Hanaization from the Cloud

For outsiders - and even for community insiders - it is still not really clear why the open source project OpenStack was able to experience such a boom and establish itself as the open standard for cloud infrastructure-as-a-service solutions in a very short time.

When it comes to optimization opportunities in the IT infrastructure area in general and in the SAP IT infrastructure area in particular, cloudification or the introduction and use of hybrid clouds is clearly at the top of the agenda for IT managers.

In this switch to the cloud, it appears that SAP's existing customers predominantly prefer private cloud computing, also known as on-premise cloud computing.

In this context, companies can no longer avoid OpenStack. In a nutshell, OpenStack stands for centralized management and automated provisioning and control of services via a dashboard.

This means compute, storage and network resources at the push of a button - for example, to quickly provision infrastructure resources for a new SAP Hana application that a company or department has opted for, even in less than an hour. It is not uncommon for resource provisioning to also be self-service based on OpenStack.

From the first hour

To date, well over 300 companies are involved in the OpenStack project. NetApp is a founding member of the OpenStack Foundation and has been one of the active protagonists since 2011, making a committed contribution to OpenStack developments or making features available to the community. The OpenStack platform itself has a modular structure and is supplemented by various individual projects.

NetApp's goal is twofold: to ensure the integration of OpenStack with NetApp products and solutions, and to make OpenStack an option for enterprises with the demanding needs of mission-critical IT environments.

These integration options within OpenStack ensure that for mission-critical applications, all NetApp FAS and E-Series storage capabilities are applicable in OpenStack-based cloud environments. In addition, the NetApp integration options are a fixed element of the upstream source code, so that they can then be part of the OpenStack distributions.

In other words, the sophisticated and proven NetApp storage efficiencies that benefit enterprises deploying traditional IT infrastructures are also available to enterprises deploying or aspiring to deploy a cloud-based IT infrastructure with OpenStack.

These include, for example, compression, data deduplication, cloning, or integrated data protection with continuous availability/high availability and optimal performance as well as maximum scalability with the NetApp Clustered Data Ontap operating system.

The OpenStack integration outlined above is based on developments from NetApp such as: the provision of dedicated NetApp drivers for FAS as well as E-Series systems, functions for storage device catalogs, generation of persistent and extended instances with copy offload, parallel (p)NFS support or a sophisticated optimization of OpenStack Object Storage (Swift).

Manila project

But that's not all. NetApp provides several drivers to the OpenStack project for the purpose of providing NetApp storage and data management features via OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder).

iSCSI, Fibre Channel as well as NFS are supported, especially to improve scaling at backends in connection with the block-oriented Cinder service.

Since the availability of the OpenStack version "Icehouse", Cinder drivers have been available for the NetApp E-Series and EF-Series. On top of that, NetApp has initiated an OpenStack project with the code name "Manila", which makes OpenStack deployment even more attractive and enriches it with important features. What is behind Manila - and why did NetApp initiate this OpenStack project?

Most storage solutions support shared file systems, so a corresponding OpenStack service is needed. NetApp has taken on this challenge with great commitment and introduced a project into OpenStack that is more or less the counterpart to Cinder and addresses shared file systems or has them as its content.

Manila, like Cinder, can be viewed as a layer of control for providing orchestration, resource allocation, and more.

This is used, for example, to access existing CIFS shares and initiate a new NFS export as required between existing VM instances.

In the process, Manila is already getting beyond pure development status and is already being made available as a tech preview in distributions of OpenStack Kilo.

For example, Manila including NetApp systems as well as Suse OpenStack Cloud and Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) came into play in a PoC OpenStack SAP environment together with SAP Landscape Virtualization Management (LVM), the management tool set, so to speak, at quite a few SAP inventory customers (read more about this in the adjacent box element).

Cloud: today and tomorrow

NetApp has made a clear commitment to developing, promoting, and supporting cloud computing with OpenStack, and has underpinned that commitment with developments and the delivery of on-demand solutions for enterprise use.

Likewise, existing partnerships, for example with integrators and hardware manufacturers such as Fujitsu, with OpenStack distributors such as Suse, with OpenStack solution providers such as B1 Systems, but also with SAP, for example, are being and have been intensified.

OpenStack projects at SAP customers - also against the background of a forced Hanaization (BW on Hana, Business Suite on Hana, S/4 Hana) - are springing up almost like mushrooms. This is certainly also due to SAP's OpenStack commitment last year and an OpenStack go-live at SAP.

By the way: NetApp has a unique selling point when it comes to backups for Hana using snapshots. The function is integrated directly into Hana Studio; the NFS and Fibre Channel protocols are supported.

Through a close partnership with SAP that dates back to 2000, NetApp is able to serve literally all SAP customers, all IT infrastructure landscapes, and all operational concepts with innovative, high-performance, and validated system solutions including NetApp features such as snapshot-based backup, system copies at the push of a button, and efficient storage replication - in on-premise landscapes, private cloud environments with OpenStack, or private clouds paired with hyperscaler cloud operating environments (e.g., Amazon Web Services). Amazon Web Services, for example). In other words, customers are ready for tomorrow's SAP computing with NetApp today.

Manila and SAP LVM in OpenStack landscape

The SAP LVM management tool, which is used by numerous existing SAP customers, plays a central role in the administration and control of SAP systems.

It is therefore important to integrate SAP LVM in an OpenStack-based cloud IT infrastructure landscape. This was successfully implemented as part of a PoC using Suse OpenStack Cloud, Suse SLES, NetApp Storage under NetApp Data Ontap and NetApp Services.

The OpenStack Manila component for shared file service/NFS services was also used. For this PoC, NetApp developed a beta version of an OpenStack storage adapter using the SAP LVM API, which demonstrated how easily customers can access OpenStack Manila functions from SAP LVM.