Speed for the midmarket

Even medium-sized SAP users are increasingly international today, so hosting requirements are rising. On the one hand, provisioning time is becoming a critical factor for success.

New tasks also arise from Hana or S/4 projects, migrations, SAP EWM implementations, and so on. While a three-tier SAP system landscape was sufficient in the past, today additional landscape components such as SAP Fiori front-end servers, Adobe Document Services or Web Dispatcher are often used.

The challenge lies in combining the systems with each other or with existing landscapes. Furthermore, updates and conversions must often be possible in parallel.

FIS-ASP therefore launched a project in 2013 that dealt with the then still young OpenStack technology. The goal was to use the technology to create an automated cloud solution for the SAP landscapes I hosted.

The partner was Suse. FIS-ASP now runs almost three quarters of its SAP systems on their Linux enterprise servers. OpenStack, a project supported by Suse for the development of a free architecture for cloud computing, enables precisely the desired automation.

The provider network available in OpenStack also allows the cloud to be based on proven VLAN/VxLAN technology and deliberately kept simple in architecture, but more robust in operation.

The latest version of OpenStack Suse Cloud added high availability of compute nodes or specific workloads - an essential requirement for running business-critical systems in the cloud. What was still missing was shared storage to keep systems as available and performant as in a traditional virtualized environment.

The solution was found (again in the OpenStack environment) with Ceph, one of the most widely used software-defined storage solutions for OpenStack on the market.

Ceph is highly scalable and runs on any standard hardware. FIS-ASP used a reference architecture from Suse and server/storage specialist Thomas Krenn as a basis, on whose hardware a Linux-based Ceph storage can be easily built.

Not every combination of system, database, operating system and different versions makes sense in terms of security, stability, performance and costs. Added value can only be achieved with the right combination of standardization, automation and a functioning image and version database.

This is where OpenStack and Ceph, with their open architecture as open source software, play to their strengths. To complement this, FIS-ASP uses other open source solutions such as Github software for version management of the correct images, Salt for automating the rework, and Heat Templates for building the virtual machine images - all of which are coordinated with each other and at the same time flexible enough for the harsh requirements of SAP operations.

It is important that the system ID of SAP is selectable, as is the domain of the customer or the instance numbers used. In OpenStack, customers are created as so-called tennants and supplied with predefined rules via the integrated firewall.

In the past two years, SAP has stabilized and better documented the API of its "SAP Software Provisioning Manager". The SWPM is used to install the SAP systems to implement the options mentioned (SAP SID, domain, instance number).

This means that many installations can now be selected and installed via templates. Based on this cloud infrastructure, FIS-ASP is able to offer dedicated services in the areas of Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service.

In the PaaS environment, for example, the hosting provider interconnects several SAP development systems for SAP EWM, SAP NetWeaver Gateways, Web Dispatcher or even back-end ERP (or S/4) to form a network. Developers and customers can start with a complete development landscape on this network at short notice.