Sap Migration to Azure: Accelerating Your Cloud Journey

Accelerating your cloud journey with SAP migration to Azure requires careful planning and execution.

You can migrate your SAP landscape to Azure in as little as 90 days, thanks to Azure's scalable and reliable infrastructure.

With Azure, you can take advantage of cost savings of up to 50% compared to on-premises infrastructure.

Azure's managed services and automation capabilities can help you reduce your total cost of ownership by up to 30%.

Planning and Preparation is a crucial step in SAP migration to Azure. You need to create a near-zero downtime migration plan to meet your compliance, performance, availability, cost, and security requirements.

To ensure a smooth migration, start with a Proof of Concept (POC) before attempting a full-scale SAP on Azure migration. This will help you identify potential issues related to network, data security, scalability, and resource availability.

A POC typically involves preparing the architecture/design using information from the Discovery and assessment phase and reference architectures from Microsoft and SAP. You should also scan your existing SAP landscape to determine applications that can be considered for a pilot SAP to Azure migration.

Here are the key steps to prepare for a POC:

A detailed SAP migration to Azure readiness scan is also necessary to understand the infrastructure needs and estimated growth patterns of your SAP landscape. This scan should involve a detailed analysis of the current SAP landscape, evaluation of workloads, and definition of configuration requirements for running SAP workloads on Azure.

By following these steps, you can ensure a successful SAP migration to Azure and avoid potential issues related to network, data security, scalability, and resource availability.

Thousands of enterprises have successfully migrated their SAP workloads to Microsoft Azure.

You won't gain the benefits by simply lifting and shifting your SAP workloads into the Cloud. Every enterprise looking to undertake this transformation is different, with multiple industries and geographies, and various permutations of SAP solutions.

To avoid delays and disappointment, take on board the lessons learned by others who have made the journey. Selecting the right Cloud is a critical step, and choosing a Cloud that is at the forefront of innovation and cost-effective, secure, compliant, fully certified, and supported for SAP workloads can put naysayers at ease.

You have to do a certain amount of re-architecting if you want to see significantly lower costs and higher agility in the Cloud. Most SAP systems are sized for three years of usage, but in the Cloud, you can right-size from day one, and grow your systems as you need to.

A great SAP architecture on Azure starts with a solid foundation built on four pillars: Security, Performance and scalability, Availability and recoverability, and Efficiency and operations. These pillars are the backbone of a successful SAP migration to Azure.

Security is a top priority, and designing for it involves deploying virtual machines in Availability Sets or Availability Zones to protect against planned and unplanned maintenance events. This also applies to the SAP Application servers, where a few smaller servers are recommended instead of one larger application server.

To ensure availability, it's essential to design for it by deploying virtual machines in Availability Sets or Availability Zones, and configuring operating system cluster technologies such as Windows Failover cluster or Linux Pacemaker. This ensures short failover times of the A(SCS) and DBMS.

Designing for recoverability is also crucial, and it involves understanding the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of your SAP Application. Azure Regional Pairs are recommended for disaster recovery, which offer isolation and availability to hedge against the risks of natural or man disasters impacting a single region.

Here are the key considerations for designing a great SAP architecture on Azure:

Designing for performance and scalability is crucial for a successful SAP on Azure deployment. This involves evaluating the sizing requirements for your SAP system and ensuring that your Azure components are properly configured to meet those needs.

To start, you should undertake a quality sizing exercise for your SAP deployment to determine the optimal configuration for your environment. This will help you right-size your Azure components, including compute, storage, and network resources.

A good place to begin is by referring to SAP Note #1928533, which provides guidance on the SAPS value for Azure Virtual Machines supported to run SAP Applications. You can also consult the following links to determine the network and storage throughput per Azure VM type:

In addition to proper sizing, you should also consider leveraging virtual machine accelerators for your SAP application and database layers. This can help improve network performance and reduce latency.

To further enhance performance, consider enabling Accelerated Networking on your virtual machines. This can provide a significant boost to network throughput, making it an ideal solution for high-traffic SAP applications.

For SAP HANA workloads, it's essential to enable the Write Accelerator durable write cache on your database log volumes. This can help improve write I/O latency and ensure a low write latency (sub ms) to the /hana/log volume.

Finally, consider using Premium Storage Managed Disks for the SAP database server. This can provide high-performance and low-latency I/O, making it an ideal solution for demanding SAP applications.

Application Archiving is a game-changer for large enterprises with a huge SAP legacy estate. Most of these systems are inherited in acquisitions or have been superseded, but they still consume power and incur management and licensing costs.

These systems often need to be retained for compliance reasons, even though they're rarely referenced. Application Archiving simplifies them and copies them to Microsoft Azure.

By doing so, you can turn them off and only turn them on when you need to look at them. This approach clearly has a compelling business case.

Clients have seen big cost savings as a result of this method, with some even achieving a 90% reduction in the cost of their legacy SAP estate on Azure.

A Proof of Concept is a great way to test your concerns about Cloud migration, typically taking about four weeks. It helps you see how SAP performs in the Cloud.

The goal of a Proof of Concept is to test all your concerns, including security, performance, and disruption to the business. It's a low-risk way to get started with Cloud migration.

To prepare for a Proof of Concept, use the information from the Discovery and assessment phase and the reference architectures from Microsoft and SAP. This will help you create a solid architecture/design.

Here are the steps to prepare for a Proof of Concept:

A Proof of Concept can help you identify potential issues before attempting a full-scale migration. It's a great way to build confidence in your Cloud migration strategy.

Before you start migrating your SAP platform to Azure, it's essential to establish a compatible Azure landing zone for the SAP platform. This involves assessing the SAP platform and dependent workloads.

To ensure a smooth migration, you'll need to evaluate the sizing considerations for the SAP platform. This will help you determine the right resources and infrastructure for your migrated platform.

The migration process itself involves a few key steps: migrating the platform, and then migrating the workload. This is a departure from standard migration tasks, but it's a crucial part of the SAP migration to Azure process.

We run extensive tests and execute the migration plan, providing transparent, milestone-based reports to ensure a seamless SAP on Azure migration. This level of transparency and reporting helps you stay informed and in control throughout the process.

After migrating your SAP system to Azure, it's essential to optimize your environment to ensure business continuity and avoid underutilization of resources.

Using Azure capacity and cost management tools can help you avoid overprovisioning and underutilization of resources, allowing you to pay for what you need and use.

Monitoring Azure technology advances and incorporating the latest updates into your SAP on cloud environment can also help you make the most out of the SAP on Azure infrastructure.

To achieve this, consider the following recommendations:

Operating SAP on Azure can be a challenge, especially when dealing with infinite capacity and cost. Managing this challenge requires outsourcing the day-to-day management of SAP systems to a trusted partner.

Lemongrass is a popular choice for many organizations, allowing them to optimize their SAP on Azure operations. This outsourcing approach can help businesses save time and resources.

After migrating the core platform, you can use standardized migration factory processes to migrate each dependent workload. This structured approach ensures a smooth transition for individual workload group architectures and their unique scenarios.

Continuously optimize your SAP on Azure environment to stabilize it, avoid underutilization and overprovisioning of resources, and ensure business continuity.

To avoid overprovisioning and underutilization, use Azure capacity and cost management tools to pay for what you need and use.

Monitor Azure technology advances to enhance your SAP on cloud environment and make the most out of the SAP on Azure infrastructure by incorporating the latest updates.

Use Azure monitoring and artificial intelligence for real-time visibility and to detect any threats.

Ensure data security by using Azure services along with SAP capabilities and allow access to SAP applications using Azure Active Directory single sign-on and Role-based user access.

Organize training sessions for the end-users to promote faster adoption.

Here are some additional tips to optimize your SAP on Azure environment:

By following these tips and using the right tools, you can optimize your SAP on Azure environment and ensure a smooth and efficient operation.