{"id":10490,"date":"2019-05-06T11:58:52","date_gmt":"2019-05-06T18:58:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=10490"},"modified":"2023-06-12T16:10:00","modified_gmt":"2023-06-12T23:10:00","slug":"building-an-agile-and-trusted-sap-environment-on-microsoft-azure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/building-an-agile-and-trusted-sap-environment-on-microsoft-azure\/","title":{"rendered":"Building an agile and trusted SAP environment on Microsoft Azure"},"content":{"rendered":"
This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
With features for managing HR, finance, and other services, SAP\u2014our enterprise resource planning software\u2014is integral to business performance and processes at Microsoft. We migrated our SAP environment to Azure\u2014the preferred platform for SAP\u2014and found that we cut costs and gained scalability. Integrating SAP on Azure presents opportunities for digital transformation: optimizing the size of our environment to meet demand and empowering employees to achieve more with increased process efficiency.<\/p>\n
SAP is the backbone of our digital transformation. Like many enterprises, Microsoft uses SAP\u2014the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solution\u2014to run the majority of our business operations. And we\u2019re the only cloud provider that runs SAP on our own platform. At Microsoft, we\u2019re running SAP on Azure\u2014the preferred platform for SAP and the best platform for digital transformation. Azure is tested, proven technology that we trust for our mission-critical systems and by migrating SAP to Azure, we\u2019ve gained business and operational benefits that make our SAP environment agile, efficient, and able to grow and change with our business. Specifically, we have:<\/p>\n
Microsoft now has an SAP instance of 100 percent in the cloud, and it\u2019s more secure than ever. To learn more about our journey to Azure, visit Hello Azure: Unpacking how Microsoft moved its SAP workload to the cloud. Running SAP on Azure also puts us in the position to leverage the breadth of Azure functionality and integrated SAP features as our business grows and changes. Azure makes SAP better.<\/p>\n
SAP is how business gets done at Microsoft. Our SAP environment is critical to our business performance and is integrated into most of our business processes. SAP provides functionality for human resources, finance, supply chain management, commerce, and other enterprise services at Microsoft. We use a wide variety of SAP applications\u2014including ERP\/ECC, E-Recruiting, GRC, GST, CPM, SCM, OER, MDG, and SMG, among others.<\/p>\n
The infrastructure that powers SAP at Microsoft is immense. Our global use of SAP and the infrastructure necessary for that use generate some pretty significant numbers.<\/p>\n
Our SAP environment includes around 600 servers, and for ERP\/ECC, our largest SAP application, the numbers look like this:<\/p>\n
We started our journey with SAP at Microsoft in 1993. Through the almost 25 years of working with SAP and growing our business partnership, we\u2019ve come to depend on SAP for our most important business needs and have developed a two-way relationship with SAP that allows both companies to take advantage of each other\u2019s technology. Our relationship with SAP consists of three important aspects:<\/p>\n
Historically, we\u2019ve run SAP at Microsoft on infrastructure hosted in our datacenters on a combination of physical and virtual hardware. With around 600 servers in the environment, SAP infrastructure maintenance and governance has always been a big job for us. Maintaining a datacenter-based solution for SAP involved big infrastructure, in physical numbers and in raw computing power.<\/p>\n
Running SAP in the datacenter presented us with several day-to-day challenges that we faced:<\/p>\n
Azure is the preferred platform for SAP. As the top SAP certified cloud provider, Azure enables us to reliably run our mission critical SAP environment on a trusted cloud platform built for enterprises. Azure meets our scalability, flexibility, and compliance needs, and we can do more with SAP on Azure because of the expanded partnership between Microsoft and SAP. We can run the most complete set of SAP applications across dev-test and production scenarios in Azure\u2014and be fully supported. Azure is certified for more SAP solutions than any other cloud provider, including solutions like SAP HANA and S\/4 HANA, SAP Business Suite, SAP NetWeaver, and SAP Business One to name a few.<\/p>\n
Azure also carries a large number of benefits when hosting the SAP platform, including:<\/p>\n
For more information, go to\u00a0SAP on Azure at Azure.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n We wanted Azure on SAP to be a complete platform solution with the aspiration of 100 percent of our SAP infrastructure running on Azure. At a high level, there were several goals we wanted to achieve for the SAP on Azure migration. These were platform goals that we wanted SAP on Azure to fulfill to better meet our business needs and fit into these important enterprise scenarios:<\/p>\n Migration to Azure was a big job, but not as big as it could\u2019ve been. Because we were already using server virtualization in our on-premises datacenters, we were able to leverage the virtualized state of our infrastructure into a new virtualized state in Azure with minimal change to the server operating system (OS) and OS level configuration, or overall configuration of SAP applications. We used a \u201clift-and-shift\u201d strategy to take servers from the on-premises environment and re-create them as Azure virtual machines that had roughly the same available resources and configuration.<\/p>\n Our migration, like most Azure migration patterns we\u2019ve experienced in the past, was a phased operation. We took two approaches to system migration, horizontal migration, and vertical migration:<\/p>\n In the figure, the rows, columns, and blocks illustrate the horizontal and vertical strategies that we use for our SAP landscape. Here are some things to note:<\/p>\n Adoption of SAP for Azure began before a single server was migrated. There\u2019s an important set of steps that we follow with all our Azure migrations at Microsoft, and this is how they applied to SAP:<\/p>\n Optimizing SAP on Azure involves calculating our hardware requirements like CPU resources, storage space, memory, I\/O, and network bandwidth. When optimized, we sized to match ongoing demand. We optimized our infrastructure, resources, and costs, and then sized the virtual machines to meet the current resource demand. As demand increases and decreases, so do the virtual machines. We\u2019re working to fully automate this process within SAP on Azure to allow full-platform auto-scaling as conditions change.<\/p>\n Optimization plays a huge part in gaining business and cost efficiencies with SAP on Azure. Because our systems can scale up and out to meet demand in a rapid fashion, we no longer experience underutilized resources in our high-performance systems. Likewise, when demand is low, our systems scale down to minimize resource usage and save costs.<\/p>\n To learn more about how we optimized SAP on Azure, see\u00a0Optimizing SAP for Azure<\/a>.<\/p>\n As of February 2018, 100 percent of our SAP applications run on Azure at Microsoft. Our SAP migration is complete and our ongoing optimization efforts are continually decreasing our operating costs and increasing efficiency and reliability for our SAP ecosystem. Figure 3, below, summarizes our SAP usage.<\/p>\n With virtual machine SKUs big enough to handle a Microsoft-sized SAP ERP system, Azure hosts the largest-scale virtual machines in cloud computing. With the flexibility and scalability of the Azure infrastructure in mind, the Azure team developed the M-Series specifically to address the enterprise market demand for larger virtual machines capable of running SAP landscapes at companies just like Microsoft. With Azure M64s and M128s SKUs in hand, we were able to migrate our largest and most complex SAP systems to Azure over a weekend.<\/p>\n We\u2019re also using SAP SaaS solutions integrated with our SAP on Azure deployment. We\u2019re using the following SaaS modules alongside SAP on Azure:<\/p>\n There are many benefits of SAP on Azure. Some of the more tangible benefits we\u2019ve experienced from migrating and optimizing SAP for Azure include:<\/p>\n Along with tangible benefits, we\u2019ve also learned a few things along the way that could help you if you\u2019re considering SAP on Azure for your company:<\/p>\n We\u2019re continuing to grow SAP on Azure in many ways. Along with ongoing optimization efforts, we\u2019re beginning to leverage other Azure IaaS and PaaS functionality to create an even more agile, stable, and cost-effective platform for SAP on Azure. We\u2019re building automation and reusability into the platform to enable more efficient deployment and snoozing.<\/p>\n Azure provides so many opportunities to make SAP even better. We\u2019re also working using Azure Machine Learning to create intelligent behavior within the platform like invoice error prediction and resolution. We\u2019re examining Azure Data Lake for opportunities to handle our SAP data more efficiently and gain greater insight into what our SAP data can tell us. There\u2019s a lot coming for SAP on Azure, and we\u2019re excited to take advantage of all of it. To stay informed with updates on the Microsoft SAP on Azure solution, go to\u00a0Azure.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n By running SAP on Azure, we’re future-proofing our SAP footprint, and this enables additional options for us like running S\/4 HANA. Azure provides the largest scale cloud infrastructure anywhere, and its built for SAP HANA. We\u2019re also continuing to incorporate SAP SaaS solutions into our Azure based platform, creating SAP and Azure cloud secure interfaces and other next-generation SAP solutions.<\/p>\n We\u2019re working on moving our production SAP systems to Azure Availability Zones for improved resiliency. Azure offers an easy and quick way for you to migrate your VMs to Azure Availability Zones with no additional cost.<\/p>\n We\u2019re running SAP on the preferred platform for SAP: Microsoft Azure. With SAP on Azure, our technology platform can adapt to our business needs and grow as our business changes. We\u2019re more business efficient, more cost efficient, and better on Azure, and you can be too.<\/p>\n Lift and shift your SAP apps to Azure. You’ll immediately get speed, scale, and cost benefits of the cloud. Start your company’s journey to SAP on Azure by\u00a0signing up for your free Azure trial today<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft. With features for managing HR, finance, and other services, SAP\u2014our enterprise resource planning software\u2014is integral to business performance and processes at Microsoft. We migrated our SAP environment to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":10491,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_hide_featured_on_single":false,"_show_featured_caption_on_single":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[674],"class_list":["post-10490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","m-blog-post"],"yoast_head":"\nGoals and drivers<\/h3>\n
\n
Migration<\/h3>\n
Assessing migration strategies<\/h4>\n
\n
\n
Adoption<\/h3>\n
\n
Optimizing SAP on Azure<\/h4>\n
Running SAP on Azure<\/h3>\n
SAP SaaS solution integrations<\/h3>\n
\n
Benefits<\/h2>\n
\n
Lessons learned<\/h2>\n
\n
Moving forward<\/h2>\n