The public cloud is a dichotomy of choice for most companies. On the one hand, organizations prefer to have the flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and simplicity of running systems in a cloud environment. Meanwhile, not every application in their existing on-premise landscape is suitable for the public cloud.
SAP customers are certainly no exception. Any IT strategy that includes moving on-premise applications to the cloud brings many concerns around performance, network costs, data management and privacy, security, geopolitical risks, regulatory compliance, and trust in hyperscalers. And after much discussion and research, they ultimately choose a hybrid approach – running some applications on premise and others in the cloud – that can limit the full value of the cloud investment.
But it doesn’t have to be this way, not with a virtualization layer. SAP customers can easily leverage their hybrid architectures with a cloud infrastructure provisioned to run anywhere on and off premise, providing a consistent user experience and operations to use and manage SAP applications and workloads.
Reducing complexity with a simplified hybrid architecture
Businesses have little control over the policies that dictate regulatory requirements and customer expectations for high-performance operations and data privacy. But they do have control over how well they comply and satisfy demands – and sometimes that means running infrastructure in different locations and facilities all at once.
The VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure management layer enables SAP customers to gain that level of control they need with the flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and simplicity they want. The integrated cloud foundation delivers a services bundle that facilitates a comprehensive, consistent, and location-independent cloud operating model for SAP software environments. In addition, it comes complete with availability features, fine-grained resource allocation, intrinsic security, integrated automation, and support for virtual machines and containers.
By combining compute, storage, networking, security, and cloud management services, VMware Cloud Foundation provides an ideal platform to run enterprise workloads and containerized applications, such as SAP S/4HANA, across both private and public environments. SAP customers can deploy and operate applications faster and with greater ease and security by stretching and distributing a fully compatible infrastructure across a consistent model for on- and off-premise data centers and public clouds.
But more importantly, the foundation’s broad enablement of any SAP application continues to increase as our decade-long collaboration with SAP grows even closer as we scale up and out our virtualization capabilities. This commitment includes support for container-based, cloud-native applications to deliver maximum agility, efficiency, and risk mitigation to business-critical SAP software environments. Plus, our enhancements support even larger virtual machines for the SAP HANA database – up to 12 terabytes and eight CPU sockets, see SAP note 3102813.
Cloud-like economies of scale anytime, anywhere
Hybrid environments are, without question, becoming the de facto standard for SAP customers. However, the transition can be challenging, depending on the applications used, workloads required, and overall business needs.
With VMware Cloud Foundation, SAP customers can get the support they need to move forward in their digital transformation journey and innovation efforts with the right technologies. Better yet, if geopolitical concerns, industry regulations, or data privacy requirements impact the digital landscape, every organization can comply with them all – with greater ease – without having to “trust” another provider to ensure it.
Learn more about VMware Cloud Foundation for SAP applications by visiting https://www.vmware.com/solutions/business-critical-apps/sap-virtualization.html.
