Modernizing On-Premises and Hybrid Cloud SAP Landscapes without Disruption

I love it when problem solvers collaborate with other like-minded people to find elegant solutions to important problems. This is exactly how Cisco came together with SAP to realize our common vision to help customers modernize infrastructures without disruption, and take advantage of flexible, innovative cloud architectures. Our teams have worked hard over the last seven months, and we’re excited to bring the SAP Data Hub on Cisco Container Platform to market. It will be available in November 2018 and is expected to be on the SAP App Center in Q1 2019.

Our mutual SAP enterprise customers face a fundamental challenge in realizing the benefits of a hybrid cloud environment: they need to keep data on-premises and close to their business for compliance reasons, but at the same time they want to consume modern cloud services and offerings. Many hesitate to adopt hybrid cloud because of the infrastructure refresh it takes to accommodate the magnitude of new data, users, and service delivery requirements that can come with it. Having to limit where systems can run because of where they put their data shouldn’t be a compromise that customers need to make.

Containers and hybrid cloud deployments are really gaining momentum. The Cisco and SAP teams enthusiastically agreed that systems based on Kubernetes can serve as a great platform and offer broad adoption options across major public clouds as well as on-premises for these customers. What we’ve built with SAP gives our customers the best of both worlds, allowing them to keep data close to their business for compliance or security, while still having the flexibility of using modern public cloud services.

Cisco already has a broad portfolio of SAP infrastructure and innovation solutions for multicloud environments, so we’re in the best position to make this happen for our customers. Engineering, architecture, product marketing, and business teams from both companies got together to burn the midnight oil and solve the problem. We looked at mutual roadmaps, business plans, technologies, value propositions, and benefits to achieve a clear path to a viable solution. Cisco and SAP demonstrated a proof-of-concept in June and today, the Cisco Container Platform is fully certified for SAP Data Hub for on-premises deployments.

This solution creates a Kubernetes-based containerized core for big data capture across a hybrid enterprise, regardless of the original data source or application. Cisco and SAP have jointly tested and validated Cisco Container Platform with SAP Data Hub to help customers deploy, manage, and monitor applications and the data they consume, wherever they consume it. Now, customers can quickly and easily run their production-grade SAP Data Hub environments on-premises and in public clouds, in a secure and consistent manner without having to worry about the underlying container complexity.

Our engineering teams have been working together to make it possible to run traditional SAP ERP applications, SAP HANA databases, SAP HANA apps, and SAP Data Hub with the Cisco Container Platform running on HyperFlex. The entire SAP environment can run on one modern, hyperconverged infrastructure platform (HCI). Cisco HyperFlex is the only HCI solution where customers can do all of this in one system. It’s also the first HCI solution to run a virtualized SAP SD benchmarking.

Long term, SAP Data Hub on Cisco Container Platform will benefit from the larger Cisco Hybrid Cloud solutions aimed at delivering a consistent IT environment and seamless integration across both public and on-premises clouds.

It’s a privilege to work with thinkers and visionaries that develop innovative solutions like this to solve challenges and deliver successful outcomes for our customers. I’m really proud of how our teams came together and look forward collaborating on more solutions in the coming months.

Check out the links below to learn more.

SAP press release

SAP Data Hub on Cisco Container Platform

Guest blog by Dr. Lars Dannecker, SAP