Preface – This post is part of the SAP on Azure series.
Table of Contents
Introduction
SAP, headquartered in Waldorf, Germany, with a location in Frankfurt, New York and Bangalore, is a large enterprise having ERP & Business objects software as its main product. SAP stands for “System, Applications & Products in Data Processing”. SAP is mainly divided into two parts in terms of hosting i.e. on premise hosting and Cloud Hosting. The SAP on premise hosting is mainly SAP HANA hosting which a relational database. In this article we will discuss in detail regarding SAP cloud hosting options.
Different SAP Cloud Hosting options
SAP, with its partnership with different global cloud hosting companies provides the following cloud hosting options:
- HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC)
- AWS
- GCP
- Microsoft Azure
- Alibaba cloud
Alibaba has signed a contract recently with SAP, and is majorily focused for the clients in China and nearby regions.
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is a HANA service provided by SAP on its contract. All the data was initially saved in SAP environment, later SAP opened it up to an eco-system of external hosting partners such as DXC, IBM Cloud and NTT.
Comparison of different SAP Cloud Hosting options
Let us compare the major SAP Cloud Hosting Providers:
| Factors | Google Cloud | AWS | Azure |
| Compute | Very large VMs SAP S/4HANA up to 4 nodes totalling 48 TB of memory | VMs support up to 24TB & 48 TB memory | Very large VMs and bare metal for HANA SAP S/4HANA up to 24 TB RAM scale-up, and up to 60TB RAM scale-out |
| Storage | Cloud Storage | EBS & S3 Cloud storage & Elastic File System | Azure Storage and Azure NetApp Files |
| Network | Virtual networking & Interconnect | Virtual networking (VCP) & Direct Connect | Virtual networking & ExpressRoute |
| Security (IAM) | Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) | AWS IAM | Azure AD, RBAC, MFA |
| Monitoring | Custom monitoring agent collects metrics from SAP HANA & sends to Google Cloud Monitoring | CloudWatch & CloudTrail | Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions |
| Automation | Automation tool portfolio | Automation tool portfolio | Automation tool portfolio |
| Backups | Backups via SAP Backint agent, snapshots, or backup to cloud storage | Backups via EC2 Create Image function & Amazon EBS snapshots | SAP HANA backup using Azure Backup Highley Available VMs |
| HA/DR | HA via Linux clustering across regions & zones | HA and DR via multiple Availability Zones and Regions | HANA system replication / Azure Site Recovery |
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