Co-authored by Robert Madl
Many SAP clients are migrating their enterprise course of workloads and purposes to SAP S/4HANA® operating within the cloud. This isn’t any surprise, contemplating the cloud’s quite a few advantages together with customary SAP assist for ECC ending in 2027. This journey can embody first conducting a “lift & shift” of present SAP environments to the cloud after which upgrading to S/4HANA.
Especially for very massive SAP clients, migrating to the cloud is a multi-year course of probably involving dozens to a whole bunch of initiatives. For instance, 3M started a migration to S/4HANA and AWS in 2018 and at present estimates that they may full the journey in 2025.
To assist our mutual clients alongside these journeys, Cisco and SAP have been working collectively for a number of years. From this expertise, I’d wish to briefly share 4 basic greatest practices to assist make sure the stable efficiency of your SAP programs and the enterprise processes carried out throughout your SAP and non-SAP programs:
- Get your community cloud-ready
- Manage and optimize your hybrid panorama
- Ensure SAP utility efficiency
- Add visibility into the Internet
Get your community cloud-ready
When planning to maneuver workloads to the cloud, you need to first put together your community for cloud connectivity, basically connecting your datacenter to the cloud.
This is the place the Cisco SD-WAN Cloud On-ramp providing comes into play. Put merely, SD-WAN Cloud On-ramp gives the inspiration to attach your non-public datacenter with cloud suppliers.
Figure 1: Networking must evolve to assist cloud apps
As seen in Figure 1, cloud networking is completely different from conventional networking. For occasion, conventional on-premises networking implements applied sciences corresponding to IPsec/Firewalls, load balancing, InternetFlow and QoS. On the opposite hand, cloud networking makes use of applied sciences that permit for workload flexibility, together with cloud connectivity automation, micro-segmentation, utility insurance policies and app autoscaling.
Manage and optimize your hybrid panorama
No one migrates all their SAP processes from on-premises to S/4HANA operating within the cloud unexpectedly. Rather, SAP clients sometimes migrate the least mission-critical apps first and add apps over time. And some clients won’t migrate to the cloud in any respect, however somewhat stick with on-premises gear deployed in co-location, supplier datacenters. The net-net is that clients are sometimes operating hybrid cloud environments.
To assist simplify IT operations, Cisco Intersight gives a SaaS hybrid cloud operations platform that allows IT to streamline and handle hybrid cloud environments—together with conventional on-premises, cloud-native, and hybrid IT infrastructure and assets—from a single platform.
Cisco Intersight helps the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) and Cisco HyperFlex™hyperconverged infrastructure, Cisco® networking platforms, virtualization and container platforms, third-party servers and storage, public-cloud platforms and providers, and different integration endpoints.
Included on this checklist are two converged infrastructures: FlexPod with NetApp and Flashstack with Pure Storage. Both choices are fashionable, rock-solid platforms that Fortune 500 companies have relied on to run their SAP landscapes for a few years. Both choices present all-flash options to speed up SAP purposes at scale.
Ensure SAP utility efficiency
From a person perspective, a slow-performing utility is nearly as dangerous as an entire outage. If the ecommerce expertise is sluggish, for example, clients may be very fast to buy elsewhere. In addition, given many buyer SAP environments have grown over time, firms usually don’t have deal with on utility dependencies.
This is the place Cisco AppDynamics Monitoring for SAP Solutions shines. AppDynamics gives real-time visibility into the applying efficiency earlier than, throughout, and after a migration or improve. With the appearance of customized dashboards, you’ll be able to develop a comparative evaluation, contrasting side-by-side manufacturing and canary deployments (often known as a model launch dashboard). This helps to rapidly mitigate dangers and deal with impacts earlier than customers are migrated to the brand new deployment or modifications are carried out throughout the manufacturing setting. By leveraging AI and ML to grasp what “normal” conduct is and setting baselines to grasp anomalies, AppDynamics helps IT employees to spend extra time targeted and aligned on attaining enterprise final result aims somewhat than on situation decision.
Figure 2: Basic AppDynamics Application Flow Map pattern
Through AppDynamics’ visualization and dependency auto-detection capabilities, you’ll be able to know which programs emigrate to the cloud in teams, so that you don’t introduce unneeded latency making calls between on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In truth, AppDynamics gives movement maps of your entire panorama that embody each SAP and non-SAP purposes, together with utility context into end-to-end transactions to assist visualize points on a movement map.
In addition, AppDynamics is the one APM providing in the marketplace with an ABAP agent. AppDynamics helps SAP Java and ABAP stack to offer code-level visibility, serving to with root-cause evaluation and lowering imply time to recuperate. And with the AppDynamics BusinessIQ function, you’ll be able to construct dashboards visualizing your personal enterprise processes, correlate enterprise efficiency metrics with IT efficiency metrics to prioritize remediating points impacting the enterprise, and higher align along with your group’s total enterprise aims.
Add visibility into the Internet
Figure 3: The web creates blind spots
Once SAP purposes are operating within the cloud, a brand new problem emerges: Suddenly, a community that you just don’t management (i.e., the Internet) with no assured SLA exists between your customers and your SAP programs. If person experiences are affected by, say, an outage someplace over the Internet, with out visibility into your SAP person site visitors, you’re usually pressured into an escalated, time- and resource-consuming battle room attempting to determine and remediate the problem.
Figure 4: ThousandEyes gives visibility into the Internet
To deal with this problem, Cisco ThousandEyes gives a wholly new class of utility, basically offering visibility into the Internet. And so despite the fact that you don’t personal and management the Internet or cloud supplier networks, with ThousandEyes you achieve visibility into them as in case you do.
In abstract, migrating to S/4HANA and the cloud on the identical time may be extraordinarily difficult. The excellent news is that Cisco and SAP have partnered for years with the final word goal of serving to you succeed alongside this journey.
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