Azure NetApp Files is Made for SAP Workloads in the Cloud
SAP customers have been hesitant to move their mission-critical workloads to the cloud. But that early hesitation is diminishing as more companies realize the benefits that running their SAP landscape on Cloud provides. Enterprise cloud migrations are complex, especially when you factor in all the customized, bolt-on ...
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Azure NetApp Files is Made for SAP Workloads in the Cloud
SAP customers have been hesitant to move their mission-critical workloads to the cloud. But that early hesitation is diminishing as more companies realize the benefits that running their SAP landscape on Cloud provides. Enterprise cloud migrations are complex, especially when you factor in all the customized, bolt-on applications that integrates with the SAP platform.
If you are a company that relies on SAP and are considering cloud computing, the idea of migrating your enterprise application and infrastructure portfolio to a cloud platform can be quite intimidating. This is especially true if your company has a large and complex technology landscape with many mission-critical legacy systems as well.
Those deciding to modernize are sometimes surprised by the challenges that pop up. The top three challenges to cloud newcomers are unplanned downtime, data migration, and a lack of detailed cloud strategy. These hurdles can be overcome with the right resources and the right strategy.
Minimize Risk with the Right Cloud Strategy
Forrester recommends that SAP customers look for partners that can chart the course to cloud and take the journey along with them. They identified three things that the ideal SAP implementation partner should bring:
- experience with using the latest SAP and cloud technologies needed for an agile business
- transformation methodologies and know-how to bring new business models to bear, including change management as well as people and processes ready to navigate regulatory and industry-specific trends
- modern delivery techniques including reference architectures and accelerators to reduce project risks and costs, speed time to value, fill in gaps, and drive customer innovation
Khoj Information Technology has a proven history of delivering risk-free Microsoft Azure Cloud migrations to SAP customers. Our 27 point CloudScape4SAP methodology guarantees to make the migration (and the downtime) as painless as possible.
Azure NetApp Files Helps Make Cloud Migrations Painless
For customers implementing SAP on Azure, two very important architectural considerations are centered around storage strategy and storage solution for their SAP HANA landscape Traditional deployments were limited to shared storage NFS clusters on Linux providing for both SAP Applications and SAP HANA or vendor provided NAS storage. The introduction of Azure NetApp Files was a game changer, which provided several shared storage options optimized for SAP applications and SAP HANA.
What is more is that Azure NetApp Files (ANF) is a Microsoft Azure native storage solution certified by SAP for SAP workloads.
NetApp and Microsoft co-engineered Azure NetApp Files based on NetApp’s ONTAP operating system. It gives Azure customers a high-performance, low-latency file service. It brings on-premises performance to the cloud so that core business applications such as SAP can reap the benefits of modernization without the lag. Certified to work with SAP HANA, Azure NetApp Files offers the following benefits:
- Cost optimization
- On-premises or better performance
- Agility
- High availability (99.99% uptime guaranteed)
- Scalability
At Khoj, we use Azure NetApp Files centric architecture to support highly available SAP HANA environments in scale out configurations.
For customers assessing NFS solutions using both the homogenous SAP-workload approach and the holistic enterprise-workload approach, Azure NetApp Files is the clear leader in the market. There are other competing IaaS and PaaS solutions for SAP workloads, but many of these are not SAP-certified or supported.
Get SAP to the Cloud with Azure NetApp Files
Azure NetApp Files provides enterprise-grade data management and storage to the Azure Cloud to solve performance and availability challenges. Customers can now deploy HANA standby nodes in cloud. This was not possible with earlier solutions.
For newer versions of HANA, SAP has introduced HANA snapshot methodology for backups requiring storage-level snapshots. Azure NetApp Files supports these capabilities, leading to faster backups, lower RPO’s and RTO’s, and quicker QA refreshes, which makes it a critical component of business resiliency and disaster recovery strategy. Azure NetApp Files is not only integral to accelerated migration and deployment, it’s also a critical part of your future-ready cloud infrastructure.
At Khoj our several reference architectures centered around ANF help customers realize great ROI using SAP on Azure along with Azure NetApp Files-based storage.
To learn more about Khoj’s CloudScape4SAP cloud migration methodology and how Azure NetApp Files can help your company get SAP to the cloud painlessly, check out, “A Handbook to SAP HANA Modernization on Azure.” It’s an eBook exploring benefits, use cases, migration methodologies, and reference architectures for SAP customers moving to Microsoft Azure.
Tech Republic, “SAP Users Face Key Challenges and Benefits as They Move to the Cloud.” Techrepublic.com Article
Forrester, “Now Tech: SAP Implementation Services Providers, Q1 2020.” Forrester.com Report
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