Centiq has announced the first independent service for those current in-memory SAP HANA users to assess whether potential cost-savings, from moving to the cloud, is worth the disruption to their business, or not.
Centiq’s Cloud Readiness service makes it crystal clear if the claimed advantages of running SAP HANA on popular public cloud services, like Microsoft Azure and Amazon EC2, are worthwhile. The service takes into account the actual data loads an organisation has, as well as the requirements for non-standard cloud services like snapshotting, data replication and high availability. Such ‘add-ons’, while crucial for many organisations, are easily missed in standard cloud readiness assessments and can significantly impact cost-benefit analysis.
Until recently, running SAP HANA’s in-memory has remained an on-premise-only proposition for most. Now that instances of up to four terabytes are available to run SAP HANA in the cloud, IT decision-makers face hard choices between managing complex on-premise hardware and the convenience and potential cost-savings of architecting full-size SAP HANA solutions in the cloud.
Centiq’s Cloud Readiness service changes the game with four services based on Centiq’s own experiences in moving significant in-memory data loads to mainstream public cloud services. The services are:- Workload Assessment: Full understanding of current on-premise workloads, performance variability and seasonality and current on-premise costs.
- Architectural Design: Detailed blueprint of future potential data and networking requirements using Centiq’s own experience moving production HANA workloads to the cloud.
- Cost Benefit Analysis: Full cost assessment, accounting for IT security, availability criteria and future data growth, using up-to-the-minute package costing from cloud vendors.
- Implementation Plan: Accurate timeline to achieve project goals within budget following ‘Go’ decision.
Centiq’s director of technology and services, Robin Webster, explained the need for the new service: “Deploying complex in-memory applications on the cloud sounds too good to be true, because, often, it is. When using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings, the basic operating system and hardware alone is nowhere near enough to provide enterprise levels of resilience and availability. A full landscape design and provisioning exercise is still imperative.”
“Typical HANA on Suite implementations are three to four terabytes, so the new public cloud offerings are right in the sweet spot. They only make sense though if all the numbers line up, Centiq’s HANA experts help under-pressure IT departments, who need to relentlessly deliver results, to resist buying more hardware, de-risking moves to take important decisions around future IT strategies.”
