Safely through the cloud

For their SAP solutions, companies need an extremely flexible storage infrastructure that supports a wide range of IT systems. Here, the cloud is a valuable IT resource for increasing the performance of SAP systems in a targeted manner and meeting the requirements of the specialist departments more quickly.

The requirements for data management in SAP environments are very diverse: technologies such as the SAP Hana in-memory platform, real-time analyses for specialist departments and repeated ad-hoc requests for more storage capacity for test and development systems ensure that IT managers attach great importance to storage management that is as efficient and flexible as possible.

At the same time, data protection regulations must be observed, which, following the Safe Harbor ruling, require an even more precise analysis of which data is processed at which locations.

In addition, the continuous data growth of SAP landscapes very quickly pushes incremental backup strategies with tape libraries or classic backups to their limits.

If you want to improve the data availability of an SAP landscape across the organization, you also need to integrate the very different data sources into the backup strategy, such as for third-party systems or the open source framework Hadoop.

In addition to these more general developments in corporate IT, the new generation of SAP solutions also brings its own special requirements for the storage infrastructure.

Digital transformation creates new data

The recently introduced in-memory solution SAP Hana Vora for Hadoop and Spark, for example, is an easy-to-use technology for analyzing even the largest big data sets - enabling departments to generate new data volumes very quickly.

Furthermore, the in-memory concept is expected to establish itself as the upcoming database standard for SAP applications - in-memory technology is already firmly anchored in S/4 Hana. For the CIO, this means that the data center will face high demands for fast storage and more storage capacity.

At the level of business strategy, it is clear that business models are becoming increasingly data-centric. The digital transformation of companies is leading to a high degree of business agility and even real-time processes.

Anyone who runs an online store or an online booking platform cannot afford any IT failures due to the competitive situation. A system standstill lasting several hours due to data loss leads to annoyed customers and even a loss of sales.

For the development of SAP landscapes, this means that CIOs will need significantly more high availability and security for their storage infrastructure in future.

Fear of too much dependency

Experience shows that some CIOs still have reservations when it comes to using cloud resources. However, it is not so much the technological issues that cause discussion, as all cloud providers have standard interfaces.

Rather, concerns are expressed about having to commit to a cloud provider in the long term. A survey of German companies published by IDC in January revealed that 36% of respondents would like to avoid dependence on external cloud providers. 39% expressed concerns about security when using the cloud.

Nevertheless, cloud integration continues to progress: a survey conducted by ESG analysts in 2015 revealed that 49% of companies surveyed already use the cloud for backup and archiving. Anyone who has ever copied large amounts of data to the cloud will find that it is very difficult to transfer them to another service provider.

Data Gravity data brake

This is where the effect of data gravity becomes noticeable: it slows down IT modernization projects, as bits and bytes are also subject to the laws of gravity in a figurative sense. They have a tendency to cling to an existing infrastructure.

This inertia is caused by the fact that data has properties such as its size or a certain security class. For example, anyone setting up a storage infrastructure in the petabyte range will find it very difficult to migrate it to a new platform due to the huge amount of data.

The advantages outweigh the disadvantages

Once the SAP landscape has been implemented to such an extent that the SAP systems can run in a hybrid cloud infrastructure, the CIO has numerous options to improve ongoing operations, increase reliability and save costs.

One option that can be implemented quickly is the integration of other hyperscale cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft or Softlayer, for example for the provision of test and application scenarios.

Here, the IT department can fully automate the setup, operation, removal and billing of SAP instances in the cloud for the specialist departments. This makes particular sense if the backups are also stored in the cloud via a replication mechanism (snapshot).

Based on these snapshots, the test environments for SAP can be set up in seconds, for example as project or sandbox systems for demo purposes or for training.

Another advantage of multi-cloud environments: This enables the integration of third-party systems and storage silos into an overall solution, which increases the effectiveness of big data strategies.

Very important here: In order to simplify data management for SAP operations as a whole, cloud resources, on-premise systems and any existing storage silos should be controlled via a single central management interface.

Emergency data center in the cloud

Using the cloud as a backup platform allows additional services to be set up in order to increase data availability. For example, IT can use the cloud as an emergency data center if components fail in its own data center.

The entire range of backup, cloning and disaster recovery can now be fully mapped in the cloud with suitable software solutions.

NetApp shows what a possible solution for the requirements listed above, including cloud integration, looks like with its technologies, which provide significant added value for SAP systems compared to the use of SAP on-board tools.

NetApp's Data ONTAP, for example, is a storage operating system that combines various storage protocols in one overall system and also controls cloud resources.

SAP storage infrastructure under control

The operating system is also available as Cloud ONTAP, has the same range of functions and can be virtualized and used in HyperScaler environments - this standardized data management platform gives companies the flexibility to operate their data on any on-premise or cloud platform with standardized technology. This effectively combats effects such as data gravity and possible cloud vendor lock-in.

Fast full backup

Special solutions are available from NetApp for SAP environments to quickly create SAP copies and thus generally accelerate project runtimes. With NetApp backup, consistent full backups of the current SAP Hana data are created within a few seconds.

NetApp's backup functions are seamlessly integrated into SAP Hana Studio. In addition, this backup does not affect the performance of the Hana servers. An analysis carried out among existing SAP Hana customers has shown that customers only need an average of 19 seconds for a Hana snapshot backup (see also E-3 Magazine, December 2015, "In the fast lane", page 92).

In addition, this technology offers further functions such as cloning a system environment in order to test backups for data integrity. This can be done via a repair system that can be set up in seconds on the basis of a cloned backup and can be used to test data integrity.

Furthermore, NetApp's data fabric concept supports the setup and ongoing operation of hybrid cloud environments, so that backups can be automatically and securely transferred to the cloud. Finally, the NetApp solutions have been closely integrated into SAP LVM, enabling a high degree of automation when creating SAP system copies, for example.