How to migrate to SAP applications in the cloud

Increasing numbers of organizations are turning to the cloud to support their SAP applications. The cloud appeals to them for several reasons — it has built-in fault tolerance; it scales easily with demand; and it reduces capital expenditures by offloading the responsibility for hardware support onto the cloud provider.

However, moving to the cloud isn’t as simple as just pressing a button. Your SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA application suites are sophisticated tools that require seamless support. SUSE Linux for SAP Applications is the leading Linux for SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP NetWeaver applications in the cloud. In fact, it is endorsed by SAP and used by more than 30,000 customers. And with over 20 years of experience working very closely with SAP, SUSE delivers solutions that enable you to shift your workloads to the cloud with ease and reliability.

Here are five ways, SUSE simplifies your path to SAP in the cloud:

• Automated deployment
• Flexible management
• High availability
• Comprehensive monitoring
• Completely open source

Automated Deployment

The long history of co-innovation between SUSE and SAP has resulted in development of tools and methods that will ease your journey to the cloud, cutting deployment time from days or weeks, down to hours.

SUSE provides pre-built templates to deploy your SAP infrastructure to any of the hyperscale cloud providers – AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. SUSE supports Salt and Terraform open-source automation frameworks, which enables error-free deployment of the full SAP system stack. SUSE also collaborates with Alibaba, IBM, Oracle and other cloud service providers to build and support their own templates using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications, giving you even more options.

All the template processes follow SAP deployment best practices, and are repeatable. If deployment complications happen to arise after running a template, you can easily tweak a value in the template and run it over again.

Flexible Management

A flexible, versatile management system is critical to keeping your SAP systems running smoothly in the cloud. That’s what makes SUSE Manager so important. It enables you to manage your complete lifecycle – configuration, automation, and updates – all from a single interface. Just like the other components of the SUSE portfolio, SUSE Manager has SAP knowledge built-in, allowing it to work flawlessly with any SAP platforms.

If you’re planning to transition from on-premises to the cloud, SUSE Manager is designed to work in a hybrid environment, so you can manage your on-premises and cloud resources from a single interface.

High Availability

High Availability (HA) is a crucial element of the SAP environment for virtually any organization to ensure continuous uptime. SUSE is an innovator and thought leader in High Availability, with years of experience solving real-life customer challenges.

SAP HA solutions developed by SUSE include the HANA System Replication Scale-up and the HANA System Replication Scale-Out. The choice of these and many other scenarios enable you to customize your SAP environment to meet your organization’s unique needs.

SUSE has also developed HA solutions for SAP NetWeaver and SAP S/4HANA, including the sap_suse_cluster_connector, which simplifies SAP maintenance processes in an HA cluster. This cluster connector software serves as a certification reference for any Unix/Linux cluster vendor.

Comprehensive Monitoring

The SUSE monitoring framework provides comprehensive dashboards that offer deep insight into your SAP environment, addressing all three layers of the core SAP infrastructure – SAP applications, the cluster stack, and the operating systems.

Through a single console, you can monitor the SAP HANA database, SAP HANA System Replication, SAP S/4HANA applications, and SAP NetWeaver applications, as well as the infrastructure. Graphical warnings and reporting make it easy to spot any potential issues before they occur. Plus, the monitoring tools can be used to check Pacemaker cluster resources and generate integrated insights.

Completely Open Source

Some vendors say they support open source, but at the same time they adopt strategies that can lead to vendor lock-in. SUSE is an independent vendor with no competing priorities, committed to a fully open-source posture. SUSE supports multiple cloud platforms, hypervisors, container technologies, and management solutions. SUSE knows the cloud is all about flexibility, and wants to ensure its customers benefit from having a full range of choices.

This commitment to open source and flexibility ensures customers can maximize bargaining power. And if you need to switch environments, you can bring your SUSE solutions with you.

Other vendors may focus on their IT skills and offer to support SAP in the cloud. But SUSE truly knows how critical your SAP applications are to your business. So, when it comes to migrating to the cloud, it simply makes sense to rely on an expert like SUSE that is well-known for its close, long-term co-innovation relationship with SAP, and strong Cloud Service Provider partnerships.

To learn more about SUSE solutions for SAP infrastructures in the public cloud, visit www.suse.com/cloud-for-sap.