Lift and Shift SAP Workloads to the Cloud Using Familiar VMware Technology and Skills

Enterprises have a huge amount of time and money invested in existing infrastructure, people and processes for their SAP environments. The idea of a massive migration, either to new infrastructure or the public cloud, has often been seen as both too risky and too expensive.

As a result, many organizations have simply ignored their SAP workloads in their digital transformation plans. According to Frost & Sullivan, this has left business-critical SAP workloads “mired in cumbersome, labor-intensive infrastructure environments.”¹

It doesn’t have to be this way any longer—specifically for enterprises that use VMware as their primary virtualization platform. When it comes to SAP migration, enterprises can easily lift and shift their VM environments to the public cloud with minimal disruption, risk and change, using solutions within the IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions portfolio.

Benefits of the IBM Cloud
By moving VMware-based SAP workloads to the IBM Cloud, enterprises can leverage a known environment, while enabling access to new cloud technologies and innovations, including IBM Watson for artificial intelligence and platforms for cloud-native apps. IDC has identified five key benefits for enterprise customers in leveraging this model, including:

1. Non-disruptively achieve the benefits of public cloud for SAP modernization, with rapid provisioning and scalability, pay-as-you-go pricing and access to the broader services within the IBM Cloud environment.
2. Leverage VMware on bare-metal servers within the IBM Cloud with no performance impact or nested virtualization degradation compared with an on-premises installation.
3. Take advantage of hardware flexibility across a range of server configurations, including CPU, memory and storage details, delivered on VMware-compatible bare-metal servers with support by IBM Cloud and IBM Cloud Business Partners.
4. Extend capabilities to additional VMware components as well as a range of third-party services pre-integrated into the IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions.
5. Reduce costs and/or shift to an OpEx model through flexible licensing models for the VMware stack, using existing licenses or paying for them as part of the cloud service.²

Take Advantage of SAP Flexibility
According to IDC, an additional benefit of this approach is that enterprises can choose from a range of VMware options based on their preferred configurations, levels of automation and other factors.

This provides huge advantages versus do-it-yourself approaches, which may have limited flexibility in hardware selection and software configuration or may lack formal backing from VMware in terms of support and certifications.

With IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, organizations can:

• Automatically deploy an entire VMware environment stack with VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud, making SAP modernization efforts much simpler, faster and more cost-effective.
• Leverage vCenter Server on IBM Cloud for an on-demand, automated deployment with integrated backup.
• Optimize, expand or migrate workloads onto high-performance cloud resources, deploying customized cloud infrastructure that can be managed with the same VMware management control panel your IT teams already use.
• Minimize risk by designing, accelerating and implementing VMware solutions on bare-metal servers leveraging the experience and expertise of the Cloud Professional Services team at IBM.

Conclusion
Modernizing SAP is no longer a binary choice: On-premises or cloud. With the right solutions from VMware and the IBM Cloud, enterprises can leverage the best of both worlds, marrying cloud economics and agility with the consistency, governance and management platforms that have characterized successful SAP deployments for years. The path to SAP modernization can now be much clearer, simpler and more straightforward.

¹ “Growing Your SAP Business in the Cloud,” Frost & Sullivan, October 2018.
² “IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions: Bringing VMware Environments to the Public Cloud,” IDC, August 2018.