SAP System Migration into the Cloud Using Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Listening to cloud evangelists and cloud providers, it sounds like moving SAP systems to the cloud should be an easy task. And in fact, customers have many options to move or copy a system to the cloud. For most customers, this move can involve significant changes in system configuration and daily operations, including intense testing and/or downtime. In this blog post we look at an example of how NetApp customers can migrate an SAP system from an on-premises location into a public cloud. We show how NetApp® Data Fabric technology helps minimize downtime while keeping the system configuration and IT service management processes unchanged.

System Migration Challenges

Most customers are running their SAP systems today using enterprise storage, either attaching Fibre Channel or iSCSI block devices or using network attached storage via the NFS or SMB protocol. Unfortunately, when moving to the cloud, the Fibre Channel protocol is no longer an option. Many customers need to change their SAP system configuration and operations when switching to the various cloud storage offerings such as Elastic Block Store from AWS (EBS) or Azure SSD Premium Managed Disks (Premium Disks). For EBS or Premium Disks, high availability is accomplished by multiple (typically three) redundant copies. Often these Premium Disks need to be combined at the client by using Logical Volume Manager (LVM) striping technology to meet capacity or performance requirements. For many customers, these requirements mean dramatic changes in operations, when used to administer enterprise-grade storage systems with all their integrated features to back up, tune, and resize.

Fortunately, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP® (CVO), as a software-defined storage management solution for the cloud, offers the same enterprise data-management capabilities as physical NetApp hardware or ONTAP Select, a NetApp software-defined storage solution. For customers running their SAP systems on NFS shares, there is almost no change in features, manageability, and operation. All their proven workflows and data protection tools work with CVO the same way they do in their on-premises data center. And CVO provides resilience, high availability, and performance for many of the small to medium databases such as DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and MaxDB, to name a few. CVO requires less adaption, less effort in testing, and less additional training when moving to the cloud

Simplify the Transfer with NetApp Data Fabric Technology

For customers who are required to change the architecture, a database backup or export is usually the only viable choice. This backup or export file, which contains all the data, needs to be transferred. Depending on the use case, time may not be critical, but for migrating a production system from on the premises to the cloud, time matters.

Many NetApp customers don’t face a lot of changes and challenges when moving their SAP systems to the cloud, because the architecture stays the same. NetApp Data Fabric can help to transfer the data and minimize downtime. NetApp Data Fabric and the NetApp SnapCenter® data protection suite can be used to transfer production systems and also for other use cases, such as regularly refreshing QA or training systems almost automatically.

The following figure shows our test setup. In the on-premises data center, we run a production SAP NetWeaver system using MaxDB as the database. The database is installed on Linux and a NetApp data and log volume is attached via NFS. The example would work as well if customers were using Fibre Channel in their on-premises data center, but in this case iSCSI needs to be used in the cloud to attach the block devices.

• TR-4757 SAP Applications on Microsoft Azure Using Cloud Volumes ONTAP
• NetApp Cloud Central
• SAP on Azure Landing Page

SAP SAPPHIRE NOW, Orlando, May 7-9, 2019