AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
AWS Partner Network (APN) Technology Partner ATADATA: Helping Power SAP on AWS Migrations
By Kalpan Raval, Global Program Lead, Migration, AWS Partner Program
Many Enterprise customers have begun to take advantage of AWS services to fuel innovation in their businesses, build environments more securely than ever before, retire technical debt, and save money. This has led to a rise in highly automated workload migration activity as customers look to move to AWS. Increasingly we find that customers are looking to AWS Migration Competency Partners to help deliver migrations of key workloads, and reduce risk through proven experience and high quality tools.
SAP environments are often complex and play a core role in many businesses workflows. Additional complexity is seen in the varied infrastructure types where SAP workloads may reside. From an x86 perspective, you will see Windows and Linux workloads, on both virtual and physical machines, running a large amount of CPU cores and RAM. This is in addition to potentially dozens of disk drives, where highly transactional databases might be Oracle, SQL, or SAP HANA®-based (among others). The conclusion can be drawn that when migrating mission-critical SAP workloads, the method and vendors should be carefully selected. We provide a number of resources for you to consult as you evaluate AWS for SAP. We also recommend visiting our AWS Migration Competency Partner page and SAP Competency Partner page for a list of APN Partners with whom you can engage. Today, I want to tell you a bit about one of our Migration Competency Partners and Advanced APN Technology Partner ATADATA, and discuss how the company’s platform can be used to migrate SAP workloads to AWS.
Migration of SAP workloads at scale
ATADATA has multiple agentless automation modules that function as a holistic platform to enable migration of Enterprise workloads at scale, including for SAP. The modules can be consumed individually, or as a unified offering, for not only Automated Live Migration, but also Discovery, Application Mapping, Cost Projections, Move Group Creation and Enablement, and Synchronization of migrated workloads. In addition to being a unified migration platform, the solution set is designed for Enterprise environments as fully self-contained, and rapid to deploy.
Typical workflow for automated migration enablement and execution:
- Application Discovery / Mapping with ATAvision Discovery Module
Discovery and planning are essential phases in any migration. Whether the intent is to migrate, or otherwise transform your application portfolio, without a map of the territory, project efficiencies and timelines can get lost. This is very important during SAP migrations. SAP can be highly complex: with its many modules, connections can affect multiple lines of business and even extend outside an on-premises environment to a multitude of end points, spanning an intricate supply chain. Knowing these dependencies is crucial in understanding which servers must be moved together, what their infrastructure dependencies are, and learning the most convenient migration window that will have the least impact.
By using the agentless ATAvision module within the ATADATA platform, SAP dependencies are discovered in a way that are suitable for migration. The migration architect must know which applications and supporting servers are tightly coupled, along with the ones which are interdependent to one another. ATAvision was designed for this purpose and uses integrated intelligence to group related infrastructure by application communication.
- Creation of Migration Move Groups and Cost Projections with ATAvision Discovery Module
ATAvision was developed to provide the information necessary to formulate migration Move Groups and the Wave Plans that incorporate them. While there are still migration architects who manually task themselves with spreadsheets to combine servers into Move Groups by way of pivot tables, ATAvision now offers the ability to produce Automated Move Groups, which is especially useful in systems like those involving SAP.
Simply define the rules and the logic will take over. The intelligence and speed of the Automatic Move Group technology alone can save a huge amount of man hours and reduce the risk of human error made when solely relying on spreadsheets.
In addition, prior to migration, client and application teams can forecast AWS spend projections by individual Move Group or through filtering on any number of collected attributes.
- “Point-to-Point” Migration and Sync to AWS with ATAmotion Migration Module
ATAmotion is ATADATA’s core product and has a robust architecture that was created with a mission to migrate Enterprise workloads at scale, enabled by a proprietary multi-threaded clone engine, and advanced AWS API integration points.
What do we mean when we describe ATAmotion as point-to-point? The data path flows from the source machine, directly to the target instance on a specified client subnet inside their VPC on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), without travelling through an intermediary stage, image library, or storage bucket. The architecture allows for the support of migration of dozens of live SAP workloads simultaneously, regardless of underlying OS or Database type, so the migration windows can shrink from weeks to hours for even complex SAP deployments.
ATAmotion supports Windows Server versions from 2003 32bit to 2016, and all common Linux distributions ranging from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SuSE Enterprise Linux, Debian, OpenSuSE, CentOS, Oracle Linux, Amazon Linux, Fedora, and Ubuntu. It supports migration from any cloud environment or on-premises environment to AWS, and between/to all AWS Regions, including the AWS (US) GovCloud Region. If the migration is cross-continent or with low bandwidth capacity, ATAmotion monitors the copy for lag or interruptions and finds the most effective way to complete the data copy successfully.
ATAmotion software can migrate data-intensive SAP applications running on any supported Windows/Linux variant with virtually no downtime. This is mainly because ATAmotion consumes a very low CPU percentage and just a few MBs of memory on client hosts and such low resource utilization anticipates no disruption to services. And ATAmotion migrates all filesystems. It doesn’t matter whether your operating system and its data are split across several LVM logical and physical volumes, or if it’s stored in a hundred disks using fixed partitions, the tool will recreate the same device structure on the target server so that your disk configuration will remain the same.
Furthermore, it has the intelligence of choosing the appropriate method to move your data based on its structure. If the data is stored in filesystems, then it is copied using a file-based copy algorithm. However, if it’s stored in RAW devices, a typical scenario for databases where there is no filesystem, the data is instead copied using a block copy algorithm.
Lastly, ATAmotion incorporates multiple automated synchronization methods to allow for varied cut-over strategies during, and prior to cut-over.
ATADATA platform benefits for SAP on AWS migrations
- Manage a single vendor for holistic end-to end, seamless AWS migration enablement
- Reduce risk with a validated AWS Migration Partner solution to migrate SAP workloads to AWS
- Gain complete insight into source SAP environments prior to AWS migration initiation
- Accelerate timelines migrating dozens of SAP workloads simultaneously (think hours, not weeks)
- Reduce costs and mitigate human error associated with legacy methodologies and technology
- Leverage advanced automation as part of the journey to AWS
- Retire resource intensive on-premises hardware
If you are an Enterprise customer or a service provider evaluating the migration of existing SAP workloads to AWS, you can take advantage of ATADATA’s automation and specific expertise today. Learn more about ATADATA at www.atadata.com/aws.