Overview of IBM Cloud® for SAP

Introduction

IBM Cloud® for SAP is for enterprises who believe that empowering their SAP workloads also empowers their business. IBM Cloud® for SAP provides your enterprise with full cloud capabilities. So you can run your mission-critical SAP workloads with secure, reliable, and compliant infrastructure, and take advantage of options to append more cloud services to transform the business.

Our IBM Cloud® for SAP offerings are designed based on over 50+ years of IBM-SAP expertise (since 1972). The on-demand flexible compute options for various SAP Business Application scenarios range from cloud-native SAP and burst compute all the way to high performance with enterprise-grade availability.

Our IBM and SAP multi-decade alliance is why IBM was selected as one of SAP’s strategic infrastructure providers for hybrid cloud. Support for SAP's suite of products is available through the highly scalable, open, and security-rich IBM Cloud. With this partnership, SAP applications can expand to major markets; this expansion is made possible by more than 60 IBM Cloud data centers worldwide.

IBM Cloud® for SAP was launched in late 2014, with our SAP HANA certified Bare Metals as a strategic partner with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC). Our SAP HANA certified Bare Metals were first released as Infrastructure-as-a-Service in early 2017, the first Cloud Service Provider to provide high-performance Bare Metal IaaS for SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver.

Using various configurations of the SAP Technical Applications, you can confidently run SAP Business Applications such as:

• SAP S/4HANA
• SAP BW/4HANA
• SAP BO-BI
• SAP CAR
• ...more

Our rigorous certification process with SAP ensures that your workloads are supported.

We deliver these cloud capabilities for SAP to improve your business, and provide more solutions from SAP Partners to accelerate your SAP implementations.

IBM provides you with the most powerful available cloud building blocks so that you can design and implement SAP landscapes that meet your current business needs and your requirements for the future.

Our infrastructure options are designed to support all your SAP workloads in different scenarios, including business applications based on:

• SAP HANA
• SAP AnyDB
• SAP NetWeaver
• Other SAP products that use other technologies (for example, older applications such as SAP Content Server, or newer applications such as SAP Data Intelligence)

Our key offerings are SAP-certified Infrastructure-as-a-Service, which we append with more capabilities specific to SAP workloads.

Supported SAP Business Applications

• SAP S/4HANA AnyPremise edition
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud SaaS Extended edition (by request to SAP)
• SAP BW/4HANA
• SAP CAR
• SAP Commerce (formerly SAP Hybris Commerce)
• SAP ECC
• SAP BW
• SAP Business One
• SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence Suite (BOBJ/BO-BI)
• SAP Data Intelligence 3.x / SAP Data Hub 2.x
• ...more

Supported SAP Technical Applications

• SAP HANA
• SAP NetWeaver
• SAPRouter
• SAP Web Dispatcher
• SAP Fiori Front-end Server
• SAP Gateway
• SAP Solution Manager
• SAP Content Server
• Adobe Document Services (ADS) for SAP
• SAP Process Orchestration (PO) - Process Integration (PI)
• SAP Landscape Management (LaMa)
• SAP Secure Logon Server (SLS)
• AnyDB - IBM Db2
• AnyDB - Microsoft SQL Server
• AnyDB - SAP MaxDB
• AnyDB - SAP ASE
• ...more

Supported SAP Development Applications

• SAP Cloud Platform (including SAP Cloud Connector)

SAP-certified Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings

The IBM Cloud SAP-Certified IaaS gives you the flexibility to run your SAP workloads in the IBM Cloud when you need them, where you need them with over 60 IBM data centers worldwide. You can quickly address issues such as:

• Rapidly expanding and contracting capacity (as needed)
• Migrating SAP workloads to the cloud
• Supplementing existing on-premises virtualized infrastructure architectures.

The IBM Cloud® for SAP portfolio primarily consists of five offerings:

1. IBM Cloud Bare Metal
2. IBM Cloud Bare Metal with Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory
3. IBM Cloud Virtual Servers
4. IBM Power Virtual Servers (complementary offering from IBM Power Systems, with connection through IBM Cloud)
5. IBM Cloud for VMware

More information on the these Infrastructure offerings within the IBM Cloud® for SAP portfolio, see Infrastructure certified for SAP.

These offerings are spread across two primary infrastructure environments, and one separated environment that uses IBM Power technologies:

• IBM Cloud Classic Infrastructure environment. The original environment and network, formerly known as the Softlayer network.
• IBM Cloud VPC Infrastructure environment. The latest environment and network, with the newest technologies and networking capabilities.
• IBM Power Systems Infrastructure environment. The environment maintained by IBM Power Systems built of IBM Power enterprise components, which has links to either Classic Infrastructure and VPC Infrastructure.

Our documents provide detailed considerations and information for building your SAP environments at each layer for all offerings. However, if you are interested in quickly finding the information related specifically to one of the IaaS offerings, then you may consider using the Fast Path Site Maps for Intel Bare Metal, Intel Virtual Servers, IBM Power Virtual Servers and VMware SDDC.

SAP's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings

IBM Cloud also enables the use of cloud-native SAP technologies. IBM-SAP work on multiple open source projects together and both companies use similar technology underpinnings. You can reduce your SAP implementation project timelines and long-term maintenance by adopting the "Side-by-Side Extensibility" model that SAP recommends for custom development with their SAP Business Applications.

The portfolio includes a variation of SAP's Platform-as-a-Service, which is designed for increased security of cloud-native SAP extensions. This SAP PaaS variation can be combined with IBM Cloud's various PaaS options, functions, and services.

Affiliate offerings for SAP's PaaS by request only:

• SAP Cloud Platform Private Edition, using Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

However, the core cloud-native SAP technologies are able to be used directly with Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud or other IBM Cloud capabilities (such as Cloud Foundry) in the same way as deploying to SAP Cloud Platform. This is because many of the cloud-native SAP technologies are built upon widely supported cloud-native technologies. However to deploy outside of the SAP Cloud Platform ecosystem requires general knowledge of cloud-native technologies, and will require more manual effort (not described in this documentation series) because the SAP multitarget application (MTA) archive format is not supported outside SAP Cloud Platform.

Cloud-native SAP technologies which are portable, directly to Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud or Cloud Foundry from IBM Cloud, examples include:

• SAP Fundamental Library Styles component library for UI Frameworks (Angular, React, Vue, and other frameworks)
• SAPUI5 Framework (and upstream project OpenUI5)

SAP's Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings

IBM Cloud is also available as an option underneath SAP's Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products.

IBM Cloud offerings for SAP's SaaS by request only:

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud SaaS, Extended Edition; using IBM Cloud SAP-certified IaaS (IBM Cloud is a strategic premier partner, requires PMC contract with a services partner)

SAP Partner ecosystem solutions offerings

IBM Cloud provides numerous solutions from SAP's Partner ecosystem. These solutions can reduce SAP implementation project timelines or increase the efficiency of SAP Systems that are running maintenance on IBM Cloud. IBM Cloud works closely with these SAP Partners (who are also IBM Business Partners) to offer their capabilities from the IBM Cloud catalog.

These solutions from SAP Patners may not apply to all SAP software or all Infrastructure within the IBM Cloud® for SAP portfolio; please see the individual sections under the SAP Partner certified solutions topic group.

This table summarises the available SAP Partner solutions:

Comparing the different SAP-certified IaaS offerings

When you compare the different SAP-certified IaaS offerings available on IBM Cloud, keep in mind that each offering was designed to provide flexibility for various scenarios. Each offering provides different levels of performance criteria, security, and risk-acceptance.

Each of these SAP-certified offerings is available to support numerous different SAP Business or SAP Technical Applications. However they differ in the performance they can achieve:

• Bare Metal very offers high performance. This option has no software-related overheads as it is purely an OS and the SAP software that uses local SSD storage. However, the SAP workload cannot move around as easily.
• Intel Virtual Servers for VPC uses an IBM Cloud managed hypervisor. This option provides lower total cost of ownership when coupling Suspend Discounts and Sustained Usage Discounts, with more flexibility and an abundance of extra features for security and networking. However, the performance and sizing are lower than other options.
• IBM Power Virtual Servers use the enterprise-grade IBM PowerVM Type 1. This option is a complementary offering from IBM Power Systems, with connection through IBM Cloud, that provides significant scalability on robust hardware with significant flexibility and many more features available. But, this option does not allow root-access control of IBM PowerVM underneath where some SAP tools would ordinarily provide integration. Commonly this is paired with existing IBM Power or IBM Z infrastructure in on-premises data centers, to create a Hybrid Cloud model which drives modernization using paired capabilities from either on-premises or Cloud that address the business needs (e.g. security, flexibility, speed etc.) and business strategy
• VMware is a Type 2 hypervisor. This option has a minor reduction in the available performance. But this option also has vastly more flexibility and optimization in running SAP workloads, including:
• Full root-access control to all VMware features
• Capability to install more software that uses VMware capabilities (for example, SAP Landscape Management)
• Ability to bridge the network with any existing VMware installations

This content is a high-level summary, for more details please see Infrastructure certified for SAP; in addition there are multiple pages describing each profile available across the infrastructure options, or a compilation list of all profiles available is provided in the FAQ of Profile List with Benchmarks and Specifications.

Our recommendation is to investigate what your current business requirements are and what are your future requirements for growth. This information helps you understand the short-term and long-term needs for running your SAP Systems. After you know your short-term and long-term needs, complete an SAP Sizing exercise.

This exercise provides you enough information to establish what IaaS and surrounding needs you might have, which can help to evaluate decision points such as:

• Whether to move the existing SAP workload to cloud quickly or steadily (for example, avoid data center expiry fees versus potential business disruption)
• Whether to migrate the existing SAP ECC system to SAP S/4HANA, or build from the ground up on cloud
• What your current sizing of your SAP Systems are, and their projected increases
• How to align your move to cloud and SAP rollouts to meet business needs. For example, connectivity to existing applications in on-premises data centers, intermittent or offline locations such as factories or front-line business operators, mobile device connectivity while retaining security and more.

The following documentation sections provide details to help understand how IBM Cloud® for SAP can empower your business and help you to make informed decisions for your IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and SAP Partner solution choices.