Uncategorized Moving SAP to the cloud? It may be easier (and cheaper!) to bring the cloud to you! by Fanny Osorio May 31, 2023 written by Fanny Osorio The public cloud is not always the best choice for your SAP workloads. HPE GreenLake can bring cloud-like simplicity and flexibility to your on-premises infrastructure or colocation facility.by Fanny Osorio, Master SAP Solutions Architect at Hewlett Packard EnterpriseMore often these days, I come across articles about the true cost of cloud and how businesses are starting to rethink their cloud strategy after being hit with unsurmountable fees, much higher than initially anticipated.After all, one of the expected benefits or values of moving workloads to the cloud was lowering costs, wasn’t it? Companies have found out the hard way that this is not always the case.The larger the organization, the bigger the hit, of course. You can just check some of the headlines on this topic, there are way too many examples: The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox – Andreessen/Horowitz: “In 2017, Dropbox detailed in its S-1 a whopping $75M in cumulative savings over the two years prior to IPO due to their infrastructure optimization overhaul, the majority of which entailed repatriating workloads from public cloud.”SAP Sees COVID-19, Hard-To-Control Public Cloud Costs Driving More On-Premises Engagements – CRNCloud Budgets Busted: Almost 40% Overspent Last Year – HashiCorpCloud vs. on-prem: SaaS vendor 37signals bails out of the public cloud – Network WorldFor SAP customers, this can be an even more important decision. Not just because of the criticality of the SAP application itself, but because factors like data gravity and application entanglement can represent big obstacles to easily moving these systems to the public cloud.Public cloud benefits? Your mileage may varyThere is no question about the benefits that the cloud brings to the table in terms of flexibility and agility. But the mileage will vary depending on the specific environment, size, usage, scalability, availability requirements, among others. Public cloud vendors offer IaaS solutions to host SAP and other workloads, primarily in a series of virtual machines, hosted alongside several other clients on the same physical infrastructure (servers/storage/networking) in a multi-tenant environment. This could result in a noisy neighbor situation (and no one likes nosy neighbors!). If you are large enough to merit (and pay for) a dedicated server, then you will get some dedicated compute capacity, but the rest is still being shared.Also, the capacity-on-demand concept is rarely applicable. Production SAP systems need to be up 24×7. If you want to lower the overall cost, it’s more beneficial to opt for one- or three-year reserved capacity pricing vs. on-demand alternatives. And if you decide to do on-demand for non-production landscapes, careful control must be in place to avoid running hundreds of VMs and never shutting them down (with a very high price tag attached to it).Cloud may initially seem to be the right path for getting out of the data center business, but what if it isn’t? Have you evaluated all the options out there? Powerful alternatives to the hyperscalersWe at HPE understand that the world is hybrid, and in fact we implemented a hybrid cloud strategy for our own HPE IT transformation. That project included a migration to SAP S/4HANA, which runs on a private cloud solution hosted in a co-lo facility, along with other SaaS solutions.Having the control and security of running our S/4HANA landscape in the same data center as our data lakes and other systems that feed to/from our core S/4HANA solution saves thousands of dollars in egress charges that we would get if hosted in a hyperscaler. It also ensures the performance and low latency we need.Referred as the “cloud that comes to you,” HPE GreenLake can bring precisely that cloud-like agility and consumption-based capabilities to your SAP deployment (and/or any other workloads!) It can do that either on-premises or in a colocation of your choice, with the option for a fully managed solution that goes beyond IaaS if needed. (Read about HPE GreenLake for SAP – scalable infrastructure to support SAP solutions).Even SAP, which promotes its RISE offering* to help speed up and simplify the migration to S/4HANA, has recognized that the hyperscaler route is not the best option for many clients. The company has introduced SAP S/4HANA RISE Private Edition, customer data center option (aka PE CDC), for those clients concerned with data sovereignty, privacy, and residency requirements, while needing low-latency, high-throughput communications. In fact, HPE partners with SAP on this offering, which is also powered by HPE GreenLake.Please contact HPE if you would like to learn more about how HPE and HPE GreenLake may represent a better alternative that brings the cloud experience to your SAP environment and saves you from learning the hard way about the true cost of public cloud and its potential implications.Why partner with HPE? Not only are we industry leaders when it comes to providing mission-critical infrastructure and services to support your SAP needs, but we can also provide you all of this as a service if preferred, without the burden of a complex and disruptive migration, and potentially saving your business a ton of money.Learn more about HPE GreenLake, the open and secure edge-to-cloud platform. May 31, 2023 0 comment 0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail