S/4 Conversion

During this S/4 transformation, experienced IT service providers such as Q-beyond are available to implement uniform managed services and cloud operating models with solutions from NetApp. This involves the use of technologies that enable a fast and smooth transition to S/4 in just two days, as a real-world example shows.

Medium-sized companies that have so far relied on on-premises systems and ECC 6.0 are increasingly shifting their SAP operations to the cloud for competitive reasons. The decision to end support for ECC is motivating more and more companies to push ahead with the switch to cloud-based S/4.

As this is a demanding transformation, managed service providers are essential to initiate the necessary measures on the one hand and to ensure a smooth changeover and operational flow on the other. The basis for this is a fast and smooth data migration. Q-beyond is such a full-stack service provider that supports medium-sized companies in the digitization of their business models in close cooperation with NetApp.

Foundation for the transformation

At SAP partner Q-beyond, Net-App Flash, Ontap data management - including snapshot technology - and close integration with SAP are among the core elements of the cloud model. On this basis, hundreds of Hana instances can be efficiently managed and secured. Cloud migration of databases, applications, and other workloads is accelerated by Azure NetApp Files. Azure NetApp Files is a fully managed Microsoft service that enables enterprises to move databases, industry platforms such as EPIC, and SAP enterprise applications to the cloud quickly and securely while ensuring compliance.

The service delivers a performance speed of 4.5 GiB/s and 100 TB of storage per volume. Support for multiple file storage protocols such as NFSv3, v4.1 and SBM3.1.x on Windows or Linux enables a variety of lift-and-shift scenarios to run without having to customize the code for each system.

Hyperscale storage

NetApp's software-based data fabric approach ensures that customer data is always available exactly where it is needed, whether in the virtual private cloud, the public cloud, or in the multi-cloud. Q-beyond focuses on the combination of Microsoft Azure and S/4 Hana. Optionally, SAP can also be integrated into Microsoft 365 or Azure platform services are added so that additional added value is created for the customer, for example through data analytics and business intelligence. The seamless integration of Azure NetApp Files with other Azure cloud services makes this possible. In this way, the advantages of storage as a hyperscaler service can be combined with data management from NetApp and SAP Hana-certified performance.

Seamless data management-whether on-premises or in the cloud-is handled by NetApp Ontap. With various efficiency functions in the inline area such as deduplication, compression, and compression, storage costs can be reduced in combination and data capacities can be designed more effectively.

Vertical and horizontal storage scaling

The HDD and SSD storage environments are freely scalable according to the requirements of the company. Storage systems with Ontap can handle SAN, NAS and object workloads of a few terabytes or up to 176 petabytes. Vertical scaling by expanding the capacity of existing storage controllers is possible, as is horizontal scaling by adding more controllers. The cluster can be expanded to up to 24 nodes. Ontap also supports NAS data containers. With Net-App Ontap FlexGroup, a single namespace can grow up to 20 PB or 400 billion files while providing consistently high performance and resiliency.

Ontap as a cloud-native service also works smoothly on Microsoft Azure. Cloud resources can thus be adapted efficiently and quickly. Unnecessary costs are saved. Ontap also offers rapid system copies and extremely short RPOs through snapshot technology. Since SAP systems can thus be copied and cloned at lightning speed, Q-beyond can massively accelerate SAP dev, test and QA processes.

Data backup with snapshot

Snapshot technology backs up individual files or entire file systems in seconds as a point-in-time image. These copies can be restored quickly without having to use database dumps. This is made possible by WAFL Storage Virtualization. Similar to a database, WAFL uses pointers to the individual data blocks on the disk.

In contrast to a normal database, however, no existing blocks are rewritten, but updated data is written to a completely new block and the pointer is subsequently renewed. A Snapshot copy only manipulates these block pointers. Thus, a frozen read-only view of a WAFL volume can be created, which then allows applications to access older file versions.

Because this method does not copy actual blocks of data, Snapshot copies are very time and storage efficient. A Snapshot copy takes only minutes to seconds to create an image, regardless of how large the copied volume is. The user can create up to 255 Snapshot copies per WAFL volume. Due to its high speed and storage efficiency, Snapshot thus forms the basis for a fail-safe and constantly available backup system.

NetApp AFF Flash Storage Series enables workloads such as enterprise databases, data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to run on AFF A-Series arrays. Even for the most demanding tasks, the arrays are able to do so while offering consistently low latency without sacrificing performance. In addition, AFF A-Series arrays offer integrated data protection and seamless cloud backup and recovery.

Migrate live to S/4

In one example from the retail sector, the complex SAP landscape at a large customer of Q-beyond had to be converted to S/4 and managed from their virtual private cloud. A step-by-step introduction was out of the question here due to the threat of process failures. But after 18 months of extensive preparatory work and transformations of individual processes, Q-beyond implemented one of Europe's largest retail transformations to S/4 Hana with a big bang using NetApp solutions: The 24 TB system was migrated live in just 48 hours. This was made possible primarily by NetApp's Snapshot technology, which massively accelerated the process while providing data quickly and reliably.

The plan to convert a large SAP retail landscape to S/4 within a big bang scenario stands and falls with error-free data migration. Snapshot copies and replications were the positive deciding factor in this situation so that the deadline could be met and the planned big bang did not torpedo the ongoing business. S/4 now enables the company to respond to customer requests in near real time. The supply of goods to the retail stores and depots was permanently optimized, and with the new Hana database, system runtimes were even cut in half. With the help of NetApp, the company was able to launch a new cloud-based universe within the German midmarket.