Over the last few months, innovation releases have thankfully had natural immunity to challenging world affairs, which has allowed us to keep our customer promise of year-on-year price reductions and operational improvements.
Here are a few highlights of the more recent innovations that have helped us:
AWS
- Amazon has consistently released new SAP-specific functionality over the last few months. The most notable, and one Lemongrass was involved in beta testing, is the AWS Migration Hub Orchestrator. This new wizard-driven workflow tool is the first “end-to-end” tool we’ve seen from AWS. The wizard can build the entire source system shells (NetWeaver and SAP S/4HANA at the time of release, but more are expected), perform the SAP migration leveraging replication agents and/or SAP S/4HANA Replication and execute system testing. The system is also “file system aware” so it will also move transport files and global and local volumes over. Best of all, it’s free to use & open for orchestration for any migration and build templates.
- This next new functionality was introduced about a month ago. EC2 instances are now created with automatic recovery activated. A few months ago, you may recall learning that AWS now commits to zonal SLAs for single EC2 instances. Now, combined with this update, single EC2 instances & zone-specific systems now carry a decent SLA & recovery metric.
- Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP has now been SAP-certified for scale-up SAP S/4HANA workloads on r6i, x2idn, x2iedn, and High Memory Instances. This includes some new feature-rich capabilities, like application-consistent snapshots and SnapMirror replication and provides us with a new architecture pattern for SAP S/4HANA-based solutions. If you are of a certain “vintage” in the SAP world, you’ll know this solution worked very effectively in the BC (Before Cloud) era.
- One of the big headlines for us was the launch & SAP certification of the new X2 family of EC2 instances (Family names X2idn and X2iedn). These VMs finally plug the chasm in the EC2 HANA certified world that existed between 2TB and 4TB HANA VMs driving a lot of SAP on AWS customers to operate on rather loose-fitting appliances that are a couple of TBs too large. These new Intel IceLake generation systems deliver 50% compute to price performance vs. the existing X1’s. X2idn has a 16:1 Ration of memory to CPU, X2iedn’s 32:1. My tip for this week is to go check where you can use these to price optimize customers on X1s– especially for the new 3TB 24xlarge systems.
- AWS also launched the Billing Conductor. This is a significant new release enabling the ability to add custom billing groups, i.e., you can slice your assets into logical billing groups or carve out an account or assets for a vendor to manage. The Billing Conductor also adds the ability to add custom pricing rules and even add custom line items into the Cost & Usage Report (CUR) and event to change the billing template. This happens inside AWS’s Biller Central so there is no need to export, analyze or three-way invoice match. Pricing data no longer has to leave the AWS management console to be manipulated.
- Over the last 9 months, I can’t think of a single RFP I’ve been involved with that didn’t carry a heavily scored section on Carbon Reduction as organizations pass their corporate environmental KPI targets down to prospective vendors. To help quantify the carbon offset that customers can achieve by leveraging Cloud platforms, AWS has launched a Carbon Footprint tool. Integrated with the Billing Console it shows the carbon offset stats with monthly, quarterly and annual granularity. This is a useful update that can be included in both sales cycles and QBRs to help customers demonstrate how they are meeting corporate responsibility commitments.
- System copies and refreshing data images to non-prod systems are a common event in the world of Basis operations. AWS recently released this guide which details how to automate HANA DB restores using 100% AWS standard services orchestrated by Amazon’s own System Manager and leveraging a simple CloudWatch event that can be triggered by a non-technical landscape manager.
AZURE
- The start of every Cloud journey starts with a Landing Zone to launch from. It’s imperative that landscapes are built on solid foundations of Security, Cloud Architecture, Tooling and Monitoring, any flaws will quickly result in cracked walls in the application built on top. Azure have now released the SAP on Azure Landing Zone Accelerator – a modular best practice design importantly including the Azure Control Plane for Automation management and execution.
- With SAP Sapphire concluding this week, Lemongrass has been involved in supporting Azure on some new SAP on Azure release update blogs. If you need some weekend reading material, this is a great article covering many of the new releases from Azure such as the new v2 of Monitor for SAP, Sentinel for SAP Security (works on GCP and AWS workloads too), the new BLOB storage connector for SAP ILM and the Landing Zone Accelerator we’ve leveraged in some of our recent Azure engagements.
