NetApp and Google Cloud: Reliability and Agility

The digital transformation is presenting companies across all industries with a wide range of challenges. As a result, many are looking to improve the effectiveness of their IT systems. In an increasingly globalized economy, large companies are realizing that improvements in productivity can only be achieved through significant investment in smarter software applications and the ability to extract valuable insights from data. As a result, companies are strongly driving innovation in Big Data analytics and machine learning (ML), for example.

One goal here is to reduce operating costs. At the same time, new ways are to be found of developing and providing products and services more effectively. Automation and expanded functionality are buzzwords that play a role here.

A recent study conducted by the consulting firm Deloitte¹ on "digital maturity" in larger companies found that higher digital maturity is closely associated with better business results. Regardless of industry, companies with higher maturity were three times more likely to achieve annual net revenue growth and net profit margins above the industry average than those with lower digital maturity. However, according to the Deloitte study, only 54 percent of the companies surveyed had achieved a medium level of digital maturity. An indication that digital transformation still has a long way to go.

IT structures and application overload

Many companies have production systems in place whose daily operation is crucial to success. These are often complex and multi-layered, which makes digitization projects more difficult.

According to a study² by security provider Okta, the number of software applications used by large companies in all industries worldwide has increased by 68 percent over the past four years. Some companies have more than 200 applications in use. However, not all of them offer the same added value. Among the most critical applications are larger database and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, which often form the heart of a business. These mission-critical applications are often customized to meet the demanding requirements of the business. As a result, improvements within these systems can have immense impact on multiple interconnected workflows.

Technical challenges

Many of these enterprise apps are also old and have grown with the business. Often secured using massive data centers, they have been optimized and tuned and are deployed using the fastest servers. Deeply integrated into connected systems, they span multiple workloads, plus the huge increase in data over the past few years.

The background is that digital transformation is generating more and more potentially useful data sets. At the same time, new projects in areas such as Manufacturing 4.0 or Customer Experience, but also Marketing and Sales, are consuming more data than ever before³. Companies are addressing these developments with extensive virtualization and, most recently, increasingly with the use of the cloud.

One of the most pressing technical issues is stability. After all, in order to ensure fail-safety and high availability in self-managed data centers, considerable operating costs are incurred in addition to enormous investments in IT systems. But the physical burden, such as equipment maintenance, is joined by other issues. Qualified employees are needed to cover areas such as network security in-house. If the necessary qualifications are lacking, many companies initially opt for a hybrid cloud approach. The advantages of the public cloud are obvious: easy scalability of performance and capacities, but also comprehensive options for repurposing data - especially for ML and AI projects in cloud environments. And the public cloud is gaining acceptance.

According to a study by Bitkom and KPMG⁴ 38 percent of the German companies surveyed relied on public cloud solutions in 2019. However, many companies still face technical hurdles with regard to the implementation of large applications such as SAP. There is often a lack of knowledge, particularly with regard to the management of data fabrics within the cloud.

SAP in the Google Cloud

In the SAP environment, the transition to S/4 Hana is currently probably the most common reason for migration. This is because SAP will discontinue support for all non-Hana databases with its Enterprise Suite in 2027. Many users are therefore already taking the step now, as the changeover will enable them to move critical applications to the cloud.

The fact that it is also a viable alternative is demonstrated, for example, by a US fashion label that was able to complete the conversion to S/4 within 16 weeks and implement it on Google Cloud in six weeks. A large Spanish retailer implemented SAP Hana within 15 weeks. Employee time can also be reduced by up to 65 percent in practice by deploying or migrating SAP applications to Google Cloud.

Accelerated deployment

To help users move SAP systems to the cloud, Google has launched the Cloud Acceleration Program (CAP). Participants have access to new architecture templates, acceleration modules and SAP-oriented support, and benefit from partner-led assessment services and prototyping.

In addition, the CAP also includes support from global service partners. These have created dedicated business units for Google Cloud to help customers migrate key workloads and applications to the Google Cloud. Some partners are also establishing SAP centers of excellence for Google Cloud and offering new solutions that simplify the migration from SAP to the cloud.

The migration also pays off. For example, the analysis company IDC examined the effects of moving SAP workloads to the Google Cloud and came to impressive results⁵By running SAP environments on Google Cloud, up to 46 percent of operating costs can be saved compared to equivalent systems. Over three years, IDC calculated savings of $4.8 million per company - resulting from reduced infrastructure spending, more efficient staff deployment and therefore increased employee productivity, and increased revenue.

The Data Fabric

However, moving the application alone is not enough. This is because S/4 Hana, SAP ECC and shared files are all highly networked by nature. What makes SAP so valuable, especially for business-critical processes, is the underlying data and storage architecture. This not only guarantees the necessary performance, but also ensures the integrity and availability of critical data.

Many large companies that are still on-premises rely on NetApp for this. For the cloud, the software provider has Cloud Volumes Service (CVS) in its program. In 2020, this became the first fully managed file service integrated into Google Cloud to be certified for use with Hana. CVS is multi-protocol capable, highly available and offers dynamic performance. What is special about CVS is that the solution was developed in collaboration between the development teams of NetApp and Google.

The aim was to ensure seamless integration and major functional benefits for SAP customers. These include increased resilience of SAP databases. This is achieved through NetApp's Snapshot technology - which performs backups of databases or shared file systems without downtime or restores them in seconds.

CVS also provides instant cloning capabilities. This can streamline the release cycle at all stages, from development to staging to production. This, combined with automation via tools using APIs, results in faster time to market.

However, one of the most impressive capabilities is the consistently high performance of over 460k IOPS, allowing CVS to deliver high throughput, low latency shared persistent storage. Which is especially essential for the requirements of large SAP implementations.

While CVS as a fully managed service with an SLA of 99.9 percent⁶ NetApp Cloud Volumes Ontap (CVO) covers all non-production workloads and is targeted at storage administrators and architects. The software-defined storage offering provides the full Ontap feature set for use within the Google Cloud, including data tiering, thin provisioning, deduplication, and compression to minimize storage consumption and cloud resources.

Cloud-native and integrated

Both platforms were built as native cloud applications and support block (iSCSI) and file storage services (CIFS/NFS) for enterprise-class cloud workloads. They deploy well hybrid and for standardized data management - whether in on-premises or cloud environments or with a third-party vendor. They often support use cases such as business continuity, disaster recovery, storage services for remote offices, or distributed file caching.

What makes the partnership so attractive for companies is the strong integration of the individual platforms, supported by a common certification process and dedicated expertise. Google Cloud has helped many SAP customers migrate and therefore has common practice. Many of the existing Net App customers using SAP are very familiar with the technologies around Data Fabric and have been using them for business-critical workloads for several decades.

The fact that the two companies' solutions work well together is evidenced by NetApp Cloud Volumes Service winning the Google Cloud Partner of the Year Award for Infrastructure Solutions in both 2019 and 2020.

Advantages in operation

The combined solution simplifies SAP operations and data storage. For large Hana databases, streaming or file-based backups can take many hours and place a significant burden on the Hana database server and storage and network infrastructure. CVS' snapshot capabilities reduce the time required for a backup to a few minutes with no impact on network or compute resources. The size of the database is almost irrelevant.

In addition, both the restore and recovery processes are much faster - a new volume can be completed from a snapshot in just a few seconds, and a full database recovery in minutes.

Financial advantages

The costs for SAP operation differ in every large company, as they are influenced by individual factors. It is therefore quite complex to classify the financial benefits of using Google Cloud. The analyst firm Forrester surveyed six companies and 20 decision-makers from various industries that use SAP on Google Cloud for this purpose⁷. This was joined by 75 decision makers from various industries who use SAP on a different cloud.

The survey found that SAP to Google Cloud saved hardware, software and operating costs associated with SAP of more than $3 million annually. By migrating SAP infrastructure to Google Cloud, the companies surveyed were able to reduce the size of their on-premises environments, lowering associated operations and maintenance costs. In addition, companies could phase out software and security licenses associated with older SAP hardware. This would further reduce the cost and complexity of managing their remaining infrastructure.

Forrester also found that by making the switch, companies were able to manage their supply chains more efficiently. By reducing delays in this way, more than $420,000 was saved annually. Preventing downtime associated with SAP systems resulted in savings of more than $1.5 million annually.

The time is ripe

In summary, the partnership between Google and NetApp lays the foundation for a seamless transition to the cloud for SAP users. These will benefit from the proven and certified blueprint already used by some of the world's largest companies.

A survey⁸ among SAP customers found that 73 percent of organizations are planning to adopt Hana and 18 percent are already in the adoption process, including Google Cloud. These companies know that they need to become more digital through agility and transparency. Because, in our view, this is the only way to drive innovation, reduce costs and shorten the time it takes to process information. Google cloud solutions, combined with NetApp's Cloud Volumes Service, help them realize such benefits quickly. In addition, we believe that once the transition is made, competitive advantages await through the use of leading AI and ML solutions - which Google Cloud and NetApp are also happy to help with.

Use Case: SAP Migration with NetApp to the Google Cloud

Healthcare IT teams are under pressure to transform and modernize their IT landscapes. So is one of the world's largest medical and pharmaceutical distributors. The company is almost entirely dependent on its SAP systems. These include more than 400 servers, 30 applications and 150 integrations. Still, the organization took the bold step of pushing Hana to the Google Cloud. And it was rewarded. It achieved a 37 percent cost reduction, increased security as well as availability, and is now able to respond more quickly to new market dynamics. The healthcare distributor also optimized demand levels and created complete visibility into its systems for higher availability and disaster recovery.

The goal of the project was to replace the existing NAS with the cloud. To date, this has been a major challenge because many COTs applications and many processes relied on it. Therefore, those in charge were looking for a solution that would allow developers to spin up their own cloud storage with the click of a button. Tiered storage is now used for this purpose. When developers are running their tests and need a bit more resource, they can get to a higher storage tier with just the click of a button. Without downtime, restarting or moving the storage, it works smoothly.

But the main reason the company chose NetApp for its critical storage management function was the simplicity of the solution. There was no need to sign a purchase agreement with another company, and no need to commit to a specific storage scope. There was no need to build a separate infrastructure, not even in the cloud-the service was simply there. All it takes to connect to its network is a small setup, and storage can be provisioned whenever it's needed. What's more, speed and throughput can be changed as needed at any time, with no downtime.

Cloud Acceleration Program

To help users move SAP systems to the cloud, Google has launched the Cloud Acceleration Program (CAP). Participants have access to new architecture templates, acceleration modules and SAP-oriented support, and benefit from partner-led assessment services and prototyping.

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References:

¹Deloitte, Digital Transformation Survey, 2020.

²Okta, Business @ Work Report, 2019.

³Splunk, The Data Age Has Begun. Are you ready?, 2020.

⁴bitkom Research and KPMG, Cloud Monitor 2020, 2020.

⁵IDC on behalf of Google, Business Value of Google Cloud for SAP Environments, 2020.

⁶cloud.netapp.com/cloud-volumes-service-for-gcp, November 20, 2020.

⁷Forrester on behalf of Google, The Total Economic Impact™ of SAP on Google Cloud, 2020.

⁸IDC on behalf of SAP, SAP Customers on the Move to SAP S/4HANA, 2019.