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SAP on the Enterprise Cloud

The DefiniTive GuiDe To

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Table of ContentsWhat This Book Covers

Chapter 1/introduction Driving More Value from Your SAP Landscape Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Satisfies SAP Requirements

Chapter 2 An Introduction to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Nutanix Acropolis Nutanix AHV Nutanix Prism

Chapter 3 Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Performance Optimized I/O Performance Superior Performance Density for SAP Workloads

Chapter 4 Availability, Data Protection, and Disaster Recovery Protecting Your SAP Environment

Chapter 5 Accelerate Application Development and Test for Your SAP Landscape Provisioning Development and Test Environments Application Lifecycle Management and Cloud Orchestration Embracing DevOps

Chapter 6 Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Security Security Development Lifecycle Security Automation Advanced Microsegmentation with Nutanix Flow Extensive Network of Security Partners One-click Upgrades

Chapter 7 Partnerships, Support, and Services SAP and SAP Solution Partners Support and Services

Chapter 8 Superior Infrastructure for SAP NetWeaver and SAP HANA Architecting SAP NetWeaver Environments Architecting SAP HANA Database Environments

Chapter 9 Getting Started with Nutanix Enterprise Cloud and SAP Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Reduces TCO for SAP Landscapes When It Is Time to Change

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14 16 19 19

22 22 23

26 27

30 30 31 33

36 36 37 37 38 38

40 40 40

42 42 43

46 47 48

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What This Book Covers

It has become imperative for IT and Basis teams to

operate SAP® landscapes more efficiently, minimizing

management overhead without sacrificing performance

or availability and enabling faster deployments,

upgrades and expansions. However, many SAP

landscapes today are siloed on complicated, aging

infrastructure that adds expense and complexity while

failing to deliver the capabilities and speed needed for

today’s digital businesses.

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software leverages the

industry’s most popular and powerful hyperconverged

technology to deliver SAP-certified NetWeaver and

HANA-based landscapes with predictable and

consistent performance, one-click operational simplicity,

and easy deployment and scaling for faster time to

value. More than 120 enterprises worldwide rely on

Nutanix for the powerful and robust infrastructure that

their Classic and SAP HANA® landscapes demand.

The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud adapts easily to changing

business needs while continuing to reduce risk, cut

costs, and provide high availability. Delivered as

software, software-based appliances, and cloud-based

services, Nutanix provides multi-cloud architecture

flexible and reliable enough to run both SAP and your

other enterprise applications and use cases.

8 9

More than 388,000 companies around the world rely on SAP

to support crucial business functions including ERP, CRM, SCM,

HR, and many others. SAP has been the leading ERP software

provider for over three decades, and around 75 percent of

transactions supporting global GDP are processed through

an SAP system.

Given the critical importance of SAP software, performance

and availability are essential. Infrastructure supporting SAP is

crucial, not just for IT teams and Basis administrators, but for

the many business units that depend on the software. Digital

transformation and the rise of the intelligent enterprise are

generating unprecedented demands on IT. In response,

organizations are seeking more efficient and scalable

infrastructure solutions that can satisfy growing needs while

reducing the time spent on routine management tasks across

an entire SAP landscape, from production to QA to

development and test.

Driving More Value from Your SAP Landscape

ChAPTer 1 / InTroDuCTIonYour company may be considering upgrades to the

infrastructure supporting SAP for a variety of reasons:

• The need to upgrade to a newer version of SAP software.

• Addition of a new data warehouse or a new SAP module.

• Re-platforming current infrastructure due to obsolescence,

or to take advantage of newer and more cost-effective

technology options such as hyperconverged infrastructure

(HCI) instead of SAN, or x86 instead of Unix.

• Accommodate mergers and acquisitions.

• Rollout of a new business unit or subsidiary.

• Move to S/4HANA from SAP NetWeaver.

• Move to SAP HANA database from anyDB (Oracle, SQL

Server, DB2, Sybase, and more).

Planned upgrades, whatever the reason, create the perfect

opportunity to rethink your infrastructure approach.

understanding SAP

This book tacitly assumes that you are already familiar with SAP, but

for those new to SAP or in need of a refresher, here’s a brief

introduction. Traditionally, SAP has run on databases from SAP,

Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and others. These deployments are often

referred to as SAP Classic, traditional, or NetWeaver landscapes.

The terms anyDB and RDBMS are often used to describe the

databases in these environments.

SAP created the in-memory SAP HANA database and S/4HANA

application suite to address the many new sources and volume of

data in today’s new digitally transformed business climate. SAP has

mandated that all systems run on HANA databases by 2025. To

date, HANA landscapes have been delivered in traditional IT

architectures, including appliances, often on bare metal. Cloud

deployment options are available as well. Like classic NetWeaver-

based landscapes, HANA landscapes require a production instance

plus two or more similar environments to address development,

testing, qualification, and other needs.

Figure 1. Digital transformation is creating a variety of challenges for your SAP landscape.

Rapid Time to Market

one-click Simplicity

fractional iT Consumption

Continuous innovation

need to deploy and scale production and non-

production environments quickly

Managing SAP landscape sprawl can be a painful

challenge

retiring and reallocating infrastructure resources

takes a lot of effort

elastically expand and contract to address changes in workload demand

Accurately measure SAP resource usage

non-disruptive upgrades are desired

new versions of SAP applications and hAnA require next-generation, cloud-ready infrastructure

10 11

1For many organizations, the arrival of SAP HANA and

S/4HANA present both opportunities and challenges. SAP

HANA presents an opportunity to modernize both software

and infrastructure to better support digital transformation and

position your company for the future. However, you may find

yourself supporting both NetWeaver and HANA environments

in parallel for an extended period of time. Reducing risk for

new HANA deployments is a top priority due to their business

importance. It is essential to deploy HANA on reliable,

predictable, and highly performant infrastructure. Simplifying

the infrastructure that supports HANA is another top concern,

as complexity creates risk as well as inefficiency and expense.

You may also be looking for a more cloud-like way to operate

HANA on-premises so that you can take advantage of the

increased resource utilization, availability, and flexibility that

virtualization provides. It can quickly become inefficient to buy

stand-alone appliances and run every deployment on bare

metal. This is a capital cost challenge since these server and

storage configurations are performance- and memory-intensive

and an operational cost challenge as the number of HANA

databases proliferates. Advanced virtualization provides the

flexibility and operational simplicity to deliver different-sized

HANA landscapes cost-effectively while enabling you to easily

adjust resource allocations over time.

Over the last few years, hyperconverged, web-scale

infrastructure has emerged as a better alternative to traditional

enterprise infrastructure that is increasingly ill-suited to meet

the growing demands of SAP software. Hyperconverged

infrastructure combines compute and storage resources—

including flash—with intelligent operating software to create

flexible building blocks that eliminate many of the pain points

of deploying and managing IT infrastructure.

The first hyperconverged solution to be certified for SAP,

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud combines the benefits of

hyperconvergence and public cloud, making infrastructure

invisible and elevating IT and business teams to focus on the

SAP landscape. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud drives faster time-to-

market for important SAP initiatives, delivering benefits that

were once only possible with public cloud. Nutanix bridges the

efficiency, availability, and performance gaps between

enterprise datacenters and public cloud, delivering a single

software fabric that unifies your SAP environment, eliminates

server sprawl, simplifies infrastructure management, and

significantly reduces infrastructure footprint.

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud leverages web-scale engineering and

consumer-grade design to natively converge compute,

virtualization, and storage into a resilient, software-defined

solution with rich machine intelligence. The result is predictable

performance, exceptional availability, cloud-like infrastructure

consumption, robust security, and seamless application

mobility to support your business-critical SAP environment.

Should You virtualize Your SAP Landscape?

If you haven’t already virtualized your SAP environment, there are a variety of reasons to consider doing so.

• improved availability: Updates and infrastructure refreshes should not

have any impact on application availability.

• improved recoverability: Application recovery should be easily and

predictably tested, without disruption to production, and be repeatable

and automated.

• Rapid, automated provisioning from templates: On-demand deployment

of complete application environments in minutes ensure consistency and

scalability across SAP environments.

• Simplified driver stack: Reduces complexity and risk for applications

and eliminates the need to manage storage multi-pathing and

network teaming.

— Adapted from Simplified Sizing for Virtualizing SAP environments by Michael Webster.

nutanix enterprise Cloud Satisfies SAP requirements

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1

SAP and Nutanix share an ongoing commitment to simplification. SAP has been shrinking its data footprint while accelerating throughput. Nutanix has been integrating and simplifying the infrastructure and management stacks, enabling you to achieve cloud-like agility on-premises. If you’re facing SAP performance, availability, scalability, time-to-value, or management challenges, Nutanix Enterprise Cloud offers immediate benefits with:

Simplified architecture: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud converges storage, virtualization, networking, and security, streamlining infrastructure management and scaling while:• Reducing infrastructure costs up to 60 percent. • Delivering much faster time to value.• Reducing power space and cooling requirements up to

90 percent.Data locality for superior performance: A flash-accelerated architecture with a unique approach to data locality delivers superior database and application performance while eliminating the need for continual performance tuning.exceptional availability: Nutanix exceeds the capabilities of traditional infrastructure with a self-healing architecture that restores full resiliency without operator intervention. One-click non-disruptive upgrades eliminate planned downtime.integrated management and automation: Manage the entire infrastructure stack through a single interface, Nutanix Prism, with built-in automation for many common tasks. Nutanix Calm facilitates application automation and orchestration.full virtualization: Server virtualization means that your SAP environment immediately benefits from all the operational advantages of virtualization, including significant reductions in operating costs.

Figure 2. Our customers describe how the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud solves SAP infrastructure challenges.

Rapid Time to Market

Rapid Time to Market

fractional iT Consumption

Continuous innovation

“I can deploy my application in five

minutes.”

“I don’t spend time on low-level infrastructure

management.”

“I use and pay for just what I need, only when I need it.”

“My infrastructure gets better on a regular basis.”

Secure by design: Nutanix software utilizes a security-first design, resulting in a smaller attack surface and less chance that sensitive customer data can be compromised. Security specifications and testing are built into every step of product development. Nutanix Flow adds integrated microsegmentation for additional network security.Multi-cloud integration: For IT teams that need to integrate on-premises and cloud operations, Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software converges private, public, and distributed clouds, bringing one-click simplicity to hybrid cloud environments and enabling you to deploy and manage applications in nearly any cloud. Greater choice: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS runs on multiple hardware platforms, including those from Dell EMC, Lenovo, Cisco, and HPE—as well as Nutanix-branded NX appliances. Nutanix supports all popular virtualization solutions, in addition to our native hypervisor, AHV. World-class support and services: Nutanix delivers award-winning support and comprehensive professional services worldwide.

other applications can share the same infrastructure as your SAP environment with no negative effects, enabling greater consolidation for superior cost reduction.

Simplify Multi-Cloud Management with nutanix Beam

You may be running SAP in multiple datacenters and cloud locations. Nutanix Beam is a multi-cloud optimization and cloud compliance service delivered as part of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS. Beam provides deep visibility and rich analytics of cloud consumption patterns, along with one-click cost optimization and advanced cloud security across your cloud environments.

• Beam identifies underutilized and unused cloud services and provides convenient single-click remediation suggestions.

• Visualize and control consumption of cloud resources across departments and groups, and enforce policies based on allocated budgets.

• Different consumption models across multiple clouds make effective decision-making challenging. Beam utilizes machine-intelligence to evaluate alternatives and provides recommendations based on your usage and growth patterns.

• Beam automates cloud health checks so you can easily monitor and ensure security compliance.

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Nutanix Enterprise Cloud builds on a foundation of

hyperconvergence to create a flexible platform uniquely

capable of solving your SAP challenges. The architecture

converges servers, storage, data protection, virtualization, and

networking with one-click operations, full application

automation, and multi-cloud management, creating a solution

that is ideally suited for deployment in primary datacenters.

An Introduction to nutanix enterprise Cloud

ChAPTer 2With a compact footprint and simplified remote management,

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud is also perfect for secondary

datacenters, disaster recovery (DR) sites, and edge locations,

including production facilities, distribution centers, and remote

and branch offices. All infrastructure and applications across

your entire operation can be managed from a single interface—

Nutanix Prism.

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud eliminates the guesswork and

removes the constraints of conventional infrastructure, so you

can be up and running quickly and scale without disruption.

Nutanix helps you eliminate silos of infrastructure, increase

utilization, and dramatically improve scaling and availability—all

while reducing costs. As management tasks are reduced or

eliminated, your team spends more time enhancing SAP

applications and delivering new services, resulting in faster

time to value for the business.

Simple 1U and 2U appliances that scale out one node at a time

replace complex and expensive legacy components. Each node

includes Intel-powered x86 hardware equipped with flash SSDs

to accelerate application and database performance. You can

create hybrid clusters with enterprise-grade HDDs for bulk

storage, all-flash SSD clusters for performance-intensive

workloads, or mix hybrid and all-flash nodes to meet your

specific SAP needs. Nutanix software runs on each node and

distributes all operating functions across a cluster for

APP APP

Multi-cloud Management

Prism

Application Automation

one-click operations

Virtualization

networking

Server Data Protection Storage

Figure 3. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud incorporates all common infrastructure functions.

Figure 4. Nutanix Prism provides all management functions for your Nutanix clusters.

one-click Infrastructure Management

App Lifecycle Management

Self Service and Governance

hybrid Cloud Management

Calm

one-click operational Insigths

one-click Planning

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2performance, making the system resilient and self-healing.

When you scale out the cluster, performance grows linearly

and resiliency increases. All nodes in the cluster share storage

capacity, and intelligent tiering and data locality ensure

optimum storage performance for every workload.

A single Nutanix cluster can have an unlimited number of

nodes, with different node configurations to address varying

needs for compute and storage. Nutanix software is hardware

agnostic, running on Nutanix-supplied hardware as well as

hardware from other leading providers.

Because you can add new nodes and transparently migrate

workloads and data off older nodes to retire them, a Nutanix

cluster can run forever. You can forget about the pain,

extended planning, overprovisioning, and risks of the forklift

upgrades that traditional systems require every few years.

Nutanix Acropolis is the software foundation that delivers

enterprise-class storage, compute, and virtualization services

for database instances and SAP applications. Make your

infrastructure decisions based on your specific performance,

economics, scalability, and resiliency requirements.

Acropolis makes it possible to run applications at any scale with:

• Integrated management of physical and virtual infrastructure.

• End-to-end operations, planning, and analysis.

• Unfettered application mobility.

• Up to 80 percent lower virtualization costs.

nutanix AcropolisServer

Converged compute,

storage and virtualization

network

Shared Storage

(SAn/nAS)

Figure 5. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud dramatically simplifies IT infrastructure versus traditional approaches.

More options, More freedom

Most IT solutions have significant limitations that constrain your IT team. By focusing on software, Nutanix transcends the limitations of other solutions. Only Nutanix offers:

• extensive hardware choice: Including Dell EMC, Lenovo, Cisco, and HPE—in addition to Nutanix-branded NX appliances.

• Support for popular hypervisors: Including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Nutanix’s built-in hypervisor, AHV, for NetWeaver landscapes. AHV is integrated into the Enterprise Cloud OS and included with purchase at no added cost, simplifying management and eliminating licensing expenses while delivering unsurpassed functionality, including certification for running SAP HANA.

• Support for public cloud: Including AWS, Azure, GCP, or Nutanix Xi Cloud Services.

18 19

2

Figure 6. Nutanix uses a web-scale architecture to create a VM-centric Distributed Storage Fabric that unifies storage across a cluster into a single pool available to SAP and other applications.

Production and non-Production SAP App Servers and DBs

nutanix Controller vM

(Distributed in VMs on multiple nodes)(one per node)

node nnode 2node 1

nutanix Cluster nX, hX, XC or hP or Cisco• Snapshots• Locality• Clones

• Tiering• Compression• erasure Coding

• Deduplication• resilience

X86X86X86

hypervisorhypervisorhypervisor

eR

P

CR

M

BW

S4

h

S4

h

Cv

M

eR

P

BW

De

v

De

v

Cv

M

eR

P

CR

M

BW

Cv

M

It delivers enterprise data storage as an on-demand service using

a shared-nothing distributed software architecture. Acropolis

pools local flash, including NVMe, and HDD storage and exports it

to the virtualization and application layer, eliminating the need for

separate SAN and NAS arrays. Acropolis also supports a variety

of software-defined data services:

nutanix volumes provides direct block-level access via the iSCSI

protocol to support applications running on servers outside the

Nutanix cluster.

nutanix files is a native file storage solution for unstructured

data. It provides a highly available and massively scalable data

repository.

nutanix Buckets provides an AWS S3-compatible API to enable

application development teams to consume storage as a high

performance, on-demand service. It supports applications that

use large unstructured datasets such as big data analytics and

data warehouse applications.

Acropolis Container Services (ACS) provides persistent storage

for containers and the ability to easily deploy and manage

containerized applications.

Nutanix block and file services, in particular, have proven

extremely useful in the SAP landscape. Volumes lets you

continue to support some of your existing server hardware while

retiring expensive SAN storage hardware. Files provides a

secure, shared file system accessible to all SAP systems.

Additional DSF data management services include replication

for high availability and DR, VM snapshots, clones, and more.

DSF also includes native support for deduplication, compression,

and erasure coding to maximize storage efficiency.

While Nutanix fully supports hypervisors such as VMware ESXi,

Microsoft Hyper-V, Acropolis also includes AHV, a hypervisor

built for VM-centric infrastructure that is provided at no

additional cost. With enterprise features like VM mobility,

resource scheduling, VM and host high availability, and

enhanced security, plus simplified VM management, AHV not

only provides high performance, it delivers the best overall user

experience at the lowest TCO.

AHV is certified to run SAP NetWeaver and SAP HANA-based

landscapes. It also supports a variety of databases from the

AnyDB ecosystem, including Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server,

Db2, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and others.

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud incorporates management as an

integral part of the solution stack, greatly simplifying

infrastructure and virtualization management for your SAP

landscapes. The Nutanix Prism management interface delivers

consumer-grade simplicity for infrastructure management,

making it easy to keep infrastructure up and running.

Powered by advanced data analytics and heuristics, Prism

streamlines common IT workflows, providing a single interface

for managing your entire IT environment, including servers,

storage, data protection, security, virtualization, and more.

nutanix AhV

nutanix Prism

20 21

2Prism makes configuring, monitoring, and managing Nutanix

solutions remarkably simple. One-click management reduces

the administrative burden and the potential for operator error

while eliminating the need for planned downtime. Prism

one-click planning includes sophisticated scenario-based

modeling, based on X-Fit™ machine intelligence, so that you

can foresee the impact that changes to the IT environment will

have on application performance and availability.

one-click software upgrades: A consistent pain point for any

application environment, including SAP, is keeping system

software and firmware up to date. IT administrators often

sacrifice evening and weekend hours to upgrade tasks, not to

mention the expensive professional services required with

some platforms. Prism takes the pain and disruption out of

upgrades, allowing them to be executed during normal

business hours. Intelligent software does all the heavy lifting,

eliminating the need for weeks of upfront planning across

multiple teams.

Nutanix operating software and hypervisor software on each

node update via a rolling methodology that eliminates

disruption to running jobs with zero downtime.

one-click remediation: In the event of alerts or failures, Prism

suggests remediation actions that you can initiate to correct

problems quickly. This functionality greatly reduces the mean

time to repair and restore services, significantly improving

availability.

Any task that can be performed via Prism can also be

performed using REST APIs or a library of PowerShell cmdlets.

As a result, you can easily incorporate Nutanix data

management capabilities as cloud services.

one-click Management

Full reST APIs

See a nutanix cluster upgrade while production SAP landscapes are running without impact.

nutanix: one-click operations

Nutanix provides a universal control plane spanning private and public

cloud, eliminating management complexity. An intuitive interface and

comprehensive REST APIs cover the entire stack: VM operations,

virtualization, compute, storage, backup, applications, and disaster

recovery (DR) across a single site, multiple sites, and cloud.

Machine intelligence and self-learning capabilities drive end-to-end

automation, making the platform smarter over time. Management is

built on the principle of consumer-grade design, minimizing time to

productivity. Automatic infrastructure optimization and remediation

takes the place of many routine tasks, reducing operator involvement

and freeing IT resources to focus on more high-value tasks.

22 23

Naturally, one of the biggest concerns for any SAP

environment is the performance of SAP applications in

production. In the past, it was generally assumed that bare

metal servers would always deliver better performance than

virtualized servers. However, today virtual machines meet the

same key performance indicators of a similarly configured

physical server. In some cases, virtualized environments have

even been shown to deliver better performance than physical

servers. SAP has supported virtualization since 2011 for specific

virtualization products and is supported on Nutanix AHV.

SAP defines performance in SAP environments carefully.

According to SAP, “Performance refers to the total

effectiveness of a computer system, including throughput,

individual response time, and availability. Programming for

good performance means making reasonable use of critical

resources, keeping response time at a minimum, taking into

consideration aspects of network communication, and

producing software that is scalable.”

For the purpose of sizing SAP infrastructure, SAP measures

performance in standardized units:

nutanix enterprise Cloud Performance

Superior Performance Density for SAP Workloads

ChAPTer 3buffer. This functionality ensures that critical SAP applications

and databases receive excellent random read/write

performance. For data warehouses and other analytics

applications requiring streaming performance, intelligent

tiering ensures excellent sequential read/write performance

using both flash and disk drives for very large datasets.

Data locality: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform keeps much

of the data used by an SAP database or application on the

node where the VM containing the workload is running, which

minimizes latency, optimizes performance, and reduces

network congestion. When a database or application VM is

moved from one node to another using vMotion or Live

Migration (or during an HA event), the migrated VM’s data

automatically follows the VM in the background.

Nutanix algorithms trigger data movement between nodes as

needed. A local node’s SSD tier is always the highest priority for

I/O generated on that node, but all of the cluster’s storage

resources are available to all nodes within the cluster. The SSD tier,

including NVMe, provides maximum performance for hot data and

random I/O, while the HDD tier (if present) provides maximum

capacity and economy for cold data and sequential I/O.

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud is designed to deliver excellent SAP

performance without the constant tuning required with

traditional infrastructure. The Acropolis Operating System

(AOS) includes multiple features that enhance I/O

performance. AOS delivers excellent random read/write

performance for transactional workloads and excellent

sequential read/write performance (bandwidth) for streaming

workloads such as data warehouses. A Nutanix cluster delivers

optimum performance for every workload and adapts

automatically to workload changes, so you don’t have to waste

valuable time tuning performance.

intelligent tiering: In hybrid clusters combining SSDs and

HDDs, intelligent tiering provides automatic performance

optimization. AOS continually monitors data access patterns

and optimizes data placement on the most appropriate tier,

achieving the best performance without administrator

intervention. It automatically tiers SAP data between local

flash, and remote flash, and, if you choose to leverage hybrid

nodes, local disk drives and remote disk drives. It deduplicates

frequently read data, which is cached into RAM and local flash,

and always writes data to a distributed flash-based storage

optimized I/o Performance

24 25

3SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS) is a hardware-

independent unit of measurement that describes system

configuration performance in the SAP environment. It is

derived from the Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark, which

defines 100 SAPS as 2,000 fully business processed order line

items per hour.

Because datacenter space is frequently at a premium, it is

often useful to measure the performance density of a given

hardware configuration in terms of the number of SAPS

delivered per rack unit of space.

A comparison of the performance of Nutanix Enterprise Cloud

versus a popular converged infrastructure solution

demonstrates that Nutanix delivers almost 3.5 times the

performance density as shown in the figure below.

in other words, nutanix can deliver the same performance for

your SAP landscape while consuming a third of the space.

30,058 SAPS / Ru

Converged Solutions enterprise Cloud Platform

vS

up to 104,670 SAPS / Ru

30u

Cisco uCS5108 B-Series Blad Chassis

2207 XP Chassis FeX ModulesB200 M4 B-Series Blades

6248 uP Fabric Interconnect6248uP Fabric Interconnect

Cisco nexus 9396 SwitchCisco nexus 9396 Switch

netApp FAS8040 (2 controllers in single enclosure)

Cisco nexus 5596Cluster interconnect

netApp DS224 3.84 TB SSDnetApp DS224 3.84 TB SSDnetApp DS224 3.84 TB SSDnetApp DS224 3.84 TB SSD

VDX 6740VDX 6740(Switches only for hA)

nX-3460-G5nX-3460-G5nX-8150-G5nX-8150-G5

2u8u

8 x Blades = 901,760 SAPS

16 x e5-2699v4

96 x 3.84TB SSD

8 x nodes = 837,000 SAPS

10 x nodes = 1,046,700 SAPS (expandable)

20 x e5-2699v4

96 x 3.84TB SSD

Figure 7. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud dramatically simplifies IT infrastructure versus traditional approaches.

26 27

For critical production SAP environments, availability is just as

important as performance. No matter how your SAP landscape is

architected for availability and data protection, you want the

underlying infrastructure to be as resilient as possible so that your

team can stay focused on application-specific tasks rather than

infrastructure management, maintenance, and repair. Nutanix

Enterprise Cloud is fault resistant, with no single points of failure

and no bottlenecks. Nutanix exceeds the resiliency of traditional

datacenter infrastructure with tunable redundancy and self-healing.

Resilience is built into Nutanix AOS, which is designed to

• detect, isolate, and recover from failures;

• survive system hardware, software, and hypervisor issues;

• maintain 100 percent data availability.

Each Nutanix data container is configured with a replication

factor (RF) of two or three. RF 2 ensures that there are two

copies of data at all times, allowing the cluster to survive the

failure of a single node or drive. RF 3 ensures that AOS

maintains three copies of data in a cluster, providing resilience

to two simultaneous failures. This flexibility allows you to

dynamically configure data redundancy based on SAP SLAs.

Nutanix’s patented erasure coding algorithm, EC-X, reduces RF

storage overhead. Using EC-X can increase usable space in a

cluster by up to 70 percent.

Nutanix combines tunable redundancy with self-healing to

ensure continuous data availability for SAP applications. When

a disk or node fails, full data redundancy is quickly and

automatically restored without administrator intervention. In

the case of host failure, VMs are restarted on other nodes. A

large Nutanix cluster can withstand the failure of an entire

four-node enclosure (referred to as a block) with no disruption

in service beyond the time needed to restart affected VMs on

surviving nodes.

Availability, Data Protection, and Disaster recovery

ChAPTer 4

Another compelling advantage that Nutanix offers for SAP

landscapes is a broad spectrum of data protection and disaster

recovery (DR) options. Critical services like snapshots, cloning,

asynchronous and synchronous replication are built into the

architecture, so you can solve many of your data protection and

DR challenges without the need for additional solutions.

However, Nutanix also often supports data replication options

that are native to the application and partners with leading data

protection vendors, ensuring that any solution you currently rely

on will continue to work in the Nutanix environment.

Protecting Your SAP environment

Cross-hypervisor Data Protection and DR

Another significant advantage of Nutanix Enterprise Cloud for data

protection and DR is the ability to utilize cross-hypervisor operations,

replicating across hypervisor boundaries. For example, you can run

VMware in your production environment and Nutanix AHV in your

DR or backup environment. Since Nutanix Enterprise Cloud includes

AHV at no additional charge, this approach can significantly reduce

virtualization licensing costs. Nutanix frees you to choose the best

hypervisor for each environment.

Figure 8. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud supports the entire spectrum of data protection and DR needs.

rPo

1 hour

1 hour

hours

near-zero

rTo

Minutes

Minutes

hours

Minutes

Dr

remote replication

Metro Availability

Backup

Min

or

Inci

den

tsM

ajo

r In

cid

ents

3rd Party Backup

SnapshotsSnapshots

28 29

4Simple, crash-consistent Nutanix snapshots provide a first line

of data protection with no storage or performance penalty.

For DR, software-defined, multi-site asynchronous replication

functionality is built on application-granular snapshots.

Administrators can set replication policies at the individual

protection domain level, rather than at the LUN or volume level.

Additional options exist for how often the replication occurs

and for leveraging a metro cluster for synchronous replication.

Figure 9. Built-in asynchronous DR simplifies protection of SAP environments running at multiple locations.

LoCATion 1 LoCATion 2

LoCATion 3

OS OS

OS

Protection

Domain 1

Protection

Domain 2

Protection

Dom

ain 2

Prot

ectio

n D

omai

n 3

Prot

ectio

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Remote Site

Remote Site

Remote Site

30 31

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud also offers substantial benefits for your

SAP development and test teams. These benefits include:

• Rapid provisioning of new SAP non-production environments

and data refresh.

• Complete application lifecycle management and cloud

orchestration.

• Full support for DevOps.

Not only can you create new database instances for testing,

you can also clone production data sets so that everyone on

the team can use up-to-date data without using terabytes of

storage capacity.

Accelerate Application Development and Test for Your SAP Landscape

ChAPTer 5

Your SAP landscape depends on the ability to set up and tear

down development and test environments rapidly using

automated processes. Provisioning in a traditional infrastructure

environment is a complicated and onerous process that

consumes too much time and too much storage to scale

efficiently.

Production data copies used in development and test processes

must be as up-to-date as possible to ensure code quality.

Relying on test data sets that are months out of date is a recipe

for disaster.

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud enables users to create new test

environments—including space-efficient production data

copies—in minutes by cloning instances on demand. This

functionality dramatically reduces the amount of time wasted

during development, test, QA, and more.

Nutanix clones are also extremely space efficient. A clone

accesses the same data blocks from storage as its parent.

Additional storage is consumed only as changes are made.

Nutanix Calm adds native application orchestration and lifecycle

management to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS. Calm

decouples application management from the underlying

infrastructure—enabling SAP applications to be easily deployed

into both private and public cloud environments. Calm turns

common tasks into repeatable automations accessible to all IT

teams. A common framework for modeling both applications

and infrastructure accelerates the overall time to production for

critical applications and services.

For example, suppose you need to spin up additional application

servers to meet end-of-month demands. Nutanix Calm makes it

Provisioning Development and Test environments

Application Lifecycle Management and Cloud orchestration

System Landscape

Temporary Landscape

Figure 10. VM clones can be used to quickly provision development, test, and QA environments—including production data copies—without consuming excessive storage space.

Du

al

Mai

nte

nan

ce

1. Copy2. upgrade

old releasenew releaseTransport route

Transfer Changes

Production Landscape

DeV

DeV

QAS

QAS PrD

32 33

5fast and easy to scale application servers by leveraging a

standard template and workflow-based approach. Calm makes

the process repeatable, even at scale, and removes errors that

can delay projects, lead to missed opportunities, cause

operational issues, and require resources to fix.

Nutanix Calm also grants developers self-service access to the

resources they need at any time. They simply consume custom

blueprints from the Nutanix marketplace. For example, if you

create a blueprint for an SAP test environment and make it

available in the marketplace, any time a developer needs a test

environment, they can then request it and it is automatically

provisioned.

Unique capabilities of Calm include:

• Lifecycle management: Calm simplifies the setup and

management of custom SAP applications by incorporating

all elements of each app, including relevant VMs,

configurations, and related binaries, into an easy-to-use-

blueprint, making the deployment and lifecycle

management of common applications automated and

repeatable.

• Self-service provisioning: Blueprints can be published

directly for end user consumption through the Nutanix

Marketplace, giving Basis administrators, application

owners, and developers the ability to request IT services

and have them provisioned instantly.

• Role-based governance: User operations are limited based

on assigned permissions. All activities and changes are

centrally logged for end-to-end traceability and debugging.

• hybrid cloud management: Calm automates hybrid cloud

architecture provisioning. Both multi-tiered and distributed

applications can be scaled across different cloud

environments. Policy-based reporting shows the overall

utilization and true cost of your public cloud consumption

at a glance.

SAP_DB LoadBalancerSAP_AS

Scale AS Scale ASScale AS

CheckASAvailability updateConfigProvisionScale

network Config

SAP Client Config

Set SAP Profile

Set env variable

Bringup SAP

Task Task

Task

Action Action

Action

+ +

+

+ +

+Figure 11. Calm blueprints automate mundane tasks, such as spinning up app servers.

Learn more about Nutanix Calm at www.nutanix.com/calm.

Digital transformation, Internet of Things (IoT), and the

proliferation of mobile services may be putting pressure on

your teams to deliver new applications and services more

quickly. To achieve this, many teams are transitioning to a

DevOps model—a combination of changes to IT culture and

technology that aims to close the gap between development

and operations, removing the friction between the two to

accelerate the delivery of new capabilities and services.

DevOps bridges organizational gaps, removes strict division of

responsibility, and enables collaboration and automation,

resulting in benefits such as:

• Rapid release: Automated testing and release of product

all the way from source code check-in to customer release

and use.

• fail fast and fix fast: Automated deployment (and revert)

strategies reduce risk while increasing tempo.

• Closed-loop design and testing: Every change is an

opportunity to learn and experiment; every gap or mistake

is an opportunity to improve testing, instrumentation, and

automation. Automated operations allow monitoring

systems to trigger healing.

embracing Devops

34 35

5Democratized access and self-service: Development and

test environments can be created ad hoc by developers,

testers, and operations.

You may be asking yourself whether the ideas of DevOps really

apply to ERP software and SAP. If so, the answer is yes. A

practical guide to Devops for SAP explains why and describes

the differences and similarities of SAP DevOps versus DevOps

in other software environments.

In both cases, infrastructure agility is essential to the DevOps

process. The right infrastructure stack can make it much easier

to achieve your goals. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud simplifies your

DevOps journey, ensuring your infrastructure has the required

agility and flexibility at all layers. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud

gives your infrastructure the agility of the public cloud while

reducing costs and maintaining control of important processes

and data.

Nutanix Calm simplifies all aspects of DevOps, providing the

means to consistently deploy both non-production and

production application environments. Calm is designed to

integrate with tools you already use, working with existing

solutions to leverage them for the tasks they’re best suited to.

it’s a Multi-cloud World

A recent IDC study found that the majority of IT organizations over the next five years expect to leverage multiple private and public cloud options to meet the needs of their workloads and business as they seek to optimize performance, cost, and security while looking to be more agile, innovative, and efficient. The study estimated that 70-85 percent of workloads in the typical enterprise will run on-premises or on hosted infrastructure, and this will include critical applications and databases from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and others, while dev/test, and dynamic, horizontally scaling applications will often be deployed in the public cloud.

36 37

Complex, legacy infrastructure solutions were not designed with

security as a primary consideration and are vulnerable to the

ever-increasing risk of cyberthreats. The Nutanix architecture takes

a security-first approach; a variety of built-in features deliver

defense-in-depth and greatly simplify the process of ensuring that

your SAP landscape remains secure.

nutanix enterprise Cloud Security

ChAPTer 6

Nutanix uses a unique Security Development Lifecycle (SecDL)

that incorporates security into every aspect of its software

development process, from design and development to testing

and hardening. To ensure compliance, the Nutanix solution is

certified under a broad set of evaluation programs for

government, financial services, and healthcare. The result is a

greatly reduced attack surface and safer data.

Nutanix developed its own Security Technical Implementation

Guide (STIG) to speed up accreditation process for the

Department of Defense, enabling secure installation and

maintenance of Nutanix systems and reducing accreditation

time from months to minutes.

• fast baseline checks and validation: Nutanix STIGs are

written in XCCDF format and support the SCAP standard

for compatibility with automated assessment tools.

• Automatic configuration management: Security

configuration management automation (SCMA) efficiently

checks over 800 security entities in the Nutanix STIGs,

including storage and built-in virtualization.

• integration: Security is incorporated into every step of

product development and covers the entire

hyperconverged infrastructure stack, including storage,

virtualization, and management.

• Automated testing: SecDL testing is fully automated and all

security-related code modifications occur during minor

releases to minimize risk.

• Threat modeling: Potential risk associated with all code

changes is assessed and mitigated.

System-level security features include two-factor authentication,

cluster lockdown, and software or hardware-based data-at-rest

encryption with robust key management.

Security Development Lifecycle

Security Automation

Figure 12. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud utilizes a security-first approach that simplifies the process of establishing and maintaining infrastructure security.

full-Stack Security Development Lifecycle

Repeat

update

encryption

update

Assess

Test

Key Manage-

ment

Anti- Malware

Measure

Report

Micro-Segmen-

tation

Anti-virus

Automated validation and Self-healing

Security Certifications ecosystem

With increasingly strict regulatory requirements in many

industries, microsegmentation is quickly becoming a

requirement. Nutanix Flow simplifies network and policy

management, enabling SAP applications and environments to

be governed independently from the physical infrastructure.

Advanced Microsegmentation with nutanix Flow

38 39

6

The highly extensible Nutanix architecture exposes APIs that

allow integration with a broad ecosystem of security partners.

Verified joint solutions provide flexibility at every layer, including

network, data, and end-point security, and deliver a committed

support experience. With Nutanix, you can deploy SIEM, firewalls,

and other security applications on the same shared infrastructure.

Many cyberattacks seek out known vulnerabilities on

infrastructure that has not yet been patched. Nutanix provides

one-click, non-disruptive upgrades that take the pain out of

patching infrastructure software, making it far easier to keep your

infrastructure up to date with no downtime.

extensive network of Security Partners

one-click upgrades

Flow provides:

• Microsegmentation that protects against threats capable of

propagating from machine to machine by segmenting

virtual networks and applications to permit only necessary

communications between application tiers.

• visualization that takes the mystery out of network policy

creation. Before policy can be created and enforced, the

behavior of an SAP application must be understood. Flow

gives policy owners deep and clear insight into application

behavior by visualizing discreet communications between

the VMs that make up the environment. Creating policies

for allowed traffic becomes a simple, repeatable process.

• extensions and automation that enable easy extension of

network functionality via third-party software integration.

Nutanix partners are able to enhance the Enterprise Cloud

to integrate advanced networking features.

40 41

Your success depends on more than just great technology. Nutanix

has the experience and expertise to make your vision a reality. We

offer an extensive portfolio of services and the deep industry

partnerships that are critical to enterprises of all sizes. Our

expansive partner ecosystem includes relationships with the most

important industry leaders, as well as over a hundred partners

delivering validated solutions on Nutanix.

Partnerships, Support, and Services

ChAPTer 7

Nutanix is an SAP Global Technology Partner and a Global

member of the SAP Co-Innovation Lab (SAP COIL). This gives

us ready access to a complete proof-of-concept environment to

test solutions and better address unique customer requirements.

We also work with SAP COIL on joint marketing activities. In

addition, we’ve partnered with the important consultancies and

global systems integrators (GSIs) that leading enterprises rely

on for SAP assistance.

At Nutanix, commitment to our customers is one of the

foundational pillars of our business. We have built a reputation

for customer trust and customer satisfaction, based on a

sustained effort that goes back to the founding of the company.

For four years running we’ve earned a 90+ Net Promoter Score

(NPS) (a key measure of customer satisfaction), surpassing by

far the mid-30s industry average.

Nutanix and SAP have a collaborative technical support

agreement in place, enabling a seamless support experience

from setup to optimization to troubleshooting without the

finger pointing that can occur when vendors don’t coordinate

support efforts.

Nutanix Consulting Services offers a full range of services tailored to meet your needs with regard to SAP. At the core of the Nutanix consulting services operation model are three key tenets:• Building and leveraging battle-tested best practices and IP.• Hiring and enabling top-notch consultants.• Focusing on customer outcomes

Our consulting team has created unique service offerings to fit your experience and fill gaps in your organization’s skill set. Specialized offerings include:• Workshops that provide hands-on experience and access to

Nutanix infrastructure design expertise.• Residency Services that put a Nutanix expert on site to

address operational challenges.You can find out more about all Nutanix service offerings by visiting nutanix Consulting Services.

SAP and SAP Solution Partners

Support and Services

nutanix Support and nutanix Consulting Services Win Awards for Customer Satisfaction The Customer Relationship Management Institute first created the NorthFace ScoreBoard Award program in 2000 to recognize organizations that not only offer exemplary service to their customers, but that also establish as their primary objective a deep commitment to continuously exceeding customers’ expectations.

For the fifth year in a row, Nutanix has received the northFace ScoreBoard Award for excellence in support service delivery. And now, Nutanix Consulting Services is being recognized with a NorthFace ScoreBoard Award for excellence in customer satisfaction.

ASSeSS DeSiGn DePLoY oPTiMiZePre-Sales ScopingDiscovery/Plan

• Business outcome

• Discovery Workbook

• Questionnaire

Design

• Migration Architect and Design Workshop

• Re-platform, Architect and Design Workshop

Solution Deployment

• Application deployment

• Application migrations

• Comprehensive Validation

Operations

• Resident Consultant

• Health assessment

• Performance Tuning

Figure 13. Nutanix offers consulting services covering all aspects of SAP planning, deployment, and operation.

42 43

No matter whether your SAP landscapes are architected with

NetWeaver or HANA, the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud can

accommodate them. Nutanix, an SAP Global Technology Partner, is

certified not only for NetWeaver-based applications and

application servers for SAP Business Suite, Business Warehouse,

Solution Manager, and S/4HANA Application servers, but also SAP

HANA databases.

Compared with traditional 3-tier implementations, deploying

NetWeaver, HANA, and related applications on Nutanix

dramatically reduces complexity and risk, while increasing

flexibility, shortening time to market, and lowering total cost of

ownership. Non-production landscapes can account for as much

as half of a total SAP deployment, if not more, and thus present a

great opportunity for creating new efficiencies with virtualization.

Development, QA, sandbox, training, and other landscapes can be

rolled out, expanded, and refreshed quickly and easily, optimizing

physical server and storage resource consumption. For production

systems, the Nutanix management plane provides insights into the

entire infrastructure stack, removing manual, time-consuming

tasks, as well as interactions with separate IT teams, and thereby

enables Basis admins to quickly diagnose and respond to

application issues.

You also have the option to run your SAP environments on the

same infrastructure as your non-SAP workloads, or to architect

them separately as your requirements dictate.

interface. For detailed guidance on deploying these

environments, refer to the Nutanix solution note: SAP on

nutanix (SN-2039) and the Nutanix best practices guide:

running SAP on nutanix (BP-2025).

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud can run the databases already certified

for the NetWeaver stack, including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server,

Sybase ASE, Sybase IQ, and IBM Db2. For more information on

deploying databases on Nutanix Enterprise Cloud refer to:

• Virtualizing oracle Databases: nutanix Best Practices (BP-2000)

• The Definitive Guide to SQL Server Deployment on nutanix enterprise Cloud

• nutanix Best Practices for Microsoft SQL Server 2016

• nutanix Best Practices for IBM Db2

Superior Infrastructure for SAP netWeaver and hAnA

ChAPTer 8

Deploying and operating SAP Business Suite applications is an

important task. The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud provides the

reliability, predictability, and performance that the SAP Business

Suite demands, all with an efficient and elegant management

When it comes to SAP HANA landscapes, you can deploy both

S/4HANA applications and SAP HANA databases on the

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform. Nutanix AHV is the first

hypervisor certified by SAP to run both non-production and

production SAP HANA environments on HCI, which is crucial

now that all roads lead to HANA. Using AHV radically simplifies

infrastructure management by effectively making the hypervisor

invisible, which frees you to reallocate resources towards

extracting value from the applications and improving business

processes and insights.

SAP HANA is revolutionizing the speed of data processing for

reporting, analytics and computational tasks. Nutanix has

proven the performance and scalability required for successful

SAP HANA enterprise deployments, along with simple Day-2

operations of SAP environments. This includes the ability to

deliver superior throughput rates with minimal latency, as well as

ensure high availability during periods of heavy database usage.

Nutanix software for SAP HANA runs on Nutanix AHV on

certified Intel SkyLake SP-based server platforms from Lenovo

Architecting SAP netWeaver environments

Architecting hAnA Database environments

44 45

8and Dell. Initially these qualified hardware systems are scale-up,

with two- or four-processors, and support HANA VM sizes up to

2.3 TB and 168 virtual CPUs. You can run application VMs on

those processors that aren’t committed to the HANA databases.

When you need more storage or compute, Nutanix HCI lets you

scale on-demand, as little as one server node at a time, without

downtime or disruption. This combination of hardware and

software abstraction simplifies the SAP customer journey to an

enterprise cloud that reproduces the elasticity, simplified

management, consolidated infrastructure visibility, and speed of

the public cloud. At the same time, customers have full control

over data residency, security, world-class enterprise support,

and on-premises troubleshooting.

While SAP HANA in production is one of the most business-

critical applications that enterprises run, there are also

tremendous benefits of running non-production SAP HANA on

Nutanix AHV. You can take advantage of the flexibility of a

virtualized, common infrastructure resource pool and simplified

deployment, updates, and retirement of SAP HANA instances in

the one-click Nutanix environment. Learn more about running

SAP hAnA on nutanix in the Best Practices Guide.

If you have large HANA databases, you can run these instances

on a separate appliance while gaining the advantages of

virtualization for the rest of your SAP environment. For more

information on this approach, see the solution note, SAP hAnA

the nutanix Way (SN-2059).

Businesses that use SAP solutions will be able to leverage the

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS platform in production and

non-production environments to rapidly provision, simplify

management, and easily scale their IT infrastructure for faster

time to value for SAP HANA and other SAP applications.

To learn more about the journey to SAP HANA on Nutanix, read

this blog on non-production support and this blog on

production certification.

SAP

net

Wea

ver

Ap

plic

atio

ns

and

any

DB

SAP

hA

nA

Figure 14. Full SAP Coverage – HANA and Classic

nutanix Cluster on nX, Lenovo hX, Dell eMC XC or hPe or Cisco

nutanix Cluster on SAP hCI Certified

hardware List

eRP CRM BW

hypervisor

hypervisor

eRP BW Dev Dev

hypervisor

eRP CRM BW S4h S4h

flash nvMe

flash nvMe

Ahv

hAnA hAnA hAnA

Ahv

hAnA S4h

Ahv

hAnA S4h

Business Suite Production

hana Production

hana non-Production

Business Suite non-Production

other Application

Servers

S/4hAnA App. Servers

Figure 15. Production deployment option examples

Non-HANA DB VMs

Virtualized HANA Database

46 47

Infrastructure modernization has become essential to the

success of IT organizations in the digital age. While this eBook

only scratches the surface, it should be clear that Nutanix

Enterprise Cloud offers substantial benefits for your

organization, including:

• Faster time to market and easy scaling for non-production

and production environments without disruptive and costly

upgrades every few years.

• Predictable and consistent performance without the

ongoing performance tuning needed on traditional servers

and storage.

• Reduced risk through superior integration of essential

infrastructure capabilities, application lifecycle

management, and an extensive ecosystem of partners.

• Flexible data protection and disaster recovery options. Take

advantage of Nutanix’s fast, space-efficient, and VM-aware

snapshot and replication capabilities standalone, or in

conjunction with the tools you already use.

• Integrated management and advanced automation that

eliminates infrastructure management tasks.

• Built-in security that ensures your infrastructure is secure

and saves your team time.

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud replaces the complexity of separate

servers, storage, and storage networks with web-scale building

blocks that eliminate silos of infrastructure, increase resource

utilization, and scale into the future without wholesale

replacement while delivering the performance and availability

business-critical SAP applications need.

nutanix Acropolis brings together all the storage, compute,

networking, and virtualization services needed to support your

SAP environment. Acropolis delivers predictable, scalable

performance, a full suite of data protection services, including

asynchronous, near-synchronous, and synchronous replication,

compression, deduplication, and much more. Move applications

seamlessly between nodes—and between hypervisors. Leverage

built-in virtualization with Nutanix AHV for SAP Classic and SAP

HANA landscapes, as well as other hypervisors, including

VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V for NetWeaver

landscapes if needed.

nutanix Prism delivers a superior management experience with

consumer-grade design. Prism lets you manage your

infrastructure and virtualization across multiple locations, access

operational insights, leverage machine-intelligence, plan

capacity changes, and conduct maintenance and upgrade

operations, all with a single click.

nutanix Calm adds full application orchestration to your

infrastructure stack to streamline the entire software lifecycle,

including application development, production deployment,

and more.

Getting Started with nutanix enterprise Cloud and SAP

ChAPTer 9

For all the advantages that Nutanix Enterprise Cloud offers for

SAP landscapes, total cost of ownership still matters to cost-

conscious businesses and IT teams with tight budgets. Nutanix

Enterprise Cloud reduces TCO and delivers a rapid return on

investment compared to traditional IT solutions. As reported by

IDC, Nutanix Enterprise Cloud:

• Lowers TCO by 60 percent

• Delivers ROI of 534% within five years

• Reduces management time by 60 percent

• Decreases unplanned downtime events by 97 percent

nutanix enterprise Cloud reduces TCo for SAP Landscapes

To find out more about Nutanix costs visit www.nutanix.com/tco.

48 49

9

validating the new environment Post Migration:Compare current metrics to sizing metrics.

Naturally, Nutanix Services can help you with any or all of these

steps to put you on a path to greater infrastructure success.While every environment is different, here are some basic yet

fundamental things to consider when moving your SAP

environment to an enterprise cloud.

understanding Your Current environment: The process starts with a full understanding of your current

environment including:

• Application-specific metrics: Gather the steady-state

statistics and trends for each application to be moved, as

well as working set size, execution times for any batch

processes, and average and peak transactions per second.

• infrastructure-specific metrics: Gather appropriate

specifications, utilization, and capacity for server CPUs and

memory, networks, and storage. Also gather performance

metrics such as latency and throughput.

• Mapping everything to service owners: Accountability is a

key success factor.

Sizing the new environment:Once you’ve gathered the information above, you can work with

your partner and Nutanix to accurately size your new

environment. Although every environment is different, here are a

few things to think about when getting started:

• The working set requiring low latency access should fit into

the flash tier when deploying hybrid clusters.

• Always factor in HA for both compute and storage.

• Additional infrastructure and clusters may be required

based on the following considerations:

- Business: SLAs, licensing, security, budget, politics

- Technical: Locality, cache amplification, traffic

patterns, affinity

Planning the Migration:Follow Nutanix SAP best practices and guidelines and be sure to

use Nutanix, partner, and SAP-native tools when possible.

You can also use Nutanix Xtract to simplify the migration of your

VMs to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. Xtract for VMs automates

“lift and shift” migrations, especially the tedious steps required

to manually migrate or rebuild VMs on the new environment.

When It Is Time to Change

valpak Accelerates Both Traditional and online Business

After Valpak acquired Savings.com, it needed simpler, more cost-effective infrastructure to support workloads including SAP, Oracle, and SQL Server. The company needed to keep IT staff lean and become more agile without sacrificing resiliency—all while increasing performance. By adopting Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, Valpak:

• Accelerated deployments by 10x.

• Achieved 8x improvement in performance.

• Cut management time from 180 hours per month to just 2 hours.

• Experienced a 10x reduction in CapEx through a pay-as-you-grow approach.

ASM Accelerates Batch Reporting by 5X

ASM International, headquartered in the Netherlands, is a leading supplier of wafer processing equipment for semiconductor manufacturing. ASM needed to replace aging infrastructure to eliminate slow batch processing performance and get its operations team out of constant troubleshooting mode for hardware supporting SAP ERP, CRM, SCM, PI, BW, BOBJ, PLM, SRM, PORTAL, and more. With Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, ASM:

• Improved batch processing performance by 5X to sustain growing market demands.

• Reduced hours spent on operations by nearly 3X.

• Achieved overall system improvement between 50 and 500 percent.

• Consolidated SAP and DB VMs to reduce licensing costs.

SAP CASe STuDY

SAP CASe STuDY

50 51

9

SAP systems encompass nearly every aspect of the enterprise, so

it is vital to run your landscapes on reliable, secure, and high

performing infrastructure. Nutanix has proven itself by passing

SAP’s rigorous certification process for SAP HANA and

NetWeaver landscapes. Nutanix and SAP also have a collaborative

technical support agreement that gives our joint customers a

seamless support experience, from setup to operations to

optimizing the application stack. To learn more about the many

benefits of running SAP on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, get in

touch with our SAP experts at sap@nutanix.com. Be sure also to

check out nutanix.com/sap, where you can find more information

about our SAP solutions and read testimonials from our

customers who partnered with us on their Enterprise Cloud

journey for SAP.

Conclusion

Multinational food Company Modernizes SAP Landscape

A well-known food company was looking for a way to speed the delivery of new business projects. New deployments on its existing infrastructure that included Electronic Data Interchange (B2BI), order to cash (SAP NetWeaver and B2BI), SAP project staging (CRM, BW apps), and other applications was too time consuming to satisfy increasingly aggressive business goals. The company also faced space constraints in its datacenters, needed to control ongoing storage costs, and wanted a solution to jump start its cloud strategy.

The IT team converted its “big iron” Unix environment using virtualized Linux servers running on Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, achieving immediate results:• 40 percent lower TCO.• Huge reduction in overall footprint.• Elimination of SAN.• Increased agility for new deployments.• Streamlined upgrades.• A clear cloud roadmap.

SAP CASe STuDY

52