Tailwind for SAP Administration
The demands of business departments on IT are becoming more demanding. User demand secure, highly available and easy-to-use IT solutions.Resources, which are available as immediately as possible. At the same time, the ITEmployees The majority of them are busy keeping the increasingly complex infrastructure up and running.
If new requirements from the specialist department are then not implemented quickly enough, the department increasingly obtains its services independently from the Cloud - IT services are only a few mouse clicks away, or so the naïve opinion goes. However, this means that the IT department loses control and a shadow IT with dangerous security gaps emerges. Even worse: The IT organization loses its status as an innovation driver and is only used as a purchasing department.
Converged infrastructures provide a remedy to this dilemma: They enable IT managers to quickly and risk-free validate IT environments for SAP and other applications.Applications build. However, a look at the IT trends currently under discussion reveals another development that IT managers should pay attention to: the hyperdistribution of Applications and data. The experts from NetApp and Cisco estimate that around 30 million new devices are integrated into existing networks worldwide every week.
The Internet of Things (IoT) ensures that around 500 billion devices could be connected by 2020. The volumes of data being generated are gigantic and, according to estimates by Cisco could be a User generate or process more than five TBytes of data in 2020. In the course of this development, companies are relying more and more on ITResources from the Cloud. By 2018, another prediction is that 78 percent of all workloads in Cloud-computer centers are processed.
CIOs therefore need a future-proof platform for the Data Management, the hybrid Cloud-infrastructures as well as mixed application landscapes with SAP and other Applications supported.
Who today his Data center to expand or modernize to meet the increased demand for IT services needs a solution that can be deployed quickly. This should also be able to be implemented without Risk can be deployed for ongoing operations. In contrast to rigid hyperconverged architectures, a more flexible converged infrastructure platform such as FlexPod offers an ideal solution for this: Here, previously distributed components such as Serverstorage and network are integrated into a centralized and scalable infrastructure.
This creates multiple benefits such as simplified administration and high scalability when operating virtualized and non-virtualized systems. In addition, the Insert of pre-validated configurations facilitates the commissioning of specific workloads and reduces risks in new projects.
The benefits of a converged infrastructure with validated designs for SAP software can be seen, for example, in application optimization. Typical businessApplications can be implemented much more quickly in a high-performance configuration, without the need for ITEmployees first have to painstakingly fine-tune. With the FlexPod platform, the infrastructure is already designed for horizontal or vertical scaling: Computing power and storage can therefore be added flexibly in relation to one's own business success. The solutions developed by Cisco The Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) developed by the Applications easier to roll out. This includes, for example, functions for centralized Automation and for policy-driven application profiles are available.
For operation in hybrid Cloud-environments, the solution features tools for the Data Management, such as the NetApp Ontap storage operating system.
This is a particularly efficient way of making ITResources in the Cloud and in own Data center to manage. At the same time, companies always retain full control over their data, so they can retrieve it at any time from the Cloud retrieve again. Also optional is the Insert of OpenStack software is possible, in order to create a private or hybrid Cloud-infrastructure. From the CIO's perspective, low administration costs are important for IT operations. With the software Cisco UCS Director provides a platform that facilitates the implementation of all ITResources of the FlexPod platform is simplified and the ongoing operation is highly automated. For example, the Insert of multiple hypervisors and bare-metalServer possible in a FlexPod unit.
The system can also be very easily integrated into existing Server or SAN-Resources integrate. Based on these technologies, new SAP infrastructures can be deployed in just 45 minutes. The hereby possible Automation leads to up to 59 percent less admin and management costs. Also, a solution implemented with UCS Data center significantly clearer, since, for example, around 77 percent less cabling is required compared to conventional infrastructures, according to the manufacturers.
Automated IT services for SAP
In order to meet the aforementioned requirements of the specialist department for new ITResources to be implemented quickly, a high degree of Automation in IT administration and IT operations. SAP LaMa (Landscape Manager) is the central tool for this purpose, enabling the necessary 
processes. FlexPod offers tight integration with SAP LaMa: companies use it to automate the provisioning of instances and simplify the management of SAP landscapes through visualization and end-to-end monitoring.
IT experts can thus implement a wide range of functions and also offer these to the business departments as self-service. The functions include, for example, the rapid cloning of SAP instances and the rapid commissioning of test and development systems. Overall, this results in a high level of transparency and efficiency for administration across the entire SAP infrastructure, making it easier to maintain system availability.
SAP LaMa for Cloud-Resources
Even in SAP landscapes with hybrid Cloud-resources and FlexPod as an infrastructure platform, SAP LaMa is ideally suited as a central management tool. The software supports the implementation and management of on-premise SAP-Applications in data centers and Cloud-infrastructures. In a proof of concept jointly conducted by SAP and NetApp, the cloning of an on-premise SAP instance into the AWS Cloud automated with the help of LaMa. The administrator starts the cloning from LaMa or selects a Backup which is to serve as the basis for the clone. If there is already an active replication relationship for this system in the CloudOnly the changed data has to be transferred (delta transfer) and the clone of the SAP instance is available in AWS with practically no time delay. Cloud ready. Seamless integration with LaMa is enabled using the Storage Services Connector (SSC) developed by NetApp. The SSC integrates with LaMa and thus provides administrators with all functions such as provisioning or cloning of SAP instances. The SSC is capable of interoperating with all other existing storage controllers in the company's own Data center or in the Cloud-environments.
In this way, the use and administration of hybrid Cloud-infrastructures from a central location. The large volumes of data in today's and tomorrow's IT landscapes also require adapted concepts for Backup and restore, to ensure data availability even in hybrid Cloud-environments at all times. NetApp offers a wide range of functions and tight SAP integration based on the Ontap storage operating system.
This solution is also used with FlexPod Insert. For example, NetApp technology enables the rapid creation of backups: companies can create consistent full backups of the current Hana-generate data. The Backup-functions are seamlessly integrated into the Hana Studio integrated. In addition, the Backup not the performance of the Hana–Server.
One under Hana-The analysis carried out for existing customers showed that customers spend an average of only 19 seconds on an Hana-Snapshot-Backup need. In addition, the technology offers further functions such as the cloning of a system environment in order to test backups for their data integrity. This can be done via a repair system that can be set up in seconds based on a cloned backup and can be used to test data integrity.
When put into practice, the procedure shown above demonstrates that the use of Cloud–Resources This results in great advantages when testing and developing SAP systems. For testing, current data from the production systems, which are often stored in the company's own Data center run, into the Cloud replicated.
When SAP customers use the NetApp-managed Cloud-storage such as NetApp Private Storage (NPS) or CloudOntap as disaster recovery or Backup Resource, test and development systems can use this data for use with existing SAP-Applications from the Cloud use. Companies thus save considerable time and costs and can carry out more test cycles, thereby improving the quality of SAP'sApplications increase. All in all, IT managers can create a future-proof solution with a convergent IT infrastructure for hybrid environments that also use current SAP technologies such as Hana fully supported.
