Choosing the right infrastructure and keeping it up to date is essential for SAP success. Yet only about 39 percent of SAP customers refresh their infrastructure on a regular cadence, which leads to an array of avoidable challenges. Nutanix found this and a range of other insights when they collaborated with the Americas’ SAP User Group (ASUG blog) to understand the dynamics of IT infrastructure refreshes among SAP customers. The research was focused on learning about how SAP customers plan and execute refreshes, what their SAP S/4HANA priorities are, and whether or not they are taking advantage of automated testing to streamline upgrades.
We capture the highlights of this research below, but you can also view the full report for more details.
Refresh on a Regular Cadence
One of the key findings is that the 39 percent of SAP customers who refresh IT infrastructure on an as-needed basis encounter more hurdles—in terms of staffing shortages, provider selection, and internal approvals—than those who schedule updates in advance.
Having a planned refresh schedule will help you avoid issues, keeping your infrastructure projects on time and on budget.
Get the Help You Need
ASUG also asked SAP customers about the best ways to improve processes and outcomes for IT refreshes. In addition to proactive scheduling, respondents reported that greater investments in resources—including outsourcing, vendor support, and cloud tools—have positive effects. Increased standardization is also considered an important process improvement.
Make sure any providers you consider can handle the end-to-end update process and that they offer standardized, repeatable practices to achieve the outcomes your organization requires.
Prepare for SAP S/4HANA
Two-thirds of SAP ERP customers have adopted, or are in the process of adopting, SAP S/4HANA, and they are utilizing the full range of infrastructure environments—from bare-metal to managed cloud—for S/4HANA deployments.
When we asked respondents about the reasons for their infrastructure choices, two factors figured prominently: cost and security. Yet expertise in setting up security controls between infrastructure and SAP software is hard to find.
Look for a provider with expertise in SAP security who can also help you run your chosen cloud environments while addressing other top SAP S/4HANA challenges: threat of downtime, inefficient testing processes, and lack of internal skills.
Automate Testing
Only about 38 percent of respondents are using automated SAP testing, even though it is far more efficient and catches more issues than manual testing.
A lack of automated testing can slow progress for organizations migrating to SAP S/4HANA. An automated testing process allows you to fix code errors before you migrate, assess new code before launches, and keep your technology landscape secure and running smoothly.
As the figure above shows, organizations that rely on scheduled infrastructure refreshes use automated testing to a greater extent than those who do refreshes as needed, but almost all organizations have significant room for improvement.
Look for providers who can deliver infrastructure that accommodates an automated testing program.
How Nutanix Can Help SAP Customers
Nutanix helps SAP customers achieve success through a combination of infrastructure innovation and proven expertise.
Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) technology combines compute, virtualization, and advanced data services into a resilient, software-defined solution with built-in security hardening and rich machine intelligence. It’s a flexible building block with integrated software services available to help build your ideal hybrid-ready private cloud. A Nutanix solution delivers predictable performance, exceptional availability, cloud-like infrastructure consumption, simplified management, and faster dev/test to support your SAP environment.
End the Pain of Refreshes
The fully integrated HCI environment simplifies the process of infrastructure refreshes. Nutanix technology enables you to accomplish deployments, refreshes, and upgrades in less time with less hassle, eliminating sources of disruption. Nutanix software pools the resources of standard server nodes, which allows you to start small and grow as needed, and then swap out nodes non-disruptively when it’s time to replace. No more forklift refreshes and data migrations. Advanced planning tools integrate with the Nutanix Prism management environment, helping you avoid resource shortages and the pain of infrastructure planning.
Advanced Support for SAP S/4HANA
Nutanix was the first HCI platform certified for SAP HANA and NetWeaver landscapes. You can run SAP S/4HANA alongside other SAP landscapes and workloads on the same infrastructure with predictable and consistent performance, one-click operational simplicity, and easy deployment and scaling. Enterprises worldwide rely on Nutanix for the infrastructure that their Classic and SAP HANA landscapes demand.
A Better Platform for Test Automation
Test automation in traditional infrastructure environments is a complicated and onerous process that consumes too much time and doesn’t scale efficiently. Nutanix helps enables your teams to create SAP test environments—including space-efficient production data copies—in minutes, significantlydramatically reducing the time and effort needed for test automation, making your teams more agile and able to adopt changes for the business faster.
Nutanix provides a code-free, visual approach to task automation, enabling any administrator to build, maintain, and troubleshoot automations. Complex infrastructure tasks required to support SAP testing become automated, one-click operations.
Superior Services and Support
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.
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 and partnerships tailored to meet your SAP needs. Our consulting team and partners have service offerings to fit your experience and fill gaps in your organization’s skillset.
Ready to Learn More?
Whether you are refreshing infrastructure for an existing SAP landscape or migrating to S/4HANA, Nutanix is uniquely suited to meet your SAP infrastructure needs. Nutanix reduces the cost of deploying and operating SAP, while increasing service levels and delivering a cloud experience with the control of on-prem in a single solution that can span to hybrid when you’re ready. By significantly reducingeliminating IT complexity, simplifying management, integrating data services, and improving data protection and security, Nutanix helps enables SAP landscapes to be more agile, more scalable, and more effective.
Click here to view the full report.
To learn how Nutanix can help you transform your approach to SAP infrastructure visit www.nutanix.com/sap. You can contact Nutanix at sap@nutanix.com, take our software for a free cloud-based test drive, follow us on Twitter @nutanix, or send us a request at www.nutanix.com/demo to set up your own customized briefing.
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