SAP S/4HANA on AWS: As easy as ordering a pizza?

Today, we have so many things that are just a click away: calling a ride-share, ordering food for delivery, streaming entertainment, and so on. Why would you not want your SAP infrastructure to operate the same way? Well, it turns out that’s already possible… with SAP S/4HANA on AWS. With a few simple clicks of a button, you can stand up an SAP-certified S/4HANA system on AWS, including storage and anything else you need.

AWS has been working with SAP since 2011 and provides solutions of all shapes and sizes for any purpose. Need a small footprint to do a proof of concept? They’ve got that. Need a mega-sized scale-out system? Yep, they’ve got that too, and everything in between. This includes the new generation of technical offerings around Internet of things (IoT) and machine learning. And all of these capabilities enable greater speed, agility, and scalability to take full advantage of ever-evolving technical advances, including the latest in processor technology from Intel.

I’ve been working with SAP technology for more than 25 years and I’ve lived through the big-server days, with their big lead times and even bigger maintenance bills. Those were frustrating times for architects and even more so for their business customers. Fortunately, it’s no longer a huge leap to go to AWS, but rather just a short step or hop. A few clicks, pick this, select that, and BAM! You’re ready to go. AWS even provides solutions to migrate existing on-prem systems. Options to “lift-and-shift” or “move-and-upgrade” are well documented, with many examples and scenarios in existence today. I’m still amazed at the simplicity and speed of what must be the sheer magic that happens behind the scenes.

Once an organization moves its operations to AWS with S/4HANA as the digital core, the art-of-the-possible rapidly goes from whiteboard to project plan. What’s more, you only pay for what you use. This gives you the ability to say “oh, yeah” to that request from the team that wants to do a blockchain POC for a few months and allows you to support more copies for a project without any impact on timelines. And when you’re done, you can simply shut down the instances and not have to worry about it.

AWS provides its compute services – known as EC2 compute instances – in all shapes, sizes, and setups, from scale-up to scale-out. This includes the newly announced monster 48TB S/4HANA solution, meaning that no matter how large the S/4HANA deployment, you can take advantage of EC2’s performance, security, isolation, elasticity, and efficiency – and all is certified by SAP.

AWS offers a smorgasbord of compute models to choose from, ranging from 122 to 12,228 GB of memory. Not only are AWS EC2 compute solutions rock-solid, but they also take advantage of the industry-leading 2^nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors family to enable faster memory access and higher throughput and stability. In addition to offering powerful solutions for S/4HANA today, AWS is continually working with Intel and SAP on the latest advancements and technologies around processor and chipset offerings. Similarly, Intel is working closely with SAP to optimize the second generation of “2^nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors and Intel® Optane^TM DC persistent memory technologies. These advancements will allow for much larger systems while at the same time providing faster startup and recovery when loading data back to the main memory.

Capgemini, leveraging our deep strategic partnerships with SAP, AWS, and Intel, can help accelerate value even more by bringing our tools and capabilities to not only kick-start companies on their journey to the cloud, but also provide end-to-end management of the solutions thanks to dashboards, tooling, and other capabilities. We help organizations all over the globe see the value and benefits of shifting to a DevOps way of working and leverage the power of cloud-native development, which is increasingly prevalent and will only continue to increase in popularity.

Additionally, Capgemini has teamed up with Intel to incorporate Intel Optane DC technology for SAP S/4HANA into Capgemini’s industry solutions for SAP S/4HANA. Intel’s persistent memory technology helps extract more value from larger data sets than was previously possible, scales delivery of services, and supports our customers with compelling total-cost-of-ownership and quality-of-service levels.

Customers moving to S/4 HANA realize a quicker return on investment when they leverage Capgemini Path solutions optimized with Intel Optane DC persistent memory. The combination reduces the overall cost of operations through efficient processes, integration, and lower infrastructure cost.

Capgemini can help you wherever you are on your SAP or cloud journey, so please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Intel, the Intel logo and Intel Optane are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Andrew Jeffery

Andrew (Andy) Jeffery is a Managing Solution Architect in the Capgemini Cloud Service. He brings over 22 years of experience planning, architecting and implementing enterprise IT systems and helps his customers realize the benefit of deploying and migrating their systems to the cloud. He has entensive knowledge and experience with SAP technology including SAP HANA platform, S/4 HANA.