with SAP HANA, Cloud Volumes ONTAP equips DevOps teams with the tools needed to better manage system copies, accelerating overall SAP lifecycles:
A number of companies are transforming the operation of their SAP in the cloud with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. In this section we dive into some prominent case studies.
The first SAP case study involves a multinational human capital management company based in San Francisco which provides cloud-base SaaS software solutions. The company turned to NetApp with the goal of transferring operations to Azure, without losing its existing SAP functionality. By using Cloud Volumes ONTAP the enterprise:
One of the largest retirement plan providers in the US, this company serves nearly 40,000 plan sponsors, adding value to their customers through mutual funds, managed accounts, capital preservation products, and retirement income solutions. As part of its cloud-only strategy, the company turned to Cloud Volumes ONTAP to migrate its core applications to AWS. With Cloud Volumes ONTAP the company gained:
With over $500 billion in revenue, this international American retail giant operates a chain of big-box department and grocery stores and employs 2.2. million employees. With a hybrid cloud infrastructure that includes Azure and Google Cloud, the company was looking to migrate its SAP HANA instances to Azure. In using Cloud Volumes ONTAP it achieved:
Headquartered in Sydney, this company is one of Australia's leading integrated energy companies, covering energy exploration, generation, distribution, and retail. The company turned to NetApp in need of a multi-protocol shared storage service for their SAP migration to AWS. The company is currently leveraging Cloud Volumes ONTAP for a wide array of benefits:
SAP provides an incredibly widespread suite of tools which allows companies to better manage multiple facets of their business. More and more SAP users are looking to transfer their SAP systems into the cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP eases this transition.
Once in the cloud, Cloud Volumes ONTAP offers an array of features, including backup, DR, cloning and file sharing which enable SAP users to meet even the most challenging of business requirements.
Start a free, 30-day trial of Cloud Volumes ONTAP to move your SAP workloads to the cloud today.