Cloud services are the godsend that kept economies, government services, business operations, and people's lives from grinding to a halt. From streaming, remote collaboration, and smart sensor connectivity to high-end computing, organizations have come to appreciate the agility, scalability, cost efficiency, and accessibility to AI, advanced analytics, and other emerging technologies.
However, moving to the cloud is far from a simple undertaking that happens overnight. Soft skills, technical knowledge, collective ingenuity, and sweat equity are all necessary to underpin the delivery of reliable products and services. And by moving on-premise enterprise workloads to this dynamic deployment environment, companies increasingly realize cost savings and new innovation opportunities.
For many Red Hat customers, hyperscale provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) serves as the platform to shift terabytes of on-premise SAP data to the cloud, while ensuring operational continuity and consistent revenue streams.
“Businesses want to put data into more people’s hands so they can make better decisions by getting advanced analytics and dashboards up and running within hours,” observed Manoj Muthukrishnan, senior SAP solutions architect at AWS. “In most cases, companies reinvest any resulting cost savings into future transformation projects.”
Creating a Global Infrastructure for an Intelligent Future
Throughout the world, AWS covers dozens of regions stretching across at least 500 miles to provide the high availability, scalability, and fault tolerance needed to replicate applications and data in real time and consistently. Every zone consists of one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity.
AWS does all the heavy lifting. When running SAP applications with synchronous database replication, the platform ensures zero data loss, even if a database node goes down. It supports SAP software—for example, SAP S/4HANA, SAP BW/4HANA, SAP NetWeaver, SAP Business Rules, SAP Business One, and SAP BusinessObjects solutions. From an operating system perspective, practically every database enabled by SAP can run on AWS.
“The deployment automation capabilities of the AWS launch wizard allow Red Hat customers to quickly deploy cloud-based SAP landscapes in a universally available manner with minimal technical expertise,” Muthukrishnan shared. “Guided assistance is also offered to avoid errors in the process, and self-services through reusable configuration templates can be leveraged to ensure repeatable success of similar installations.”
Consider an organization that manually installs SAP software while using SAP Notes to guide the implementation approach. The launch wizard has all those best practices and parameters built in, giving the deployment team immediate access and the ability to automatically incorporate them into, for example, the storage layout and SAP HANA database. Furthermore, the wizard estimates how much the SAP instance will cost to configure, go live, and maintain.
Another benefit of the launch wizard is simplifying complex business needs to ensure a consistent installation experience with preconfigured templates. Using the infrastructure as the code, companies can shorten the deployment cycle and give auditors confidence that the implementation complies with corporate policies and regulatory requirements.
“Most times, organizations spend a couple of months just to complete an SAP solution installation,” mentioned Muthukrishnan. “But with the AWS launch wizard, they can deploy a production-grade SAP application in a high-availability manner in less than two hours—infrastructure, operating system, database, and all.”
Moving Data Seamlessly with Unified Governance
As data volumes and purpose-built storage continue to grow, moving enterprise workloads to the cloud with a traditionally manual approach only becomes more complex. AWS makes the entire process simpler and faster throughout every phase—consolidation, migration, and replication across multiple data stores and the data lake—with the guidance of its launch wizard.
With automated capabilities such as guided assistance, reusable configurations, cost estimation, and preconfigured templates, Red Hat customers can discover and realize the full benefit of the cloud through a pragmatic path to innovation.
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