4.2 Cloud Providers
In this section, we’ll cover some of the cloud provider offerings for SAP BW/4HANA. Certified IaaS details can be found on the SAP HANA certification website at http://global.sap.com/community/ebook/2014-09-02-hana-hardware/enEN/iaas.html.
Some additional options are available from cloud providers that are certified as TDI solutions.
4.2.1 SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud offers a platform as a service (PaaS) option. SAP can provide services up to the SAP Basis layer, allowing companies to just make use of the application. More details on SAP HANA enterprise cloud can be found at https://www.sap.com/product/technology-platform/hana-enterprise-cloud.html#.
We recommend contacting your SAP account executive to discuss the details of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. The following are some aspects to keep in mind when considering SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud to serve as your cloud provider for SAP BW/4HANA:
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Deployment
SAP provides systems through IaaS providers such as HP, IBM, and Virtustream. It can take a few days to get a system deployed, depending on the provider. -
Licensing
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud uses bring your own license (BYOL) for SAP ABAP-based systems. -
Supported SAP HANA scenarios
SAP supports most SAP software, including SAP BW/4HANA, for deployment via SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. For specific scenarios, discuss your options with SAP. -
Pricing and sizing
SAP doesn’t have a public price list for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. -
Regions available
SAP HANA Enterprise clouds is available where SAPs providers operate; there is no official list of available areas.
4.2.2 Amazon Web Services
AWS provides a set of standard certified options for deploying SAP BW/4HANA on an IaaS platform. AWS worked closely with SAP to launch SAP BW/4HANA and had some of the first deployments running live when SAP BW/4HANA was announced in September 2016. Deploying SAP BW/4HANA on AWS generally takes less than a couple of hours to get a system provisioned, and then you can start development.
An overview of the SAP BW/4HANA options on AWS can be found at https://aws.amazon.com/sap/solutions/bw4hana/. We will cover the main details in this section.
SAP HANA on AWS can be deployed on either the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) or the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system. Certain SAP HANA scenarios are supported on a multinode cluster, providing up to 4 TB of total memory; see SAP Note 1964437 for additional details. The following are some aspects to keep in mind when considering AWS to serve as your cloud provider for SAP BW/4HANA:
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Deployment
AWS Quick Start reference deployment for SAP HANA provides an automated process for deploying SAP HANA on AWS. This Quick Start option allows you to deploy single-node and multinode SAP HANA systems on AWS in less than one hour. The quick start reference can be found at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/quickstart/latest/sap-hana/welcome.html. -
Licensing
SAP BW/4HANA on AWS uses a BYOL model for the SAP HANA license and SAP BW/4HANA license.
SLES and RHEL operating system licenses are provided by AWS, and their relevant license fees are combined with the base hourly fee of the corresponding Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance type. -
Supported SAP HANA scenarios
The SAP HANA scenarios listed in Table 4.1 are supported by SAP for production on AWS.Supported Scenarios on AWS SAP BW/4HANA SAP Business Warehouse and SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (SAP BPC) on SAP HANA Native SAP HANA applications Data marts and analytics SAP S/4HANA SAP Business Suite (SAP ERP, SAP CRM, etc.) powered by SAP HANA SAP HANA Live/sidecar SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA Table 4.1 Supported SAP HANA Scenarios on AWS
For additional information about supported SAP HANA scenarios, including SAP BW/4HANA, see SAP Note 1964437. -
Pricing and sizing
Scale-out/OLAP workloads like SAP BW/4HANA, data marts, analytics, SAP BW, and SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (SAP BPC) are supported on multinode/scale-out configurations providing up to 14 TB of memory when using the x1.32xlarge instance type. AWS provides two options for deploying SAP BW/4HANA: co-deployment of SAP HANA and the SAP BW/4HANA application, and a distributed deployment in which the SAP BW/4HANA application runs on separate VMs. The co-deployed option is the most efficient, because the network traffic is always internal to the VM between the application and the SAP HANA database.
When the size of SAP HANA requires all the resources on the VM, we recommend distributing the SAP BW/4HANA application to a separate VM.
Table 4.2 and Table 4.3 provide estimates of sample SAP BW/4HANA configurations on AWS. To estimate the pricing for a multinode/scale-out SAP BW/4HANA cluster, multiply the cost of a single SAP BW/4HANA node configuration by the number of nodes required. For additional information about estimating AWS infrastructure pricing for SAP solutions, see the SAP on AWS Pricing Guide at https://d0.awsstatic.com/enterprise-marketing/SAP/sap-on-aws-pricing-guide.pdf.
Amazon EC2 offers both on-demand instances and reserved instances. We normally recommend using reserved instances unless for a temporary system, because the discounts are substantial. -
Regions available
SAP HANA Infrastructure Services on AWS is currently available in all AWS regions except for Beijing.
| EC2 Instance Type | vCPU | Memory (GB) | Supported for Production |
|---|---|---|---|
| r3.2xlarge | 8 | 61 | No |
| r3.4xlarge | 16 | 122 | No |
| r3.8xlarge | 32 | 244 | Yes |
| r4.16xlarge | 64 | 488 | Coming soon |
| x1.16xlarge | 64 | 976 | Yes |
| x1.32xlarge | 128 | 1,952 | Yes |
Table 4.2 AWS Size Options for SAP BW/4HANA and SAP HANA Co-deployed
| SAP HANA System | SAP NetWeaver AS System | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EC2 Instance Type | vCPU | Memory (GB) | Supported for production | EC2 Instance Type | vCPU | Memory (GB) |
| r3.4xlarge | 16 | 122 | No | r4.large | 2 | 15.25 |
| r3.8xlarge | 32 | 244 | Yes | r4.xlarge | 4 | 30.50 |
| r4.16xlarge | 64 | 488 | Coming soon | r4.2xlarge | 8 | 61.00 |
| r1.16xlarge | 64 | 976 | Yes | r4.2xlarge | 8 | 61.00 |
| x1.32xlarge | 128 | 1952 | Yes | r4.2xlarge | 8 | 61.00 |
Table 4.3 1 Amazon EC2 Instance for the SAP HANA DB and 1 Amazon EC2 Instance for the SAP NetWeaver AS
4.2.3 Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure provides SAP HANA systems in different sizes, like AWS; Azure has a set of standard certified sizes and deployment options available, ranging from smaller systems to larger systems.
More details about the Microsoft Azure SAP HANA option and architecture is available on Microsoft’s website at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/workloads/sap/hana-overview-architecture.
The following are some aspects to keep in mind when considering Microsoft Azure to serve as your cloud provider for SAP BW/4HANA:
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Deployment
Microsoft Azure’s deployment can be handled on standard provided VMs or in its large instance stamp infrastructure. SAP HANA on standard GS5 VMs is limited in size to 448 GB for production use; smaller sizes are available for nonproduction use. SAP Note 1928533 (SAP Applications on Azure: Supported Products and Azure VM Types) describes the details of SAP deployments on Azure, including SAP HANA VMs.
The large instance option includes sizes up to 2 TB for SAP BW/4HANA and can be configured as scale-out. SAP Note 2316233 (SAP HANA on Microsoft Azure [Large Instances]) describes the large instances on Azure. Note that the large instances don’t run on VMs but instead are installed on bare metal; hence, a failure or shutdown of the system won’t automatically fail over to another server.
The architecture of the large instances is depicted in Figure 4.1. The large instances run on certified hardware within Azure and on bare metal.
Figure 4.1 Azure Large SAP HANA Instance Architecture
Microsoft has a specific SLA for large instances, with 99.999 percent uptime. With 99.99 percent uptime, a 10 percent service credit is provided; with 99.9 percent uptime, a 25 percent credit is provided. The details are available on the Azure website at https://azure.microsoft.com/support/legal/sla/sap-hana-large/v1_0/. -
Licensing
Azure provides IaaS; hence, it’s required that licenses are purchased for the SAP HANA database and SAP BW/4HANA from SAP. -
Supported SAP HANA scenarios
Azure supports most SAP software on their platforms, including SAP BW/4HANA, in both scale-up and scale-out approaches. -
Pricing and sizing
Azure pricing is competitive with AWS, and pricing can be negotiated for large instances. -
Regions available
SAP HANA is available in all Azure regions with large instance stamp infrastructure.
4.2.4 Other Providers
The list of other providers is long. Some of the big ones are IBM, Huawei, Virtustream, and HP, and as of April 2017 Google has been certified to run SAP HANA via Google Cloud. Most providers offer services, sizing, and pricing similar to those noted previously and provide certification via the SAP TDI certification. In addition, some providers have been certified for standard size deployments, which allows for easy sizing and deployment without additional TDI certification work. These providers can be found in the certified SAP HANA listing on SAP’s website (see Table 4.4).
| Vendor | Instance Type | RAM | Clustering | Scenarios/Limitations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | cr1.8xlarge | 244 GB | No | OLAP/OLTP |
| Amazon Web Services | m4.10xlarge | 160 GB | No | Sap Business One, SLES 11 SP 4 |
| Amazon Web Services | m4.16xlarge | 256 GB | No | SAP Business One, SLES 11 SP 4 |
| Amazon Web Services | r3.8xlarge | 244 GB | Yes | OLAP/OLTP |
| Amazon Web Services | r4.16xlarge | 488 GB | No | OLAP/OLTP, SLES 12 SP 1 |
| Amazon Web Services | x1.16xlarge | 976 GB | Yes | OLAP/OLTP, RHEL 6.7, RHEL 7.2, SLES 12 SP 1 |
| Amazon Web Services | x1.16xlarge | 976 GB | No | SAP Business One, SLES 11 SP 4 |
| Amazon Web Services | x1.32xlarge | 1952 GB | Yes | OLAP/OLTP, RHEL 6.7, RHEL 7.2, SLES 12 SP 1 |
| Google Cloud Platform | n1-highmem-32 | 208 GB | No | OLAP, SLES 12 SP 1 |
| Huawei Technologies Co. | h2.2xlarge | 512 GB | No | OLAP, SLES 11 SP 3 |
| Huawei Technologies Co. | h3.xlarge | 480 GB | Yes | OLAP, SLES 11 SP 3 |
| IBM Bluemix | BI.S1.H1000 | 1 TB | No | OLAP/OLTP, RHEL 6.7 |
| IBM Bluemix | BI.S1.H2000 | 2 TB | No | OLTP, RHEL 6.7 |
| IBM Bluemix | BI.S1.H512 | 512 GB | No | OLAP/OLTP, RHEL 6.7 |
| Microsoft Azure | GS5 | 448 GB | No | OLAP |
Table 4.4 Certified IaaS Platforms as of May 2017
The certification list changes frequently, so always check if your provider is certified and ask for details about the certification process (TDI or certified hardware).