Microsoft Azure SAP PaaS Offerings

Microsoft Azure is great for leveraging Platform as a Service solution for various software enabled applications such as SAP and Visual Studio Team. I shall begin with SAP solutions that can allow an existing SAP user to merge their on premise SAP utilities to Microsoft Azure Platform.

Microsoft and SAP have a partnership that dates back to 1993, and the release of SAP R/3. This early relationship was primarily based on technology, the two companies working together to ensure that SAP technologies would support and integrate with Microsoft technologies. The relationship really started with SAP R/3 and the SAP GUI for Windows and then moved forward with the support for SAP R/3 running on Microsoft Windows NT Server and Microsoft SQL Server. The partnership was strengthened when more than 20 years ago Microsoft chose to deploy SAP as the core ERP system to run its business. Microsoft was now both a partner and a customer. Over the years Microsoft’s SAP system has grown to be one of the largest SAP ERP systems globally. As of May 2019, the size of this ERP/ECC system is as follows

• 16 TB of compressed database (equivalent of 50 TB uncompressed)
• 110,000 internal users
• 6,000 named user accounts
• 300,000 monitored jobs per month
• Up to 270 million transaction steps per month
• Up to 10 million dialog steps per day

However, ERP/ECC is only one of the SAP applications used by Microsoft; others include E-Recruiting, GRC, GST, CPM, SCM, OER, MDG, and SMG. In total the SAP estate comprises more than 600 servers, which between 2017 and February 2018 were moved entirely to Azure VMs. Microsoft now runs SAP 100% in Azure and is embarking on the first phase of its move to S/4HANA, also now deployed in Azure.

Most recently in May 2019, SAP announced project ‘Embrace’, a collaboration between SAP, the hyperscale cloud providers, and some of SAP’s global strategic service partners (GSSPs). The aim is to help customers move to S/4HANA in the cloud following market-approved journeys, which provide you with a blueprint for your journey towards an intelligent enterprise. At the same time, Microsoft announced that it is the first global cloud provider to join this project.

SAP platform on Azure helps you to optimise your enterprise resource planning (ERP) based on SAP modules in the cloud using state of the art security features, reliability, and scalable SAP-certified infrastructure of Azure. You can run the largest SAP HANA workloads on Azure. It allows users to operate transactions and analytics in-memory on a single data copy to accelerate your business processes, gain business intelligence, and simplify your IT environment.

SAP HANA on Azure Offers:

• On-demand M-series virtual machines certified for SAP HANA with proportion to 4 TB.
• Up to six TB memory with Mv2 VMs, the most important certified SAP HANA VMs within the public cloud.
• Purpose-built SAP HANA instances that proportion to twenty TB on one node.
• Ability to scale out SAP HANA capabilities up to 60 TB with TDIv4, and up to 120 TB with TDIv5 authorisation. 
• A 99.99 percent service-level agreement for giant instances during a high-availability pair and a 99.9 percent SLA for one SAP HANA large instance.

This intelligent ERP suite is meant specifically for in-memory computing. Whether you would like to run SAP S/4HANA during a new implementation or migrate from SAP Business Suite to SAP S/4HANA, Azure has you covered. 

SAP S/4HANA on Azure Offers:

• Features such as seamless connectivity for end users who got to access SAP Fiori-based applications when using Azure ExpressRoute.
• Highest SLA for your critical ERP instances by running all product instances of SAP S/4HANA during a high-availability pair by running in two Azure Availability Zones as far as 99.99%.Backup for SAP S/4HANA and SAP B/4 HANA in seconds, with a low recovery-time objective even for multi-terabyte databases. 
• Certification that SAP S/4HANA runs on SUSE Linux Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. Plus, SAP HANA on Azure Virtual Machines and SAP HANA on Azure large-instance machines are certified to run SAP S/4HANA.

So if you are the user who performs daily operations based on SAP service modules and are concerned about the criticality of application architecture, security and compliance options, SAP platform on Azure can assist you with 

• API Management, 
• Backend infrastructure autoscaling,
• Cloud Foundry runtime to suppress any issues pertaining to imbalanced performance to output ratio when working with customized SAP SaaS modules (ASCS) or, 
• ERP Business suite clients SAP ECC (ERP Central Component).

If Big Data processing RFC configured already in the on premise environment, Microsoft Azure offers SAP HANA Cloud platform that comes with AnyDB clusters and SAP S/4 HANA Cloud extensibility framework, which helps users import their existing z-Tables, file collections and S/4 HANA SC client with SuccessFactors (Easily Configurable) that can make the On Premise to cloud transitioning stress free and with minimal downtime.

SAP S/4HANA on Azure VM solution architectures illustrate how a user request flows through an SAP landscape built using high-performance Azure Virtual Machines and in-memory SAP HANA databases running on Azure Virtual Machines for unparalleled scalability and performance. The system takes advantage of Linux OS (SLES, RHEL) clustering for top availability, premium storage for performance, data replication for top availability via HANA System Replication (HSR), and a full disaster recovery (DR) configuration for guaranteed 99.95% system availability with asynchronous HSR.

One can use SAP landscape built on high-performance Azure Virtual Machines and an in-memory HANA database running on HANA large instances for unparalleled scalability and performance. Such a system takes advantage of OS clustering for database performance, high availability using HANA system replication, and a full disaster recovery (DR) configuration for guaranteed system availability.

SAP HANA Certified Large Instances List as Per Below: