Planning for Migrating SAP Workloads to Azure

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 



Strategies for Migrating SAP systems to Microsoft Azure

Generally, all the enterprises have their own SAP systems for business function such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), global trade, Business Intelligence (BI), and others; with their environments like sandbox, development, test as well as production.

Horizontal strategy

It can help you to start from the bottom of the stack as it's a safe way to experiment as well as gain experience with Azure and it can also be used while redefining your operational, deployment, and approval processes. This strategy works as follows:

  • To limit risk, you should start with low-impact sandbox or training systems. If something goes wrong, there's very little danger of affecting many users or mission-critical business functions. 

  • After that, as you gain experience with running, hosting, and administering SAP systems in Azure, you can apply this knowledge to the next layer of systems up the stack.

  • For each layer, you have to estimate costs, potential money saved, performance, and optimization potential and adjust if needed.

Vertical strategy

Vertical strategy with low-risk systems in parallel to the horizontal strategy can be used to gain experience from production systems on Azure which also provides a chance to adjust internal processes for Azure and train team members. This strategy works as follows:

  • Look at the impact on cost, customers, Service Level Agreements (SLA), & legal requirements- Firstly, move systems that have lower risk- the governance, risk, and compliance systems and then the Object Event Repository (OER) system. After that you can move the higher risk ones, like BI, and ERP.

  • When you have a new SAP system, start in Azure by default rather than putting in on-premises & moving it later- OER is a new low-risk system and you can deploy it entirely to Azure end-to-end ( from sandbox all the way up to production) after successfully moving some of the other systems into Azure with the horizontal strategy.

  • Don't move your most critical system first- The last system you must move should be the highest risk and you require the most performance intensive virtual machine SKUs as well as the largest storage.

  • Move standalone systems first- Some systems are often closely joined with one another like ERP and GRP system with lot of synchronous, real-time traffic between the two. But if you want to move ERP to Azure, while keeping GTS on-premises, it will surely affect the performance due to network latency, hence you should move them together.

  • If you have several SAP systems, look for upstream & downstream dependencies fro one SAP system to another, or from SAP to the apps outside the SAP ecosystem. You should also examine the traffic patterns and areas with high sensitivity to latency.

  • If you have tightly connected systems, do a performance analysis to know what effect moving them will have but if there isn't much impact, then you can easily move them separately to Azure (like Business Warehouse independent of ERP); otherwise you have to create migration groups and move them together.

  • In some cases consider waiting- Sometimes you don't want to move certain systems to Azure right away which could be related to sizing requirements, when the processing requirements were so high that the VMs weren't big enough yet. You have to run some tests to ensure that moving these systems isn't going to affect SLAs with customers.  

Migrating to SAP S4HANA from SAP Business Suite

For most of the SAP customers, their migration of SAP HANA to cloud is mainly due to the following factors:
  • End of life first-generation SAP HANA appliances causing customers to re-evaluate their platform.
  • The desire to take advantage of the early value proposition of SAP Business Warehouse (BW) on HANA in a flexible TDI model over traditional databases and later BW/4HANA.

This result in the numerous initial migrations of SAP HANA to Microsoft Azure have focused on SAP BW to take advantage of SAP HANA's in-memory capability for the BW workload. This means that the migration of the BW application to utilize SAP HANA at the database layer, and eventually the more involved migration of BW on HANA to BW/4HANA. 




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