The move to the cloud is hardly a new topic, for many the value of services like Microsoft 365 have proved their worth over the opening months of 2020, having key services running in the public cloud has delivered the flexibility, scale and accessibility that it promised. Beyond that we are also starting to see ever increasing tactical use of public cloud, integration into backup and archive tools, storage, cloud-based security appliances, the list continues to grow. But what about those big enterprise core applications like SAP, the systems that are running every element of a business, are we starting to move them as well?
I ask that question because of an announcement that caught my attention this week (w/c June 15th 2020) from NetApp proudly declaring they are the first to offer SAP HANA certified storage via their Cloud Volumes Service (CVS) inside of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) you can read more about the announcement in this blog, this is in addition to their already certified Azure NetApp Files service offering the same certified capability in the Microsoft Cloud. What I wanted to know was why? NetApp has no doubt put a lot of time, effort and money into gaining this certification, but is there an opportunity for this and are companies moving platforms as potentially complex at SAP HANA into the cloud at all?
I’m happy to admit that I don’t know a lot about SAP and their products but luckily I have a friend who does and he was happy to join me on this weeks show to share some of his experience. Andre Schmitz is a Senior Consultant for Datacenter Infrastructure in Germany for Bechtle and has been delivering major enterprise systems like SAP HANA for 17 years so was well placed to give me his view on the market, where companies are taking these big enterprise applications and whether announcements like this from NetApp deliver any real benefit or open up a path to the cloud for companies who have not been comfortable with that route in the past.
We cover.
- What is SAP HANA?
- Why are people struggling to shift to it?
- Complexity and the cloud.
- Is there a shift for enterprise applications to the cloud?
- Are NetApp’s enterprise storage services a useful addition?
- Are they going to help with a shift to the cloud?
- The importance of enterprise-class storage features in the cloud.
- Moving to the cloud, here are some things to consider.
This was Andre’s podcast debut and he did a great job at sharing a wide range of experience, some insight into the challenges of having systems like SAP HANA running in the cloud and some thoughts on whether NetApp (or anyone else) offering these kinds of enterprise-class features has real value. To find out more from Andre you can follow him on Twitter @der_schmitz or via his highly recommended and popular blog site derschmitz.com.
If you have an idea for a show or would like to be a guest on a future show why not email me at podcast@techstringy.com.
Until next time, thanks for listening.
Techstringy 