Linux bonus pack makes SAP Hana mover happy

The changeover signs in the direction of Hana or the ERP technology successor S/4 have once again been written on the wall. According to the latest forecasts from the SAP user association DSAG, S/4 usage among existing customers will rise from around eight percent at present to around 50 percent then within the next three years. A pretty hefty increase.

It can be assumed, however, that during this period there will also be a number of new companies of different sizes and from various industries around the world that will be switching to the Walldorf-based software group for the first time. These companies are not yet SAP customers.

Of course, virtually all existing customers, not just local or German-speaking ones, have dealt with the Hana or S/4 move in one way or another.

On the application or process side as well as on the infrastructure side. Partly in-depth, but partly still superficial. As is well known, the move in the direction of Hana means several things from the infrastructure point of view, in particular: a database change, a hardware switch and an operating system changeover to Linux (if not already carried out).

This type of triple switch may seem complex or costly to customers at first glance, but it has been proven to be adequately managed tens of thousands of times.

A departure example: DB2, Power and AIX

In the process, the constant Hana/Linux growth is fed by all SAP classic infrastructure source systems.

The databases Windows SQL Server, Oracle Database and IBM DB2; proprietary hardware such as Sun, HP, IBM Power or standard Intel Xeon and AMD hardware for SAP Classic as well as Unix operating systems such as Sun Solaris, HP-UX and IBM AIX, but also Microsoft Windows.

SAP customers are more than happy with the Hana Linux move. Of the many, many success stories, here is a brief example. This is a large supplier to the construction industry that migrated its SAP systems (ECC, APO, TM and PI) to Hana with Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications on the way to S/4.

Namely, away from DB2, Power hardware as well as Power VM and AIX. Due to the close and long-standing partnership between Suse and SAP and the long history of Hana-SLES-for-SAP applications, as well as Suse's high market share of around 90 percent in the use of Hana, the company consciously decided on this combination.

In addition, the Suse Linux High-Availability Extension (HAE), provided in conjunction with SLES for SAP Applications as a kind of benefit-generating Linux bonus pack, was intended to push system availability.

Targets more or less overachieved

The targets set before the conversion project were more or less overachieved:

The path towards S/4 has been paved, SAP system performance has improved with Hana and SLES for SAP Applications, and high availability has been increased to great advantage.

In addition, the system software license costs have been minimized by a six-figure euro amount. And on top of that, with SLES for SAP Applications as the Hana operating system platform, the company is more flexible and future-compatible with possible SAP changes. For example, when the vote is cast in favor of using SAP Data Hub or when cloud deployment is imminent. Or, or, or.

Incidentally, in the case outlined, the change in know-how from AIX to Linux posed no problems whatsoever and, according to the company's own information, was completed by the IT department in a very short time. Just as with the many previous Hana-SLES for SAP Applications migrations.