Huawei Cloud SAP Solution
📜 Introduction
Hello, everyone!🎈 As you know, technology is evolving day by day, and new solutions are needed to keep up with these innovations. If we go to a more specific point about this, previously traditional IT systems were sufficient for SAP applications to a certain extent, but today, it is not enough anymore and the requirements of enterprises are constantly changing. This is where “cloud computing” comes in. Using SAP applications on the cloud solves many problems and provides ease. SAP applications using the cloud infrastructure can be easily scaled, secured, and it is cost-effective and reliable. Therefore, with all these advantages, using the cloud infrastructure is much easier and a technology-focused solution for SAP applications. Now, in the continuation of the article, we can go into the details of this. Enjoyable readings! ☕😊
Why should we use Cloud for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)?
The ERP system is a core point of an enterprise IT system, it coordinates human resources, financial resources, supply chains, etc. Enterprises’ IT systems are becoming more intelligent and information-based, so this will enable their IT infrastructure to be flexibly scaled up and down, secure&reliable, cost-effective, and intelligent. In this point, using cloud ERP instead of an on-premises structure will provide us with these features easily.
Flexibility
IT Infrastructure should be flexible because as enterprises grow, resource requirements change, so their infrastructure should be scalable flexibly.
Cost-effectivity
Using ERP on Cloud reduces the total cost of ownership by reducing hardware costs, time cost of initial deployment, system O&M costs, and lifecycle management costs.
Security and Reliability
The service level agreement (SLA) is important to the ERP service. It requires continuity and reliability of both databases and upper-layer applications. High availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) systems for ERP can be deployed on the cloud to help enterprises remain committed to the SLA.
Intelligence
Today, most of enterprises expect their ERP to integrate with edge-cutting technologies, such as IoT, big data, AI, etc. This enables enterprises to respond to changing market and service requirements and achieve intelligent, agile, highly efficient operations.
Deploying SAP Services on HUAWEI CLOUD
The enterprises which use ERP, need the features above. HUAWEI CLOUD meets these requirements with its secure and stable infrastructure. It provides users with high-performance as well as powerful EI, big data, and lifecycle management services. Instead of traditional ERP systems, it simplifies enterprise management, optimizes operations, reduces cost, and facilitates digital transformation.
✔ What are the advantages of using SAP on HUAWEI CLOUD?
1️⃣ Huawei Cloud provides ECSs with high specifications, so users can choose ECS specifications according to their needs.
2️⃣ It provides BMS, 16 TB of memory is available in a BMS, and 16 BMSs can be deployed in a cluster.
3️⃣ It provides high-performance IaaS with its new generation V5 processors. Huawei’s proprietary 25GE NIC chip supports hardware offloading, and its network performance is 4 times higher than that of the certification requirements.
4️⃣ Huawei Cloud provides high reliability, availability, and security with its comprehensive HA and DR solutions for HANA and SAP applications. Storage-based active-active DR reduces costs by more than 70%.
5️⃣ It makes O&M management easier than traditional IT systems, provides exclusive SAP management tools which improves cloud deployment efficiency and reduces O&M difficulty and cost.
SAP Solution Architecture on HUAWEI CLOUD
HUAWEI CLOUD provides one-stop SAP platform services for enterprises. They can easily use HUAWEI CLOUD’s automatic installation and deployment tool to quickly build an environment and launch a system. HUAWEI CLOUD provides computing, storage, DR, network, security, big data, AI, etc. services to build a powerful system for SAP solutions. The SAP on Huawei Cloud architecture can be seen below.
SAP Application Scenarios on HUAWEI CLOUD
Scenario 1: SAP Dev and QAS on HUAWEI CLOUD, PRD on Local Data Center
If the production system is deployed in the enterprise’s data center, and the development and test systems are deployed on HUAWEI CLOUD, then the two on-cloud systems should be connected to the production system through the IPsec VPN tunnel, or Direct Connect service. Thus, in this point, Huawei Cloud provides quick development and integration with its services. It allows users to make full use of both local resources and on-cloud SAP.
Scenario 2: Entire SAP System on HUAWEI CLOUD
In this scenario, the entire SAP system is deployed on HUAWEI CLOUD. We can access the SAP system through the IPsec VPN tunnel or Direct Connect Service to use resources with high specifications, security, and performance. Also, HUAWEI CLOUD provides O&M capabilities, so if an enterprise has few O&M personnel, has never deployed an SAP system before, or has uncertain hardware resources, using the entire SAP system on HUAWEI CLOUD will be a better option, so that using the entire SAP system on the cloud will provide fast deployment, improved efficiency, reduced TCO, etc. The architecture can be seen in the diagram below.
🎯 Feature Requirements
1. Performance
Before the deployment of the SAP system, resource planning should be done based on enterprise SAP system requirements. VM instance SAPS, network interfaces, and storage IOPS are important points of resource planning. The SAP V5 platform supports m3 ECSs with up to 32 vCPUs and 256 GB of memory. Also, Huawei 25GE network chips support hardware offloading.
2. HA and DR
HA: HA or High Availability is a reliability design aimed at eliminating single points of failure and ensuring system continuity.
DR: DR or Disaster Recovery is the use of a remote backup system that can quickly take over service from a failed local data center. This also ensures service continuity.
3. High Security
This solution is especially beneficial for managing a distributed system environment, enhancing security control over the SAP system. Huawei Cloud provides
- Intranet Traffic Control: With the security groups and network ACLs, we can control the intranet accesses of the SAP system.
- Channel Security: It allows us to connect to Huawei Cloud through Direct Connect or VPN, and deploy the virtual next-gen firewall to protect SAProuter.
- Key Management: It offers reliable, secure, easy management, integrates multiple cloud services, and stores SAP system data securely.
- O&M Management: Security groups, etc. ensure access server security and meet the Classified Cybersecurity Protection Class 4 requirements, including user identity authentication, access control, and security audits.
- Vulnerability Discovery: It offers comprehensive, depth, professional security assessments on the SAP system.
4. Backup and Restoration
It is required to periodically back up SAP HANA data to ensure data reliability. HUAWEI CLOUD OBS, VBS, and CSBS, as well as the backup function provided by SAP or a third-party backup tool effectively back up SAP service on HUAWEI CLOUD.
4.1. How is the backup process?
- Back up HANA Database to SFS through HANA Studio
- Periodically archive HANA backup files from SFS to OBS
- SAP applications use the VBS or CSBS backup function to periodically back up data to OBS.
- Cross-region OBS replication is used to store backup data to the remote OBS for cross-region DR.
5. SAP Management Tool
Today, as technology grows, traditional data center management tools cannot meet the O&M requirements of cloud services. In this point, HUAWEI CLOUD Enterprise Project Management Service (EPS) enables us to manage our resources, applications, O&M tasks, provides monitoring alarms. It can be used to deploy software, back up & restore data, orchestrate resources, recover applications after a disaster occurs, etc, so it is basically a one-stop management service for SAP.
6. Elastic Application Scaling
With this feature, the number of additional application servers (AASs) are automatically increased by Elastic SAP application scaling according to SAP service requirements. The AS configurations and policies can be specified. With the Elastic Application Scaling feature, we can configure the Primary Application Server (PAS) and AASs in the same AS group, and AS policies based on alarm policies. For instance, we can set alarms which is triggered according to CPU usage, and when a monitored metric reaches its threshold, instances are automatically added.
7. Integration
When we need to securely interconnect the system with other systems across networks and data centers, we can use the hybrid cloud integration platform. It supports both cloud and off-cloud applications for SAP system cloud migration. Thus, it provides various interconnections (SAP cloud applications can be integrated with APIs, data, IoT, other cloud services), on-off cloud integrations, cross-region integration (applications can be deployed in a distributed structure, and integrated across data centers. In this way, latency is reduced caused by cross-region integration), IT/OT convergence.
HUAWEI CLOUD ROMA Connect in SAP Applications
Huawei Cloud uses ROMA for enterprise digital transformations. ROMA integrates business application data 2 to 4 billion times a day, and hundreds of SaaS and cloud services. ROMA Connect supports the SAP data source to connect with SAP systems.
🔔 Conclusion
In conclusion, using SAP applications on the cloud is more advantageous than traditional IT systems because the requirements can be changed every day. Such as, we may need one instance today, but if the requirements increase, we may need two instances, and it is very easy to auto scale these sources on the cloud. Also, Huawei Cloud offers us a pay-for-use payment method which is very cost-effective solution and it is easier to perform O&M tasks, also it is secure and reliable. From all of these aspects, using SAP applications on Huawei Cloud is a better option.
References
- ROMA Connect Documentation
