The SAP Technical Architect as a Super Hero

I’ve always been a fan of the action movie genre and, more recently, the series of movies about heroes in the comic books I enjoyed when I was a kid. For me, back then, it was all about each character’s special powers. I just wanted to understand, first, how they got their abilities and then see how they would use their powers to defeat the villains. Now that I’m older, I expect to see more than super-strength and beams that come out of their hands. I want to see an engaging storyline about the challenges these heroes face in confronting the villains in ways that no one else can, which typically follows this pattern:

1. Identify the villain and understand the problems he or she is creating

2. Create and execute a plan

3. Fail

4. Evaluate what went wrong and develop a new plan

5. Defeat the enemy

At the end of the day, the movies are really about solving problems, which fascinates me as a former design engineer.

If you’re a technical architect tasked with determining the future of your SAP environment, your CIO probably expects you to be a super hero. After all, this is a big task which requires extraordinary skills and knowledge. Fortunately, there’s no evil being trying to wipe out half of all life in the universe but your business may be threatened by an old infrastructure that can’t keep up with today’s service delivery requirements. You’ve seen the promise of SAP’s Intelligent Enterprise and you need to decide which elements make sense for you and how to implement them.

Let’s go back to the super hero storyline. The hero’s initial plan fails because he or she didn’t have all of the information needed to defeat the villain. Ideally, you want to skip steps 3 and 4 above and go right to a successful implementation. For that, you need as much information as you can get. That’s where SUSE can help.

We’ve developed a new web page designed specifically for the SAP Technical Architect to explore infrastructure solutions to build their SAP Digital Core. We organize it by the various SAP solution environments, and provide information on how SUSE’s Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI) and Application Delivery framework supports those environments.

Let’s start with a simple example. Let’s say that you are interested in deploying SAP Business One version for SAP HANA. Start by clicking that block.

You’ll see the areas of SDI and SUSE services that may be relevant for you as well as a few documents at the bottom that provide additional information. You can click any of the Multimodal Operating System, Physical Infrastructure, Compute or Service & Support blocks to get more information specific to these areas. For example, if you click Multimodal Operating System, you’ll see information to help you decide if you should deploy your SAP Business One version for SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications instead of the base OS you use today.

But let’s say that you want to determine your cloud strategy for SAP S/4HANA. You can start by going to that section on the diagram.

Here you can see more elements of the SUSE framework are relevant for this SAP solution, but we’ll focus just on private cloud and public cloud information. Select Private Cloud / IaaS and you get information about SUSE solutions with OpenStack, SAP’s preferred open source platform for the cloud.

Now open the Public Cloud section to see the available reference architectures, as well as a guide for defining your cloud strategy, a video about high availability in the AWS cloud, and a success story about implementing SAP HANA in the Azure cloud. The green block links to product information about SUSE OpenStack Cloud.

Our goal with this new web page is to give you easy access to the information you need to understand SUSE’s solutions and alliance partner engagements regardless of the path you choose in implementing your SAP Digital Core. Please go to suse.com/jointhebest and try it out! Respond to this blog below and let me know if it provides the information that you are looking for, and that you can find it easily. If it’s not working for you, let me know why.

You can follow me on Twitter at @MichaelDTabron.