Get Ready to Move to Cloud & SAP S/4HANA

By 2027, an estimated 40,000 SAP systems will need to move to SAP S/4HANA. The migration represents an opportunity for companies to simplify and optimize their IT environments with cloud migration and a modern enterprise SAP digital core that accelerates business transformation.

To help enterprises move to SAP S/4HANA in an agile and reliable way, SUSE partners with Wipro to provide automated end-to-end SAP deployment based on open-source technologies and cloud solutions. Using SUSE’s multi-cloud approach and close relationship with SAP, allows organizations to get more value from their SAP investment faster. The automation best practices that SUSE has developed and the SAP expertise and services that Wipro provides, enables a fast and successful path to Cloud and SAP S/4HANA.

Challenges in SAP S/4HANA Migration

For enterprise-scale organizations, the journey to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud, includes several common challenges:

• Ramping up the cloud environment before the SAP deployment requires in-depth knowledge of cloud infrastructure, network, security, etc.
• There are many requirements to follow to be compliant with SAP HANA including certification and KPI requirements.
• SAP HANA and applications are complex and demand large efforts when deployed manually.
• High availability deployments fail and cause outages because the manual installation and configuration is too complex.
• There is lack of stability and repeatability, because the process is tedious, time consuming, and error prone. Organizations are frustrated by these challenges because they significantly delay the project schedule, require additional resources to remediate the risks, and in worst cases even cause disruption in business continuity.

Simplify, Modernize, and Accelerate SAP Business Transformation

SUSE is partnering with Wipro to provide a SUSE-Wipro Automation and Monitoring Framework for SAP deployments on the hyperscalers – Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform. The framework combines SUSE's expertise in SAP, high availability, and automation, with Wipro's expertise in SAP S/4HANA implementation and migration to simplify, modernize, and accelerate business transformation for enterprises.

The benefits of this partnership are clear:

Simplify the deployment of an SAP landscape in test, dev, and production environments to reduce the cost of switching to and maintaining the infrastructure.

Modernize SAP services in a cloud environment to ensure compliance across a range of configurations.

Accelerate business transformation to become adaptive and disruptive.

How does SUSE improve a move to SAP S/4HANA?

SUSE's set of tools provide an innovative and agile approach for SAP S/4HANA transformation. SUSE’s automation combines best practices for SAP deployment and high availability for mission-critical SAP workloads. Wipro’s SAP services make use of this automation framework to deliver SAP applications across multi-cloud with agility, reliability, and repeatability. By utilizing the automation framework, a complete SAP landscape can be provisioned in hours instead of weeks or months.

This is a diagram illustrating both SUSE and Wipro’s 6 phase cloud transformation framework:

What’s in the SUSE-Wipro SAP Automation & Monitoring Framework?

1. Infrastructure
   Starting from the bottom layers of the framework, the “infrastructure” layer is based on Terraform, an open-source provisioning tool that provides infrastructure-as-code automation across multi-cloud environments. Through Terraform, virtual machines, including the underlying network and storage, can be deployed, managed, and delivered fast. 
2. Operating System
   Moving up the framework, the “Operating System” is based on SUSE-built public cloud images of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications, using instance types that are certified by SAP. 
3. OS Preparation
   “OS Preparation” utilizes built-in tools in the SLES for SAP Applications images to configure the OS based on SAP requirements. It’s triggered by SALT, an open-source configuration automation and management infrastructure. 
4. SAP Installation
   During “SAP Installation”, SAP software media provided by the organization is extracted and a production-ready SAP installation is performed. 
5. HA Cluster Configuration
   “HA Cluster Configuration” is based on SUSE best practices, and automated by SALT. The SUSE-SAP close partnership includes co-engineering that goes back over 20 years. Recently, an enhancement that we have worked on with SAP, is the creation of high availability solutions for SAP HANA, Netweaver, and S/4HANA. The deep knowledge, customer insights, and lessons learned have been translated into automation recipes that minimize manual intervention, reduce probability of errors, and substantially reduce person-hours. The SALT automation formulas are bundled as part of SLES for SAP Applications, are fully supported, and free of additional charge.
   SAP customers typically have several other applications like CRM, BW, EP, PI etc. in their landscape, including the core S/4HANA system. Wipro Cloud Studio complements SUSE’s tools for these applications to automate and accelerate deployments for the entire SAP landscape.
6. Monitoring
   SAP applications are business critical and with the growing complexity, challenging IT operations, and security concerns, any outage of the system causes huge business losses to organizations. Pro-active monitoring of the SAP environment and underlying infrastructure components is very critical to ensure near-zero unplanned downtime. Wipro leverages its ‘Boundary less Enterprise’ (BLE) toolset for IT transformation, modernization, and data protection. Further, Wipro looks for industry-best alliances that accelerate delivery and manage SAP applications running across multiple cloud platforms. For SAP applications running on SUSE Linux platforms, Wipro utilizes SUSE to monitor the OS, cluster parameters, and HANA specific parameters. The output is integrated into Wipro’s BLE tools for monitoring – SUSE’s monitoring framework, based on Prometheus, helps export key metrics related to SAP environments. These metrics are consumed by Wipro’s tools and tracked on common dashboards.
   Together, SUSE & Wipro drive operational insights, automation, and innovation to deliver:

• Real-time alerts and events, historic data analysis and visualization in SUSE monitoring framework
• Support for on-prem and public cloud environments with unified dashboards for personas
• AI/ML based analytics for SAP metrics and recommendations on automation and optimization
• Service map visualization for easy troubleshooting and correlation of SAP monitoring data 

Innovation Focused Service Delivery

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many companies and industries experienced challenges. Face-to-face customer and consumer activities were unexpectedly disrupted at a global scale never seen before. Some industries like courier and logistics services enjoyed an unexpected boom while others like hospitality and airlines experienced deep contraction. It is now commonly agreed that business transformation is imperative to all companies. Those that can adapt quickly to create a disruptive model will survive or even thrive.

Wipro has the experience, global reach, and industry focus, to drive digital transformations for any business. The joint SUSE-Wipro offerings help companies move to SAP S/4HANA and transform other SAP applications with agility and complete confidence. Together we help companies simplify and modernize existing data centers and accelerate innovative solutions on top of the core SAP HANA digital platform.

Sherry Yu
Global Director of SAP Cloud Architect, SUSE

Sherry has over 10 years of experience in SAP solutions and is a trusted advisor for key SAP products like SAP HANA, S/4HANA, NetWeaver, and data intelligence. In recent years, Sherry has focused on SAP Solutions on Public Cloud and helping SAP customers with HANA and cloud migration. She can be reached at sherry.yu@suse.com.

Mahadevan Subramaniam
Senior SAP Cloud Architect at Wipro

Mahadevan is a SAP Solution Architect specializing in public cloud migrations and Implementations. He has led multiple SAP to public cloud migrations and HANA migrations and helped clients through AWS assessment, roadmap, sizing, migration, and maintenance of SAP landscapes.