The journey to cloud and SAP S/4HANA

For enterprises running SAP applications, the cloud is a powerful alternative to costly on-premises environments. To drive business value, multiple applications and services need to work in a hybrid cloud model that seamlessly stretches your on-premises environments into the public cloud. By running your business-critical SAP apps on cloud, you can quickly realize tremendous business acceleration and cost savings, with added flexibility. Moving away from cyclical infrastructure refreshes to real-time provisioning can scale your IT infrastructure and services as demand fluctuates.

But which applications should be migrated to the cloud? Not surprisingly, our clients tell us SAP applications are central to their success and strategy for cloud, with a deadline to refresh the business processes and move to SAP S/4HANA by 2025. So, now is the time to assess, plan and execute the journey to cloud and SAP S/4HANA.

Why run SAP on IBM Cloud?

IBM is a top SAP partner for customers across all solutions and services, backed by more than 35,000 SAP-focused practitioners. This SAP expertise enabled IBM to be the first to complete 100 S/4HANA implementations and we have infused these lessons into our portfolio.

By running SAP on IBM Cloud, you can take advantage of IBM’s advanced automation to rapidly deliver SAP-certified infrastructure. At the same time, you can leverage the enhanced security of single-tenant infrastructure and a hardened, consistent design based on best practices and deep expertise at a global scale. Run the entire production SAP landscape across bare metal and VMware-virtualized servers to optimize the performance and cost of the environment in IBM Cloud.

• IBM is the only cloud service provider to offer an SAP-certified, single-tenant infrastructure for both bare metal and VMware clusters, all powered by IBM’s advanced automation for speed of provisioning and day-2 operations, like adding capacity.
• IBM Cloud provides high-performance IBM Bare Metal Servers with scale-up to an 8TB SAP HANA database (or 12TB with TDIv5) and scale-up to 4TB SAP HANA databases on VMware hosts. This provides the unparalleled ability to run SAP HANA workloads and the attached SAP applications, with both the enhanced security of dedicated infrastructure and the optimization of performance and cost across bare metal and VMware-virtualized servers within the same SAP landscape.

IBM Cloud for VMware with SAP

VMware provides an easier path to cloud

IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions is the portfolio of choice for enterprise-scale SAP implementations and IBM is consistently recognized by VMware as a top cloud partner running the VMware Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) stack in data centers around the world.

Moving SAP applications and databases can be difficult and resource intensive. When SAP workloads are running with VMware, IBM provides a simple and straightforward path to the cloud. The IBM and VMware partnership has helped thousands of companies, including American Airlines, Osram, Westpac, and Honeywell, migrate and modernize their applications in the cloud.

• By collaborating with our partners VMware and Zerto, IBM Cloud has helped design and implement a solution that leverages a combination of VMware HCX and Zerto so that you can drastically reduce networking complexity by securely stretching your existing on-premises network into IBM Cloud and then move existing SAP applications on VMware to the IBM Cloud.
• While HCX encrypts data in flight and reduces network complexity and migration planning, Zerto replicates the data from on-premises to the IBM Cloud—even from physical or virtual Raw Device Mappings (RDMs).
• This can all be done without a time-consuming and expensive re-architecture of the application and without the need to re-IP the VMware virtual machines (VMs).

Proactively protect your business-critical SAP apps in the cloud

When moving your business-critical SAP workloads to the cloud, you will want to have a strategy in place to help protect your apps and data. You can leverage IBM’s advanced automation and growing portfolio of market-leading SAP ecosystem partners to deploy, configure, and license services like Veeam for backing up SAP HANA servers and databases and Zerto for helping protect tier-1 workloads as part of your broader disaster recovery strategy. With full root access and control of the hosted environment, you can also bring your own familiar tools and scripts to the IBM Cloud.

How to manage your SAP applications on IBM Cloud? The choice is yours

IBM offers you multiple ways to manage your SAP apps on cloud:

• Self-managed by you or managed by a systems integrator of your choice: This approach provides you with unrestricted control and flexibility of a VMware cluster to run SAP production and non-production environments, providing full autonomy on the highest-performance infrastructure in your transformation programs.
• Managed by IBM Services: For new implementations of SAP S/4HANA, all IBM Cloud capabilities for SAP can be delivered as part of a transformation program from IBM Services, with decades of experience in SAP implementations and the highest number of SAP S/4HANA projects delivered globally. Most important is the hybrid cloud approach, which IBM is uniquely positioned to offer with on-premises and on-cloud deployments delivered through IBM Services Managed Applications for SAP.

This is just the beginning of what is possible

Seamless access to SAP-certified bare-metal and VMware infrastructure on the IBM Cloud is just the beginning of what is possible. SAP-run enterprises can continue to transform their businesses by further leveraging IBM Cloud capabilities, such as IBM API Connect for SAP, IBM Blockchain, IBM’s The Weather Company, IBM Watson and other cloud services.

IBM and VMware will continue to work closely together to advance SAP capabilities on IBM Cloud and will partner to increase business value for our SAP-run customers with increased automation, day-2 management operations and further certifications.

Join us at SAP SAPPHIRE (booth 711) to chat more about your journey to the cloud.

Learn more about running SAP on IBM Cloud