SAP Modernization and the Modern Mission-Critical Data Center

White Paper 2 Executive Summary The major business drivers in this changing modern IT landscape are an increase in critical business applications, Enterprises recognize the need to modernize their customer and partner demand for “anytime-anywhere” data mission-critical data centers to gain greater agility for more access, and deeper insight into industry trends to capitalize interdependent real time applications and address the on new opportunities quickly. proliferation of anytime/anywhere mobile data access. To do so, they must find a way to move their current applications Increase in Critical Applications from dedicated, siloed or legacy servers. Most consider A vast majority of workers, customers, and supply-chain migrating to a common, shared-resource virtualization partners rely on 24X7 access to business applications to environment. However, standard virtualization does not drive sales and profits. As a result, more critical applications provide the predictable performance, security, or reliability and tighter application integration is not just an advantage they must maintain for 24X7 SAP operations. Forward! any longer—it’s a requirement. This means companies by Unisys™ is the best of both worlds—the deterministic must adopt more agile, flexible, and responsive computing performance, security, and reliability of dedicated servers, platforms. SAP is at the forefront in integrating these with the agility, cost-savings, and flexibility to address increasingly inter-dependent critical applications, such as modern mission-critical applications. ERP, CRM, Procurement, Supply Chain Management, and much more. It is up to the businesses, however, to find the Importance of Modernizing the SAP most appropriate, reliable, and cost-effective deployment for Data Center these applications. SAP is a mainstay in enterprise data centers, and for Anytime, Anywhere Access good reason. SAP, and its related applications, empowers businesses to unify and streamline their entire operation. Its A seamless and compelling customer experience across impressive range of applications—from extensive accounting all new digital channels and devices is now expected by and financial tools all the way to workforce management customers and partners. Over 1.7 billion people have software—give companies the tools they need to succeed, internet access. Seventy-nine percent of workers in Western i regardless of their market. With more than 250,000 IT nations depend on the Internet to get their jobs done. customers in 188 countries, 24% market share, and the Nearly 60 percent of all Internet traffic is from mobile ii #1 ERP platform, SAP knows business. And business is devices . Meanwhile, one third of smartphone owners rapidly changing. To remain competitive and leverage the in the U.S. use their devices as their primary access to iii most value from their SAP investments, enterprises must the Internet . Beyond mobile and Internet saturation, modernize their SAP data centers for greater efficiency, the global nature of business—where just-in-time supply agility, and reliability. The first step is reassessing exactly chains stretch from China, to Europe, and the US—means what qualifies as a mission-critical business application in that business computing never stops. Ever. SAP mobile the modern landscape of global computing. software gives businesses powerful tools for addressing an increasingly wireless-centric global market; but innovative, “Mission- critical” and “mission-critical-applications” are customer-facing application development is essential to phrases that are synonymous with SAP. It’s strength is its leveraging its benefits. How and where real-time enterprise ability to deliver and tie previously disparate IT applications applications are deployed must be carefully considered by and functions into single workflows, and to do so quickly, any enterprise that relies on global transactions, partners, efficiently, and reliably. But the computing landscape is and customers—regardless of the devices they rely on for changing, and much of that change is, in fact, being driven access. by innovative uses of SAP and its related applications.

i A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: The National Security Strategy ii 60 percent of Internet traffic comes from mobile. Small Business Trends. July, 2014. http://smallbiztrends.com/2014/07/online-traffic-report-mobile.html iii How the internet has woven itself into American life. Forbes, February 2014. http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/27/part-1-how-the-internet-has-woven-itself-into-american-life/

3 Business Insight may not have the flexibility or agility to address the demands Insight drives innovation. SAP and SAP HANA are proven, of a modern mission critical environment. Dedicated or powerful platforms for data analytics and transaction legacy servers are also expensive to deploy and maintain. processing. Finance, manufacturing, consumer products and However, enterprises are increasingly testing the waters many other industries depend on real-time or near real-time of moving at least some SAP functions and processes to enterprise business intelligence to make decisions that common virtualization infrastructures. The dual pressures immediately affect the bottom line and customer experience. of cost-savings through server consolidation and a more Whether companies are currently using SAP HANA, or just agile infrastructure for application development are the need better tools for greater business insight on their main drivers toward moving SAP onto virtual machines. current SAP platform, modernizing their SAP environment While leveraging a more flexible environment, there is a gives them the flexibility to gain greater business insight cost—virtualized SAP often does not easily deliver the now, and the agility to prepare for greater innovations in the performance, reliability, or security of SAP on dedicated or future. legacy servers without considerable virtualization expertise and resources. In addition, enterprises are experiencing the The Future of SAP Environments growing challenge of managing disparate virtual and physical An increase in critical applications, reliance on resources because of the added complexity of organizations anytime-anywhere computing, and the need for better protecting and recovering mission critical applications and business insight are all driving SAP customers toward a data. reassessment of how they host, manage, and prepare for There are drawbacks and advantages in both dedicated and the future of their SAP environment. As competition and common hypervisor virtualization of SAP applications. Here customer demand puts increasing pressure on enterprises are the challenges that many SAP IT organizations face when to modernize, SAP enterprises must address the following: addressing modern mission-critical applications using either • Use Big Data and SAP HANA for more responsive business of these infrastructures. processing and greater market insight in real time SAP on Dedicated Servers and Storage • Deploy applications that can more easily scale both up There are a number of distinct advantages of hosting and out to accommodate demand mission-critical SAP applications on dedicated servers and • Deliver more device and application support for an storage. First, in all likelihood, the majority of an enterprise’s increasingly diverse marketplace SAP platform may already be deployed in a dedicated or • Contain costs and increase efficiency even as they legacy environment. The organization has the resources improve the customer experience and expertise to continue to reliably and securely run its Change is already well underway. But how are current SAP business in a dedicated SAP data center. Other advantages customers dealing with these new, modern mission-critical include: demands while reducing complexity? • Deterministic Performance: In a dedicated environment, The Current State of SAP Data Centers SAP administrators have complete control over the server, applications, and storage components for SAP; they can Many SAP deployments remain on dedicated, “right size” each application server appropriately. The high-performance servers. A “single box” application result is predictable, reliable performance. platform is stable, reliable, and businesses are reluctant to fix anything that is not “broken.” In particular, SAP finance, • Security: Isolating and securing individual servers is far asset management, and human resource applications less risky than in common virtual environments that rely perform predictably and securely on dedicated or legacy on a hypervisor that controls numerous virtual servers. servers. The downside is that dedicated or legacy servers

4 • Reliability: Dedicated servers and storage allow SAP • Become SAP HANA-ready: Whether SAP HANA is on a administrators a wide range of disaster recovery, high corporation’s immediate roadmap or not, it is clear that availability, and failover options. Each server’s reliability many dedicated or legacy server environments will not is individually customized and prioritized according to fully support the innovations that SAP HANA will provide. business needs and functions. For these and the following reasons, many corporations are • Compliance: Because applications each reside on their contemplating moving at least some portions of their SAP own servers, audit trails and security logs remain in investments to common virtualized environments. an easily identified and specified location, making log SAP on Common Virtualization Platforms collection, consolidation, and compliance reporting easier to achieve. Cost-savings, greater agility, and pressures to consolidate both physical and human resources are driving many Disadvantages of Dedicated SAP Server Environments corporations to move at least some of their existing SAP Despite its many advantages, SAP administrators and applications to a virtual environment. SAP on common CIOs find that dedicated SAP resources have distinct virtualization platforms can provide the following: disadvantages in a modern mission-critical environment. The major drawback is cost: dedicated servers must often be • Data center consolidation over-provisioned to achieve predictable performance. This • Efficient platform for development, testing, and deploying leaves expensive resources idle in many cases. Secondly, new applications maintenance costs of dedicated application servers are • Low-cost benefits of an X86 architecture escalating, as is the expense of heating/cooling, space, and • More agile platform for future technologies and devices energy consumption. There are other, even more compelling All of these common virtualization benefits come with business-case scenarios in which dedicated SAP servers penalties, however. Despite the lure of lower costs, greater should be reconsidered, including: agility, and a more flexible and extensible architecture, • Need for Greater Agility: Moving SAP applications to an common virtualization of SAP has distinct drawbacks for environment that supports the latest tools, applications mission-critical applications. and scalability improves a business’ agility in addressing new opportunities and markets more quickly. Disadvantages in Virtualizing Mission-Critical SAP First and foremost, businesses sacrifice the predictable • Require More Flexibility: As demands grow—or application performance they have traditionally enjoyed using contract—enterprises must respond quickly to keep dedicated servers. Because applications are spread out budgets in check yet deliver the best possible customer among a number of virtual machines (VMs) under the control experience. of one hypervisor, there may be contention of resources that • Eliminate Over-Provisioning: To make certain SAP disrupt neighboring VMs running critical applications. applications are running at peak performance, most SAP administrators must size their dedicated servers with These same resource constraints can spillover into I/O ample room to grow—and more resources than may be intensive tasks such as storage. Even if applications and needed. As a result, most SAP dedicated servers have their memory and CPU are adequately provisioned for their 20-30% more resources than are ever utilized. SAP applications, storage intensive tasks can quickly drop performance for all applications residing under a common • Reduce Obsolescence: As dedicated or legacy servers hypervisor. This is a common occurrence in I/O intensive and appliances, such as SAP Business Warehouse SAP applications under standard virtualization, and expertise Accelerator (BWA), come to their end-of-life, enterprises in load balancing, storage configuration, or in some must decide if “staying the course” will put them at a cases, custom SAN/DAS storage configurations must be competitive and financial disadvantage. designed, tested, and deployed to guarantee peak storage performance.

5 As a result, CPU, memory, and storage contention issues Is There a Better Way? Safely Modernizing can dramatically affect SAP application performance and SAP with Forward! by Unisys reduce the likelihood of meeting corporate SLAs—and customer satisfaction. There are other time and Forward! is a fabric based platform that combines all the resource-intensive modifications mission-critical SAP must benefits of mission-critical applications on dedicated servers make in virtual environments as well, such as security. with the economy and flexibility of virtualization. Using Forward! data centers confidently consolidate multiple, Under common virtualization, all SAP applications running dedicated SAP applications into secured compute and in separate virtual machine partitions share a common storage partitions. hypervisor. For many corporations, this is a security risk that must be mitigated. Special care in configuring software Forward! by Unisys Secure Partitioning (s-Par®) divides firewalls and operating system hardening must be applied to a server into a number of secure partitions on standard make certain that any vulnerability or breach introduced in x86 servers, each separated from the others, and each one VM is not propagated across all others. There is some with its own dedicated resources, unlike common, level of isolation and security in common hypervisors, but not shared-resource hypervisors. Each Forward! SAP workload is to the level that mission-critical computing typically requires. allocated dedicated CPU, memory, I/O, and storage. Using Therefore, the implementation of high level of security that Forward! which has a high-speed InfiniBand interconnect SAP-based applications require in a virtualized environment with dedicated, fault tolerant storage delivers predictable, falls squarely on the shoulders of the enterprise. high-performance that mission-critical SAP applications require. Applications get the same or better performance Lastly, many SAP applications run mission-critical they currently have on dedicated servers, but without the applications that are required by industry or government costly overhead. regulation to periodically document and report on their compliance with rules, regulations, and mandates. In a Forward! Performance shared resources environment of common virtualization, Forward! s-Par partitioning on x86 servers allows audit trails, security logs, and other important configurable, dedicated resources to SAP applications and application-dependent compliance data may be spread services requiring predictable performance. As a result, among many shared storage devices. This makes Forward! out-performs an industry standard hypervisor in consolidation of compliance data for comprehensive I/O scaling by a significant margin. In independent tests reporting more difficult. performed by ESG Labsiv, Forward! delivered 62% greater I/O performance over common virtualization (see Figure 1.), and With these many drawbacks to common virtualization and “s-Par performance scaled in a near-linear fashion compared dedicated servers, enterprises have had to make tough with the industry-standard hypervisor, especially at high choices—and sacrifices—regardless of which architecture levels of concurrent activity.” they choose for SAP. These compromises have driven Unisys to develop a more flexible, agile yet secure and high-performance alternative: Forward! by Unisys.

iv ESG Lab Validation: Forward! by Unisys with NetApp Storage. Study sponsored by Unisys 2014. http://outreach.unisys.com/Forward_ESGStudy

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1.0 IO Response Time(ms) 0.5

0.0 0 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 50,000 60,000 I/O’s per second (IOPS) Forward! by Unisys s-Par Industry Standard Hypervisor

Figure 1. Forward! IO performance over common virtualization. (Courtesy of ESG Labs)

SAP-Validated Low Overhead Using Forward! Inter-Partition Security and Performance This performance and scalability is possible because Security and performance are not just restricted to CPU Forward! s-Par partitions allow IT staff to allocate dedicated cycles. With Forward! s-Par partitions, customers gain storage, memory, CPU, and bandwidth with no CPU a whole new layer of security without the purchase, restrictions and very low overhead. For example, in internal configuration, and constant management of third-party tests performed by SAP, Forward! showed a very low security products, firewalls, and intrusion detection and overhead when compared to a dedicated physical server. prevention devices and software. As a part of its standard The following is a summary of the results: deployment, customers choose between three levels of OS hardening within secure s-Par partitions, eliminating the need • CPU overhead 3-4% to install operating systems and then manually apply the • Memory overhead 3-4% patches and updates and security configurations that other • Network overhead 3% dedicated or virtual SAP environments demand. In contrast, industry standard virtualization showed a In addition, using the secure, high-speed fabric of 10-30% overheadv. This means that SAP applications can InfiniBand, SAP applications on Forward! can actually run with nearly the same deterministic CPU performance improve performance of inter-dependent SAP applications. as on dedicated servers but on a cost-effective x86 For example, when a Forward! based SAP application must platform. Internal testing at Unisys has verified that server connect with another back-end SAP resource, such as a consolidation can be as high as 6 to 1 over dedicated central SAP database, switch-isolated InfiniBand transfers SAP servers—saving the capital expenses of dedicated move data at up to 54GB. The InfinBand fabric can be servers, space, heating and cooling, and individual server allocated to dedicated storage with QoS, ensuring that maintenance. critical applications are never “I/O starved,” and data is delivered to the dependent SAP applications at predictable or superior performance than dedicated SAP servers. The secure interconnect and fabric utilizing InfiniBand also has a direct impact on system reliability.

v 1945415 - SAP on Forward! by Unisys Platform and s-Par (R) partitions

7 Reliability event that an SAP s-Par secured application fails, or in the With Forward! by Unisys, companies can now host event of a planned or unplanned outage, failover to the enterprise-class SAP business applications without choosing mirrored SAP application is nearly instantaneous (see Figure between performance and reliability. Using Forward!’s secure 2.). This also allows SAP administrators to more easily partitions, SAP architects can safely mirror critical SAP reconfigure and reallocate resources for critical workloads applications and their associated storage. In the unlikely with little or no downtime or disruption to business-critical SAP operations.

User Community

App App App App App App App App

OS OS OS OS OS OS OS OS

s-Par s-Par s-Par s-Par s-Par s-Par s-Par s-Par

Dedicated CPU, Memory and I/O Dedicated CPU, Memory and I/O for Each Partition 15 Connection for Each Partition Forward! Management Nodes LAN

Figure 2. InfiniBand interconnect to identical s-Par dedicated resources for high availability. (Courtesy ESG Labs)

Redundant fabric switching, memory, and storage controllers • Failover and fault tolerance including multiple HA/DR round out the highly reliable architecture of Forward! storage configurations and mirrored partition failover for Enterprises have all the reliability of dedicated servers greater reliability yet deployed in a high-performance, consolidated x86 • “Right-sized” partitions that are not over-provisioned environment. Given this level of cost-effective reliability, Meanwhile its unique architecture delivers many benefits companies can now scale up and out as needed, and deploy found in common virtualization solutions, without the the latest in modern mission-critical applications. security, performance, or configuration issues associated Modern Mission-Critical SAP with Forward! with common hypervisors, such as: Modern mission-critical applications, on-demand scalability/ • Up to 6:1 server consolidation on cost-effective X86 performance, and high reliability on cost-effective x86 are platform by hosting multiple SAP applications on single vi now possible with Forward! by Unisys. Forward! provides the servers best attributes of that dedicated SAP servers can offer: • Ability to quickly move, change, or add partitions and resources as business demands dictate • Dedicated resources for predictable performance, including CPU/memory, storage, and I/O • Save on hardware, cooling, energy, and space • Dedicated s-Par partitions and hardened operating • Quickly develop, test, and deploy applications for modern systems for greater security mission-critical applications • Fabric-based performance and high-speed storage and inter-partition communication

vi Estimates based on Unisys engineering models. Actual benefits may vary dependent on specific client implementations.

8 The innovative architecture of Forward! has the additional Conclusion benefit of giving enterprise SAP environments the flexibility Forward! customers enjoy the benefits of both dedicated and agility to cost-effectively grow and adapt in the future. and virtualized environments in one innovative platform Obsolescence is no longer an issue. Time-to-market with (see Figure 3). Future enhancements include even greater new IT approaches is reduced dramatically. Forward! has performance, more choices in storage configurations, the extensibility to host the widest range of demanding real-time resource allocation, and an open API for integrating applications, such as Big Data and SAP HANA applications Forward! management with industry-leading Enterprise as well. System Management consoles, providing customers single pane of glass simplicity.

Modern Mission-Critical Requirements Dedicated SAP Server Common VM SAP SAP on Forward! Multiple applications per host server No Yes Yes Deploy/move VMs or apps in minutes No Yes Yes Consolidate hardware resources, save money No Yes Yes Save on power, Cooling, licensing No Yes Yes Easy to secure/harden Yes No Yes Predictable performance Yes No Yes Ease compliance burdens Yes No Yes Highly reliable operating environment Yes No Yes

Figure 3. Summary of the benefits of SAP on Forward!

The bottom line is enterprises no longer must choose between costly dedicated servers or the uncertainties of committing critical SAP applications to common virtualization when looking for a more agile, modern mission-critical infrastructure. Forward! is the best of both.

9 10 11 For more information visit www.unisys.com/forward

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