Hey there, thanks for coming in!
My name is Bradley Knapp, and I'm one of the Product Managers here at IBM Cloud,
and what we wanted to talk about today
is how to pick your cloud provider to run your SAP workloads.
So, we're going to assume that you've already made the decision
that you're going to move your SAP ERP system into the cloud,
and you've now come to the point that you're going to pick that cloud provider.
What kind of criteria are you going to use?
How do you compare the providers against one another?
What are the most important things that you need to consider?
And so, as we get started with this discussion,
there's really kind of 5 key criteria that you need to evaluate,
and you've got to go beyond just the marketing level, right?
You've actually got to get deep into the technology,
because SAP is your most important business-critical workload,
and you have to trust the technology implicitly -
that it will never go down and you'll never have a problem.
So, if we think about this holistically,
the first place that we need to look,
and I'm going to put this on the side, is compute, right?
Because SAP, particularly S/4HANA,
is an incredibly compute-intensive application and database.
There are lots of very high-performance requirements for SAP.
And so, when you're evaluating those compute characteristics,
you can't just do a sizing.
You can't just say, "Oh well, I need 4 terabytes and that's going to be enough".
You need to go one step further
because, when you evaluate a cloud provider,
you've got to evaluate not just the size,
but the characteristic of the workload as well.
You have to figure out, "All right, do I have enough compute capacity?"
"Do I have the ability to run this highly available?"
"Are the latency promises that that provider is making, do they line up to reality?"
And, unfortunately, the only way to find this out is to actually test it.
You need to actually go out, order some small servers,
and make sure that they're doing what they say they do.
And so, from the compute piece, we've then got to evaluate the storage piece.
Because, just like your compute has to be incredibly high-performance
in order to run that SAP workload, so must your storage.
And not only does it have to be high performance, it needs to fit into your budget.
Because any cloud provider can deliver
as much performance as you can ever want from a storage perspective,
but there's always a cost that comes along with that.
So, you have to evaluate that storage
and be sure that it is delivering what you need
at the price point that you need it to.
And then down here, and this is the piece that ties the whole thing together,
this is your network, right?
Because compute by itself is useless,
storage by itself is useless,
the network is what ties it all together.
And just like I was talking about with the compute piece before,
if you're going to run highly available, if you're going to run disaster recovery,
you need to look at the network.
You need to be sure that the network has sufficient performance
to be able to deliver what you need but, again, at the price point that you need it to be able to hit.
And so, that's what really brings us outside of kind of the 3 core pieces of cloud
into the other pieces that are so important for SAP.
That first one, and I m going to put it over here,
I m going to call this D.T. for "Data Transit".
Because not only does your network matter
from moving things around and making sure that you've got low latency and high performance,
but when it comes to cost, moving data comes at a cost.
You always have to evaluate: what is that data transit cost going to be?
How am I going to connect my on-premises applications with my applications in the cloud?
Because SAP doesn't exist in a vacuum.
It's just not something that's a workload like that.
You have to connect it back in to your on-premises facility
- if for no other reason than so all of your users can run ad hoc queries against the data that you're storing there.
And then, finally, that last piece that you need to evaluate.
I'm going to put that one right here, and I m going to call this A.S
AS is "ancillary services" and while we call it ancillary,
ancillary services are incredibly important for this SAP world, right?
This isn't just side things, right - it's logging, it's monitoring, it's backup,
it's all of the things that you need in order to have that successful SAP operational landscape.
Some tools come from SAP themselves, some tools come from third-party providers,
and you have to evaluate what really matters.
What do you need versus what do you want, and what fits within your budget?
So, all of these pieces, they all fit together as part of that evaluation criteria.
And then the other thing that I'd really encourage you to do is, again,
you have to get beyond just the marketing speak.
You can't look at just speeds and feeds on a marketing page,
you have to actually get out and try this. You have to run proofs of concept.
I've talked with a number of customers that have gone out and they've made a cloud selection
based on a corporate strategy,
and then figured out that cloud actually doesn't offer the performance that they needed it to offer.
Or the costs involved in running were so much higher than what they initially thought they were going to be,
they exceeded their budget for the year for the program in 3 or 4 months.
And so, you have to build this plan very realistically.
You have to think, All right, how do I tie all these pieces together?
How do I keep within that budget,
and how do I keep from being snowed by the marketing speak?
You have to go beyond that marketing and into the depth.
You can't just evaluate compute based on sizing.
You can't evaluate storage just based on sizing.
Performance is key, uptime is key, reliability is key.
Every one of these components is so important in running that SAP landscape.
You can't ignore them and, if you do, you're really just setting yourself up for failure.
Thank you so much for stopping by the channel today!
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