We are always excited to participate in SAP TechEd, especially because of the unique partnership we share with SAP to jointly help our customers migrate ERP to the cloud. For example, we recently enabled Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) to migrate its massive SAP landscape (an estimated 100 terabytes) to Azure, making it one of the largest SAP S/4HANA scale-out configurations in the public cloud.
As an SAP TechEd 2020 Gold Sponsor, Microsoft will be leading a session that covers our new migration offerings, and we’ll co-present with SAP on our latest developments on simplifying a customer’s journey from SAP ERP on-premises to S/4 HANA on Azure. Additionally, there are several sessions run by SAP teams globally that cover planning and analysis with new add-ins for Microsoft Office, running SAP Cloud Platform on Azure, RPA for common scenarios combining SAP and Microsoft Office, and deploying and protecting SAP software in the cloud with Azure NetApp files. You can find these sessions in the course catalogue here.
Earlier this year, we announced offerings to help customers optimize costs and increase agility by running their SAP workloads on Azure. At Microsoft Ignite, we shared a migration framework to help customers achieve a secure, reliable, and simplified path to the cloud. Today, we continue to deliver on that promise with additional product updates that will further streamline a customer’s migration journey, drive improved price/performance, and provide simplified management.
SAP on Azure Migration Framework
Drive improved price/performance
As customers move their SAP landscapes to Azure, we want to ensure that they can benefit from new generations of hardware and processors to achieve improved price/performance ratios. We recently launched the new Ddsv4 and Edsv4 VM families based on the 2nd generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8272CL (Cascade Lake). We have also certified a subset of the Edsv4 VMs for SAP HANA. These new VMs deliver up to 20 percent CPU performance improvement compared to their predecessors, the Dv3 and Ev3 VMs, depending on the workload. Customers can also seamlessly transition to these VMs by simply resizing their VMs from the predecessor versions. Learn more about this update here.
Save costs and reduce storage requirements with the new Azure premium storage bursting capability
We continue to innovate on existing technologies such as premium storage to reduce the total cost of ownership for our customers. With the disk bursting capability of our premium storage disks, customers no longer have to size storage configurations at a higher level to account for short-lived peak workloads. Customers can instead rely on premium storage disk bursting to cover such peak demand periods. With this new capability, customers can lower their storage costs substantially across configurations for database management systems such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server. Customers can refer to our updated SAP HANA Azure virtual machine storage configurations guide to take advantage of the updated storage size recommendations based on disk bursting. In addition, our new guide Azure Storage types for SAP workload helps customers evaluate the right storage type options for their SAP workloads.
Simplify deployment with the SAP on Azure Deployment Automation Framework
Earlier this year, we introduced introduced our SAP on Azure Deployment Automation Framework. We have evolved the framework and expanded a modular workflow to provide rapid and consistent deployments. With the automation framework, customers can deploy the Azure infrastructure to support and run an SAP system in minutes, in a repeatable fashion, to support multiple use cases. We also introduced extended functionality such as support for Azure Key Vault, Azure , and AnyDB support.
We have already made these capabilities available to a set of private preview customers. Today, we are announcing that these building blocks will be available more broadly in our GitHub Open-Source repository (sap-hana) as (v2.3) for SAP on Azure Deployment Automation soon. The automation solution is based on the best practices specified by Microsoft and SAP as part of our reference architectures for SAP. You can read more about the automation framework in our blog. You can also learn more about the scenarios supported in our GitHub repository.
Azure Backup for SAP HANA now supports incremental backups to save time and reduce costs
With Azure Backup, Azure’s native Backint certified backup solution, customers can protect their SAP HANA deployments in Azure VMs with zero backup infrastructure. We are excited to announce the public preview of support for HANA incremental backups, which allows customers to create cost-effective backup policies catering to their RPO and RTO requirements. To try out this preview offering refer to our documentation and check out this tutorial. To learn more about backups for SAP HANA databases in Azure, explore supported scenarios and FAQs.
SAP and Microsoft partner to deliver supply chain and Industry 4.0 solutions in the cloud
Today, we have further expanded our partnership with SAP to enable customers to design and operate intelligent digital supply chain and Industry 4.0 solutions in the cloud and at the edge. You can read more about how SAP and Microsoft are collaborating closely to shape the future of supply chain and manufacturing here.
SAP TechEd is an amazing opportunity to learn and gain new career skills. After the event, explore the free SAP on Azure learning resources on Microsoft Learn and consider getting certified – Azure is the only cloud vendor that offers an SAP cloud certification.
We look forward to seeing you during our sessions at SAP TechEd!