emc cloud enabled infrastructure (cei) … · lean it identifies eight types of process ......

White Paper

EMC Solutions Group

Abstract

Fully virtualized infrastructure supporting SAP landscapes can be of great benefit to businesses and organizations. There are fundamental definitions that must be accepted and certain prerequisite steps to be taken in order to deploy a virtual infrastructure to enable a cloud for SAP landscapes. When properly executed, such an infrastructure can deliver compelling benefits to the business, the sum of which can result in reduced capital and operational costs.

July 2013

EMC CLOUD ENABLED INFRASTRUCTURE (CEI) FOR SAP APPLICATIONS Enabling Cloud for SAP

Increase agility Accelerate deployment Shorten the time to value

EMC Cloud Enabled Infrastructure for SAP Applications

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Part Number H12217

3 EMC Cloud Enabled Infrastructure for SAP Applications

Table of contents

Executive summary ...................................................................................................................... 4

Applications are the essence .................................................................................................... 4

EMC and SAP .......................................................................................................................... 4

Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 5

Purpose ................................................................................................................................. 5

Scope .................................................................................................................................... 5

Audience ................................................................................................................................ 5

Overview ................................................................................................................................ 5

The Business of Applications ........................................................................................................ 6

Lean IT: reduced waste ............................................................................................................ 6

Cloud: Transforming IT and Impacting the Business ................................................................... 6

Key Considerations ..................................................................................................................... 8

Virtualization is not a panacea.................................................................................................. 8

Employ Industry Standards....................................................................................................... 9

Agree on Deployment Strategy .................................................................................................. 9

Perform a Gap Analysis .......................................................................................................... 11

Assemble in phases.............................................................................................................. 12

Deploy Pre-built Converged Infrastructure System ..................................................................... 12

EMC Bundles: Enabling Modular Consumption ............................................................................. 13

Foundation bundle ................................................................................................................ 13

Add-on bundles .................................................................................................................... 14

Implementation Flexibility ...................................................................................................... 16

Cloud consumption model ..................................................................................................... 16

Conclusion................................................................................................................................ 17

Summary .............................................................................................................................. 17

References................................................................................................................................ 17

White papers ........................................................................................................................ 17


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Executive summary

A 2012 study by ESG found that IT organizations spend 63% of their budget keeping the lights on while less than 37% is invested in new applications that can lower operational costs, increase revenue, and reduce risk.

Applications are the essence of how IT delivers value to the business. When applications are not performing to goal it is bad for business—and bad for IT.

In a traditional siloed physical environment, applications drive how IT builds the infrastructure. This means building configurations capable of meeting peak data rates at peak times of the year, even though those peak levels are comparatively rare. The waste, cost, and complexity are plain to see.

Compared to the legacy physical infrastructure described above, the impact and benefits of virtual infrastructure for SAP applications are striking. Many EMC customers have seen provisioning times drop from days to hours while the time available for primary value chain activities is doubled.

Businesses and organizations have a range of options in how to deploy and support SAP in a cloud environment. They can hand it off to someone else, build it themselves, or pursue a converged infrastructure approach with proven components and best practices.

EMC and SAP have a long-standing relationship. EMC invests heavily in our SAP partnership enabling customers maximum leverage of their SAP investment. This has resulted in more SAP being deployed on EMC today than any other storage provider.

With the catalyst of three-way strategy and collaboration between EMC SAP and VMware and new levels of investment we are delivering fully virtualized infrastructure to enable running mission-critical SAP applications in a cloud.

Applications are the essence

EMC and SAP


Introduction The purpose of this white paper is to assist SAP customers as they explore how to transform their physical infrastructures into fully virtualized infrastructure supporting SAP application environments.

The paper discusses the path to, and the business benefits of virtual infrastructure for SAP applications, including the steps businesses and organizations should take in planning and implementing virtual infrastructure for SAP. Approaches will be highlighted based on EMC and partner experiences concluding with a survey of the business benefits of doing so.

The scope of this white paper ranges from discussions of the characteristics of a virtual infrastructure to enable cloud for SAP to deployment strategies and steps an organization should employ to move forward .

IT management:

CIO

VP of Applications

VP of Infrastructure

Director level – server/storage/network/security

EMC virtual infrastructure for enabling cloud SAP applications is an integrated stack consisting of EMC, SAP and VMware components to implement an SAP cloud service model including:

Virtual datacenter for SAP with service catalogs, productized SLAs and multitenant resource pools

Chargeback, based on fully automated cost measurement, cost analysis, and cost reporting

Efficiently managed availability, capacity, performance, and health in the SAP landscape

High Availability and Application Mobility

Disaster Recovery

Data Protection

Automation and Operations

Enhanced Security

Purpose

Scope

Audience

Overview


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The Business of Applications Running IT like a business? Yes. Everybody wants to do it. But how do you get there and what does it really mean?

Applications are the essence of how IT delivers value to the business. When applications are not performing to goal it is bad for business—the company’s and IT’s.

Responsiveness is critical. How long do you keep customers waiting on the Internet; how quickly can you analyze market demographics and dimensions and get the right offers and promotions in place?

You are pressed to move beyond “just keeping the lights on” to focus on the “primary value chain” activities that deliver the applications.

The Lean IT concept has proven helpful in moving in the direction of greater value. Research shows that many global companies have employed Lean IT concepts to free up 20% to 30% of IT capacity by streamlining IT processes, automating routine functions, and eliminating redundancy.1

Lean IT identifies eight types of process waste as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Eight types of waste identified by Lean IT Type Example 1. Defects System outage

Non-working disaster recovery plans 2. Overproduction

Exceeding scope of SLAs Routinely exceed customer needs (“gold plating”)

3. Waiting

Waiting for parts (hardware, software) Waiting for others in multi-step processes Systems not available due to maintenance

4. Non-value-added processing IT portfolio elements that are not requested Reporting technology metrics to business managers

5. Transportation

Multiple handoffs of incidents, changes Sub-optimal dispatch and routing

6. Inventory

Server sprawl, underutilized hardware, unused applications System-generated alerts clogging ticket queues

7. Motion Fire-fighting repeat problems within the IT infrastructure and applications Multiple silos working on root cause analysis

8. Employee knowledge

Mismatched work functions with skill sets Lack of best practice sharing across groups Employees spend time on repetitive or mundane tasks

The waste-fighting engine of Lean IT has been supercharged with the advent of virtualization and cloud computing. With Lean IT and the cloud you can reduce waste, reduce costs, increase efficiency, and improve business processes like never before.

Organizations around the world are: 1Roger Roberts, Hugo Sarrazin, Johnson Sikes: Reshaping IT Management for Turbulent Times, McKinsey Quarterly, December 2010

Lean IT: reduced waste

Cloud: Transforming IT and Impacting the Business


Virtualizing SAP and other mission-critical applications as part of a cloud strategy.

Deploying new SAP landscapes as first enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, additional SAP applications, or migrations from existing applications such as ERP, Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), or business warehouse (BW).

Optimizing their SAP landscapes by migrating from legacy server and OS platforms such as AIX, HP-UX, or Solaris-based servers with RISC processors to more cost-effective virtualized infrastructure systems based on open source Linux and x86 processor architectures.

Driving down application infrastructure costs by consolidating and centralizing resources across lines of business.

To get to the cloud, though, you need to pay attention to the prerequisites and the design of the virtual infrastructure.

If you are exploring the possible implementation of a cloud infrastructure to deploy a full feature set for SAP your first task is to deploy a virtualized infrastructure.

One of the best examples of deploying a virtual infrastructure is EMC’s own cloud-based SAP landscape, which became fully operational in 2012.

As shown below in Figure 1, the impact and benefits of a virtual infrastructure for SAP applications compared to the legacy physical infrastructure are striking. Provisioning times have gone from days to hours. And the percentage of time available for primary value chain activities has doubled.

Figure 1. EMC IT transformation from physical to virtual The EMC IT approach to the virtual IT stack for SAP has enabled a single SAP instance supporting over 300 global sites. It has resulted in a 50% performance increase, with five times the scalability. In the process, EMC IT was able to retire 65 legacy apps and reduce the count of Application Integration Component (AIC) interfaces from 450 to 125.


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Key Considerations Virtualization is not a panacea. In a 2012 white paper, IDC made the following observations:

The relative ease with which application builders can use virtual machines to roll out new software or widen user bases has exposed and sharpened the significant challenge of acquiring, provisioning, and deploying the right level of platform (server, network I/O, and storage) capacity to enable this expansion… higher utilization of IT assets and operational efficiency—which results from running more virtual machines on new generation servers—reaches a plateau and often levels out at a certain point. This happens because the shift to virtualized servers often leads to strains in other areas of the infrastructure.2

The IDC white paper goes on to describe the negative aspects of virtual server sprawl including increased server/storage/network stress; administrative burdens required to deal with this stress; and support/maintenance challenges that threaten application performance. In addition, overloading/over provisioning storage and data network facilities forces time-consuming, costly, and often unnecessary hardware upgrades. All in all, says IDC, “application performance and recovery behaviors (data recovery and cleanup) on error conditions can vary unexpectedly; stalling plans to migrate more business-critical applications to virtual environments.”

In the not so distant past, many IT managers contemplating SAP virtualization were concerned about performance and stability problems. Many questions had yet to be answered. Today, with so many examples of successful transformations from physical to virtual—and the fact that virtualized infrastructures are becoming a very credible competitive edge—the only question left is “what’s the fastest and easiest way to virtualize my infrastructure.”

The reasons to virtualize are as compelling as ever: most physical infrastructures are using only 5 to 20% of their computing resources. Traditional physical provisioning methods are rigid, complex, inefficient, and manually intensive. Server maintenance causes downtime and data center floor space is being eaten up at a ferocious rate as cooling and power costs skyrocket. Recalling the goal of Lean IT to eliminate waste the course of action is clear: reduce landscape complexity, enable continuity, ensure security, and reduce capex and opex.

Successful physical-to-virtual transformations can be accomplished through a variety of approaches. No matter the approach, though, there is a single set of prerequisites that any virtualized infrastructure must meet before it can deliver application autonomy via a private cloud.

To begin with, to deploy a private cloud you need a virtual enterprise stack built on a physical architecture with data protection at its foundation. Designed for mission-critical operations, the virtual stack must be fully protected at every level to ensure data confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

2 Richard L. Villars, Randy Perry, Jed Scaramella: Converging the Datacenter Infrastructure: Why, How, So What? IDC May 2012 #234553

Virtualization is not a panacea


It is important that the collaboration of the virtual stack functions achieves the essential characteristics of a private cloud as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Table 2 below.

Table 2. NIST essential characteristics of a private cloud

Characteristic NIST Definition

On-demand self-service A consumer can provision compute capabilities as needed without requiring human interaction with each service provider.

Broad network access Capabilities available over the network and accessed by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms.

Resource pooling Resources pooled to support multi-tenant model.

Physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand.

Rapid elasticity Provides rapidly scaling when the demands of the business require extra resources. When demands are less, resources released providing cost saving economies of scale.

Measured service Control and optimize resource leveraging a metering capability at level of abstraction appropriate for service.

How do you choose the right business model for creating a private cloud for SAP applications? What is the best deployment strategy? With its own successful transformation experience, EMC offers the following guidance.

No two companies are exactly alike in terms of where they are on the journey to the cloud—or how they want to get there. Let’s take a look at the progression from physical to virtual infrastructure.

In a traditional physical environment, isolated infrastructure silos prevent sharing of resources. This creates redundant processes for managing the SAP infrastructure with more hardware and staff required.

Employ Industry Standards

Agree on Deployment Strategy


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The first step in transformation involves the server architecture. An organization with a legacy RISC environment must first migrate to, and standardize on, the x86 architecture. The good news is, just by itself an x86 replatform can deliver TCO cost advantages in hardware, software, and maintenance.

From a server perspective, EMC works closely with Cisco and its unified computing system (UCS) server architecture. This architecture is well designed to take advantage of the latest Intel processor technologies through efficient blade server scale-out computing. It also reduces the amount of internal memory, cables, and I/O cards for less cost while driving more database performance for SAP applications. Cisco UCS also can provide application profile templates to make it faster to deploy new application servers.

Other companies are well on the way to cloud with sectors of their infrastructure already virtualized. They are looking to add on or continue virtualization in other areas.

Then there are those with the opportunity to go directly to cloud and stand up a brand-new SAP landscape. Along the way they face a host of challenges including:

Acquisition integration or consolidation projects

Data center moves or changes

Tech refreshes optimizing SAP landscapes by migrating from legacy server and OS platforms

Application upgrades or migrations deploying new SAP landscapes

Virtualizing SAP and other mission-critical applications as part of a private cloud strategy

When it comes to building a virtual infrastructure, companies have choices to make: build it in phases using best-of-breed components or wheel in a turnkey converged infrastructure with little or no guesswork involved.

Whatever the case, as organizations move toward SAP virtualization and a cloud model, EMC is ready to assist with cloud strategies, storage capabilities, and virtual integration.

Before investing in a private cloud for SAP, a company must seriously evaluate its needs and expectations around infrastructure, security, and scalability to capitalize on the new cloud architecture and business models.

It is also important to recognize that building a private cloud for SAP involves an entire organization collaborating on several related but distinct areas including:

Common business drivers and requirements for an SAP private cloud

Virtual stack components that support a private cloud

Catalog of private cloud services that can be deployed for SAP

Sample business model to demonstrate a private cloud in action


An organization committed to moving to cloud must also ask if it has the capabilities and competencies to carry out the transformation. An EMC Cloud Readiness Accelerator (CRA) engagement could be helpful at this point.

The Cloud Readiness Accelerator (CRA) is a “Fast-Track” engagement, with immediate value and actionable deliverables for any IT organization to accelerate their transformation strategy towards cloud computing.

The CRA employs a proven methodology designed to examine an IT organization’s maturity along nine fundamental characteristics of the cloud data center. The CRA prioritizes projects in the following areas:

Table 3. Characteristics of the cloud data center

Perform a Gap Analysis

Category Benefit Enabling Technology

Self-service consumption

Chargeback

Reporting

Autonomy of business units and application operations; Service catalogs; SLAs; Management of vCloud tenants; Resource pooling

Cost measurement, analysis and reporting of the use of compute, network, storage, and backup resources

Virtual datacenter

Infrastructure chargeback

Automation

Orchestration

Management

Monitoring

Any service any time on any server

Provision SAP test and dev systems on demand with automated end-to-end process

Reduce downtime window during maintenance

Manage availability, capacity, performance, health in the SAP landscape

Non-disruptive movement of applications from one datacenter to another datacenter

Automatically get the right data to the right place at the right time

Application virtualization

Automated system provisioning

Mass operations

Unified/integrated performance analysis

Application mobility

Fully automated storage tiering with virtual provisioning

Cloud infrastructure

Multi-site cloud technologies

High availability within one datacenter and across two sites

Disaster recovery protection for cloud management cluster and SAP applications

Best-in-class converged infrastructure (optional)

High availability

Disaster recovery

Hardware, software, services

Data protection Provide data protection to cover the cloud management stack and SAP applications

Backup and recovery

Security Virtual stack security framework, authorization concepts, compliance and non-compliance tracking

Cloud networking and security


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The workshops are designed to build a personalized cloud maturity model (see Figure 3 below) describing the existing and desired readiness state of the IT environments on a scale from basic to federated.

Figure 2. Cloud maturity model

Every SAP customer is different. Each customer depending on their existing budgets, IT skill sets and pre-existing hardware and software investments will have different requirements impacting how they wish to move to fully virtualized infrastructure.

Many organizations have built their own – picking components, assembling, and testing them. This provides the most flexibility and, for a lot of reasons, many people will continue to do this.

You can certainly build on your existing investment. Perhaps the time is not right for a total tech refresh using a turnkey converged infrastructure as described below, or you have defined your own building blocks. Then the challenge starts with more strain on the rest of compute infrastructure.

With bundles (discussed in the next section), EMC provide a modular approach for consuming and deploying virtual infrastructure

The fastest way to standup virtual infrastructure for SAP is with converged infrastructure leveraging VCE Vblock™ Systems developed by VMware, Cisco, and EMC as part of the VCE coalition. Vblock Systems include compute, network, and storage, pre-integrated with a single point of management.

Designed, validated and optimized for SAP applications the Vblock architecture that spans the entire portfolio, includes best-in-class components, offers a single point of contact from initiation through support, with a robust range of configurations.

Assemble in phases

Deploy Pre-built Converged Infrastructure System


EMC Bundles: Enabling Modular Consumption Numerous successful deployments demonstrate the success of an EMC virtual infrastructure for SAP applications. This success will only grow as EMC builds out its bundled approach to building virtual infrastructure depicted in Figure 5.

Figure 3. Overview of EMC foundation and add-on bundles Lets take a closer look at each of the EMC bundles and functions in turn and how they deliver improved efficiency and reduced opex and capex. First up is the foundation bundle outlined in Table 4. The foundation bundle is for organizations that require an on-premises cloud enabled infrastructure to satisfy performance and operational SLA requirements of an SAP datacenter.

Table 4. Cloud Enabled Infrastructure (CEI) Foundation bundle

Foundation bundle

Foundation Bundle

Benefits Technology Enablers Virtual datacenter for SAP Autonomy of business units and application operations; Service catalogs; SLAs; Management of vCloud tenants; Resource pooling Chargeback Cost measurement, analysis and reporting of the use of compute, network, storage, and backup resources (in combination with Data Protection Add-on Bundle) Cloud Management and Performance Analysis Manage availability, capacity, performance, health in the SAP landscape, root cause analysis, end-to-end visibility Fully Automated Storage Tiering, Virtual Provisioning Automatically get the right data to the right place at the right time, virtual provisioning, dynamic distribution of workloads without service downtime Cloud Networking and Security Virtual stack security framework, authorization concepts, compliance and non-compliance tracking

VMware: vCloud Suite vCenter Operations Management Suite, vCloud Director, vCloud Networking and Security, vCenter Chargeback Manager, vSphere DRS and storage DRS EMC: Storage Resource Management Suite, FAST Suite/XtremSW Cache, VMAX, VNX


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With the foundation in place, an organization can add functionality and gain further benefits with discrete bundles of capability.

Table 5 shows the High Availability and Application Mobility Add-on Bundle. An organization would choose this bundle to deliver high-availability protection and SAP system application mobility across physically separated on-premises cloud data centers.

Table 5. High Availability and Application Mobility Add-on Bundle

The bundle displayed in Table 6 delivers disaster-recovery protection for on-premises cloud SAP landscapes.

Table 6. Disaster Recovery Add-on Bundle

Disaster Recovery Add-on Bundle

Benefits Technology Enablers

Disaster recovery protection at long distance (hundreds of kilometers) for cloud management cluster and SAP applications Support mission-critical business continuity with near-zero RPO and RTO Simulate DR testing

Continuous verification

SLA compliance for availability and performance DR readiness with centralized monitoring, alerting, and reporting

Simplifies and accelerates failover process with minimal human intervention

EMC RecoverPoint EMC Data Protection Advisor VMware Site Recovery Manager

Add-on bundles

High Availability and Application Mobility Add-on Bundle


Non-disrupted SAP VM movement within a single SAP on-premises cloud data center stretched across two metro-distance separated locations

Simple automated infrastructure high availability protection for complete SAP on-premises cloud data center Advanced automated application-aware high-availability protection for mission-critical SAP systems Improved resource utilization at both locations

Reduced maintenance downtime

EMC VPLEX VMware vMotion VMware High Availability Symantec ApplicationHA


The Data Protection Add-on Bundle in Table 7 delivers backup and recovery protection for SAP landscapes with offsite storage of backup sets.

Table 7. Data Protection Add-on Bundle

Data Protection Add-on Bundle


Data protection to cover the cloud management stack and SAP applications Backup/recovery at local and far apart (hundreds of kilometers) sites Centrally managed backup solution covering vCloud, vAPP, and SAP applications Reduced network bandwidth consumption

Image-level backup for virtual machine, guest-level backup for SAP, and remote backup replication

EMC Avamar EMC Data Protection Advisor EMC Data Domain

If an organization requires on demand SAP system provisioning of test and development systems, reduced downtime windows during maintenance and enhanced agility by implementing SAP application virtualization, the choice would be the Automation and Operations Add-on Bundle shown in Table 9.

Table 8. Automation and Operations Add-on Bundle

Automation and Operations Add-on Bundle

Benefits Technology Enablers Automated provisioning Reduced maintenance window

Proper startup and shutdown of all SAP systems Resources are provisioned from the defined resource pool with the desired protection level

Minimal manual collaboration required for resource allocation

SAP application server deployment

Any service, any time on any server

SAP Landscape Virtualization Manager


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The Enhanced Security Add-on Bundle shown in Table 9 satisfies the needs of organizations requiring a high level of security, change and audit control, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

Table 9. Enhanced Security Add-on Bundle

Enhanced Security Add-on Bundle


SAP single sign-on SAP log management

SAP data encryption

SAP identity management to automate user creation and management SAP GRC and audit control

SAP data loss prevention

RSA SecurID RSA enVision EMC PowerPath RSA Archer RSA Data Loss Prevention

The bundle approach allows a degree of flexibility in choosing how you implement a virtual infrastructure for SAP.

For example, you could implement all available bundles at once in a “big bang” project.

Alternatively, you could start with the Foundation Bundle along with the SAP High Availability and Application Mobility bundle. Then, when the time was right for you, you could add Backup and Recovery for SAP and then extend Backup and Recovery to your entire data center infrastructure.

Once you have a deployment model in place, you have a choice of consumption models to offer your customers as shown in the table below.

Table 10. Cloud consumption model

Type Characteristics

Capacity-As-You-Go

“Pay-Per-VM” model

No upfront resource allocation

Organization’s VDC allocated resources only as users create vApps

IT can set compute limits to cap usage

Reservation pools

Guaranteed container

100% of container guaranteed

Organization given resource management capabilities (shares and reservations)

Allocation Pools

Resources allocated, but not guaranteed

Similar to the “airline seat” model

IT can over-provision

Implementation Flexibility

Cloud consumption model


Conclusion IT must be agile to drive business needs to business outcomes faster.

Organizations must invest in new capabilities to do this.

This means redeploying opex and capex to business value, adding capabilities and redeploying previous dollars used to keep the lights on. This can be accomplished with the virtual infrastructure for SAP applications.

EMC’s longstanding partnership with SAP provides a proven path for SAP applications and SAP IT infrastructures to be more efficient, compliant, and effective, resulting in reduced capital and operational costs.

EMC Cloud Enable Infrastructure for SAP delivers enhanced flexibility, accelerated deployment, and a faster time to value for SAP cloud solutions.

References

For additional information, see the white papers listed below.

15-Minute Guide

White paper reference architecture on VMAX

White paper CEI foundation on VMAX

Summary

White papers

emc cloud enabled infrastructure (cei) … · lean it identifies eight types of process ......

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