SLES inside SAP

Of course, customers are interested in which system components SAP itself trusts or which cornerstones SAP IT relies on. For quite a few, SAP has long been regarded as a kind of trusted advisor or pioneer for the direction of their own IT.

Some follow this kind of trustworthy compass sooner, others later - as has always been the case. However, the need for customers to change or realign their IT environments and their use of SAP more quickly than in the past is certainly more urgent than it was in the past.

On the infrastructure side, Hanaization and increased cloudization are contributing to this, as are, of course, topics such as IoT, big data/business analytics and Industry 4.0 based on S4 Hana on the application side.

As the market leader for on-premise enterprise solutions, SAP has long been pushing the goal of establishing the provision of SAP products as cloud solutions. This involves both SaaS and PaaS offerings.

However, this also involves, for example, ensuring that existing customers are able to minimize their infrastructure expenditure when using SAP on the basis of SAP Cloud Solutions and Services, such as SAP Hana Enterprise Cloud - and, likewise: attracting new SAP customers.

100,000 VMs in 50 data centers

With this change, the internal SAP infrastructure landscape inevitably had to transform. And it has. The fact is: For the aforementioned SAP Hana Enterprise Cloud Service, SAP relies on Suse SLES and SLES for SAP Applications. And it does so on around 6,600 servers with over 12,000 CPUs and 16,000 VMs.

But that is not all. SAP runs about 100,000 virtual machines for internal and external SAP workloads in about 50 data centers worldwide, most of them on Suse Linux Enterprise Server as a reliable, secure, flexible and high-performance operating system platform.

SAP is focusing on further standardization. Together with Suse, the Walldorf-based software group is working to minimize operating costs, for example.

Also in view here: the automation of operating processes in the face of steadily increasing VM usage.

Also in the sights: cloud deployment based on the open source cloud solution OpenStack/Suse OpenStack.

Development also uses Linux

"SLES inside SAP" can be found in many places today. For example, in the SAP development (including tests) of new SAP applications.

And in the SAP Linux Lab, for example, the Hana Enterprise deployment was driven forward in joint SAP-Suse teams. Among other things, by developing a (clustering HA) reference architecture for SAP Hana or a security hardening guide for SAP Hana or live patching or, or, or.

All developments are of course reflected as integrated features in Suse Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications - with joint developments continuing and thus the SLES inside SAP as well.

The use of a demand-driven and sophisticated operating system platform clearly brings business benefits for SAP (which also includes 99,999 percent availability, according to the company).

Namely, above all, the reduction of operating costs coupled with the fact that they can concentrate on their core business.

Of course, the joint customers benefited from the strategic alliance between SAP and Suse. Customers who rely on SAP Classic and customers who rely on Hana or S4 Hana.

And it does so by using innovative and profitable technologies or additional features based on countless tests by SAP and SLES usage inside SAP.