SAP has a long track record in the back office. As ASUG read­ers will know, this is the place in the cor­po­rate enter­prise IT envi­ron­ment where the serv­er room pow­ers SAP’s enter­prise resource plan­ning (ERP) offer­ings — which are now evolv­ing into the next-gen­er­a­tion SAP S/4HANA.

It is in this back-office serv­er room that any SAP deploy­ment ini­tial­ly begins. Because of this, so much of the lat­est from SAP has been engi­neered to work on the Lin­ux oper­at­ing sys­tem (OS).

Although Lin­ux has nev­er made mas­sive inroads into the con­sumer desk­top space (apart from it being the unseen lifeblood behind Apple Mac OS X at its core), it has retained and expand­ed upon its pop­u­lar­i­ty in the serv­er rooms of many orga­ni­za­tions. Today, the Lin­ux OS runs the glob­al data cen­ters of major cloud providers.

Lin­ux 4 SAP HANA

When it comes to Lin­ux and the SAP stack, we know that SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA both run on com­put­ing envi­ron­ments built on Lin­ux. But what exact­ly is sup­port­ing the Lin­ux-based serv­er room?

Fel­low Ger­man soft­ware com­pa­ny SUSE reminds us that its Lin­ux Enter­prise Serv­er was the first oper­at­ing sys­tem for SAP HANA. The orga­ni­za­tion insists that it remains a co-inno­va­tion part­ner for solu­tions such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP Cloud Plat­form, SAP Data Hub, and oth­er ele­ments in the SAP arsenal.

This is essen­tial­ly a ​“ref­er­ence devel­op­ment plat­form” for SAP appli­ca­tions includ­ing SAP HANA. That’s anoth­er way of say­ing that SUSE’s fla­vor of the Lin­ux OS has ironed out some of the crit­i­cisms and that there’s a lot of robust­ness, secu­ri­ty con­trol, and few incompatibilities.

The Wiz­ard in the Serv­er Room

While SAP HANA can repli­cate in-mem­o­ry data with­in the same data cen­ter (or across two data cen­ters), SUSE points out that its tech­nol­o­gy adds auto­mat­ed failover and recov­ery in min­utes, not hours.

In terms of patch­ing con­cerns, the com­pa­ny says that SUSE Lin­ux Enter­prise Live Patch­ing elim­i­nates the need for planned down­time of SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA sys­tems. Users can deploy crit­i­cal secu­ri­ty patch­es with­out reboot­ing servers or affect­ing performance.

Accord­ing to the com­pa­ny, its wiz­ard tech­nol­o­gy auto­mates instal­la­tion of SAP NetWeaver and SAP HANA solu­tion stacks includ­ing the high avail­abil­i­ty stack. It ful­ly sup­ports SAP HANA Tai­lored Dat­a­cen­ter Inte­gra­tion (TDI) cus­tomized imple­men­ta­tions. Instal­la­tion times for a ful­ly opti­mized SAP imple­men­ta­tion can be reduced from days to hours. The wiz­ard elim­i­nates the hard-cod­ed com­mand line entries required to con­fig­ure a high­ly avail­able SAP HANA system.

SUSE also offers a main­te­nance and sup­port ser­vice that inte­grates through SAP Solu­tion Man­ag­er into the SAP glob­al sup­port back­bone. It allows users to ini­ti­ate sup­port requests using stan­dard SAP esca­la­tion chan­nels: tele­phone, web front end, a sup­port tick­et, or through SAP Solu­tion Manager.

SAP’s Lin­ux Perspective

SAP’s foot­print in Lin­ux spans oth­er key indus­try plat­forms and stan­dards. ASUG Mem­bers will note that full dig­i­tal back­bone solu­tions exist includ­ing Red Hat Enter­prise Lin­ux for SAP Solu­tions and Ora­cle Lin­ux 5, 6, and 7 for x86_64.

“SAP S/4HANA is the next gen­er­a­tion of our flag­ship appli­ca­tion suite, pro­vid­ing the abil­i­ty for cus­tomers to cap­ture trans­ac­tions and per­form ana­lyt­ics on that infor­ma­tion in real time on the same data­base instance,” said Dan Lahl, VP of SAP prod­uct mar­ket­ing. ​“Reliev­ing the enter­prise from hav­ing to do lots of batch data move­ment and replat­form­ing to a data ware­house with care­ful­ly designed schemas or mul­ti­ple appli­ca­tion-spe­cif­ic data marts removes com­plex­i­ty from the IT envi­ron­ment and deliv­ers the infor­ma­tion busi­ness users need to make deci­sions in their time window.”

Cre­at­ing an Open-Source Lin­ux Partnership

“Whether the deploy­ment envi­ron­ment in ques­tion is locat­ed in the cloud or on premis­es, hav­ing a rock-sol­id plat­form to oper­ate and report on the busi­ness in real time for SAP cus­tomers is crit­i­cal — and SUSE has been there with us, cre­at­ing this robust appli­ca­tion plat­form from the begin­ning,” Lahl added.

The annu­al SUSEC­ON con­fer­ence took place the first week of April 2019 in Nashville, Ten­nessee. Lahl was fea­tured in one of the main stage keynotes talk­ing to Thomas Di Gia­co­mo, SUSE’s pres­i­dent of engi­neer­ing, prod­uct, and inno­va­tion, about open-source inno­va­tion at SAP.

Devel­op­ments in the SAP Lin­ux Lab

ASUG News vis­it­ed the SAP Appli­ca­tions Kiosk to dis­cuss the SAP engi­neer­ing cur­rent­ly hap­pen­ing in the SAP Lin­ux Lab in Wall­dorf, Ger­many. Lahl explained to ASUG that the Lin­ux Lab is a crit­i­cal com­po­nent in SAP’s joint plat­form deliv­ery for cus­tomers and a key strate­gic advan­tage for SAP.

“Instead of decom­pos­ing the pieces of the plat­form into its com­po­nent parts, dol­ing them out to respec­tive part­ners … and then rely­ing on a loose con­fed­er­a­tion of parts the cus­tomer has to put togeth­er them­selves, the Lin­ux Lab is a place where SAP and our part­ners joint­ly engi­neer a com­pre­hen­sive, inte­grat­ed, and ful­ly test­ed plat­form of apps, data­base, oper­at­ing sys­tem, and hard­ware,” Lahl said.

A Bet­ter Expe­ri­ence for SAP Customers

In an exclu­sive inter­view with ASUG, Lahl told us that this inte­gra­tion fac­tor guar­an­tees a bet­ter expe­ri­ence for joint customers.

Lahl con­clud­ed, ​“When cus­tomers need help in trou­bleshoot­ing plat­form prob­lems — either on-premise or in the cloud — the Lin­ux Lab rolls up its sleeves and goes to work with SAP and its tech­nol­o­gy part­ners togeth­er to deliv­er a com­bined plat­form fix. There is no fin­ger point­ing from the Lin­ux Lab, just prob­lem resolution.”

SAP’s efforts to pro­vide plat­form-lev­el tech­nolo­gies to suit enter­prise Lin­ux deploy­ments now run at lev­els that are arguably as advanced as any oth­er tech­nol­o­gy ven­dor out there. The age of enter­prise Lin­ux is dri­ving forward.

ASUG Mem­bers inter­est­ed in sup­port­ing SAP HANA with help from SAP Solu­tion Man­ag­er can reg­is­ter for the web­cast, ​“SOL­MAN: Run­ning SAP Solu­tion Man­ag­er 7.2 on SAP HANA.”