This article was brought to you by Intel.
Over the past decade, cloud adoption has been steadily growing. Today, many SAP customers are either making plans to begin their journeys to the cloud or have already moved portions—or all—of their IT ecosystem to cloud environments. According to research from the ASUG 2021 Pulse of the SAP Customer study, 35% of respondents said that cloud migrations were a focus area for their organizations this year.
However, migrating an organization’s cloud infrastructure can be a complicated, risky, and potentially costly undertaking. Architects and developers tasked with overseeing and conducting need to make crucial decisions during this process, decisions that can set these ecosystems up for short-term and long-term success. SAP has been working with both hyperscale cloud service providers (CSPs) and their partners to give architects and developers tools and solutions that will not only drive down costs and risk, but also, will allow users to easily make the right decisions for their organizations’ cloud-based IT environments.
Increasing the Agility of Cloud Deployments
One of the main decisions architects and developers need to make relates to the shape and size of their networks and ecosystems. No two organizations have the same IT infrastructure. Different industries, customer bases, and organization sizes demand different types of IT environments. One of the easiest ways for architects and developers to decide on the actual size of their networks is to receive options to easily fine-tune the structure of their IT environments.
SAP has partnered with Intel and major CSP hyperscalers (including Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Alibaba Cloud) to give their shared customers these options. SAP HANA and some SAP NetWeaver cloud environments, bolstered by Intel’s bare-metal solutions like Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and Intel Optane Persistent Memory, give customers a diversity of options and a large degree of scalability. These processors offer organizations the scalability needed to handle small SAP landscapes, all the way to the largest SAP landscapes in the world. This allows architects and developers to find and settle on the best-sized landscape for their organizations’ business needs.
Processors give customers the options to scale up to 48 TB and scale out to 564 TB deployments, meaning that they can increase or decrease their resources on SAP HANA cloud instances. This gives architects and developers an incredible amount of flexibility. They can create new instances faster and without any lead time. This easily allows customers to expand or contract their resources as they see fit, increasing the agility and options available to architects and developers as they establish and maintain their organizations’ SAP cloud landscapes.
Leveraging Certified Instances
Another key benefit of the partnership between SAP, Intel, and CSP hyperscalers is that this collaboration allows customers to take advantage of SAP-certified instances on the cloud. This partnership helps architects and developers establish and maintain their cloud landscapes, because SAP works closely with CSP hyperscalers to ensure that instances bolstered by Intel technology meet certain performance standards.
SAP conducts rigorous testing on these instances and guarantees support for them. This brings peace of mind to architects, since they know that they are leveraging certified instances that will have met certain standards. These SAP-certified instances also make it easier for customers to grow their mission-critical cloud infrastructure across different types of networks. This is incredibly important, as it gives customers even more flexibility and options as they build, maintain, and leverage their cloud landscapes. Simplification is also a main draw of certified instances because simplification allows architects and developers to do more with less complexity and overhead, all while increasing the speed at which organizations can begin working in the cloud.
Memory Considerations and Costs
The partnership between SAP, Intel, and CSP hyperscalers has also given architects and developers more memory options in their cloud infrastructure. Intel Xeon Scalable Processors give customers both higher memory bandwidth and capacity. Customers can also lower the total cost of ownership of their cloud infrastructure with Intel Optane Persistent Memory, which simplifies landscapes.
SAP customers can use this memory to accommodate their growing data needs, since the higher memory densities enabled by Intel Optane Persistent Memory extend DRAM memory, allowing the data to be persistent. This ensures that customers can decrease the size of their footprint, thereby decreasing the complexity involved in running data-dense operations. Intel Optane Persistent Memory also gives organizations more options when recovering data. Unlike DRAM, data remains in Intel Optane Persistent Memory, so when a server is turned off for any reason, organizations can still easily recover data.