Many organizations have yet to begin their migration to SAP S/4HANA or are in the early stages of the process. Undertaking such a large project can be daunting since there are myriad potential pitfalls throughout the process. However, the big move also provides opportunities for businesses to transform and scale to new levels. Potential Issues

• Learning Curve: Adapting to new environments such as operating systems and infrastructure can be a difficult adjustment for IT administrators because skilled talents are difficult to find.
• Downtime: Both planned and unplanned downtime can stall progress and result in significant financial losses. It’s critical to design well and implement a robust SAP landscape.
• Lack of Insights into the Production Environment: Complex high availability (HA) deployments can often fail because of a lack of insights. Issues may not be fixed in a timely manner, leading to outages.

High availability issues can be very complex. Companies often struggle to identify configuration issues and drifts in Day 2 operations. Many enterprises need insights into the SAP landscape to help them identify issues in the early stages since outages tend to result from an accumulation of minor issues. To avoid this worst-case scenario, customers must uncover those minor issues and quickly address them. SAPinsider spoke with Sherry Yu, Senior Director of SAP Success Architect at SUSE, a global leader in open-source solutions. SUSE helps accelerate SAP S/4HANA migration, as well as safeguard the SAP landscape once migration is complete. “Customers moving to S/4HANA in the cloud typically face several challenges. First, they need a robust solution to reduce the downtime, and SUSE provides solutions to reduce planned and unplanned downtime. Another solution is to remediate the configuration drifts and also the configuring issues in the HA environment,” Yu said. Yu advises businesses that are still lagging behind in their SAP migration journey to prepare for any upcoming challenges. “The advice to customers is to start planning as soon as possible and seek advice from the industry’s best experts,” said Yu. Opportunities Although this transformation presents significant obstacles, it also gives companies a chance to not just move to the cloud but also transform their entire business operation. Companies looking to leave behind on-premise systems may opt for a cloud-centric strategy in order to gain both agility and power, all while functioning in a more sustainable way. “More important than hitting the deadline is that moving to SAP S/4HANA unlocks the potential to enhance business operations and also to help customers standardize in the cloud transformation journey,“ said Yu. Adopting the cloud allows businesses to get rid of bulky hardware systems and infrastructure. That not only saves space and energy but can significantly increase flexibility and agility. It can aid an enterprise’s bottom line while also ensuring that it runs in a more sustainable fashion. Innovations SUSE is a development platform for SAP HANA and S/4HANA. Thanks to its development platform status, hardware and cloud vendors look at SUSE when it comes to innovating new SAP solutions, providing its customers and partners with thought leadership. SUSE’s thought leadership for SAP S/4HANA migration focuses on innovations to accelerate the migration and safeguard the SAP landscape. Accelerate: The migration process features automated SAP landscape deployment, which can reduce deployment time from months or weeks to days or even hours. Not only can it speed up provisioning but best practices also help reduce errors. Reduce Downtime: SUSE provides comprehensive solutions to reduce unplanned downtime through open-source technologies and planned downtime through live patching and rolling updates. SUSE’s toolsets streamline life cycle and security management, thus strengthening the operations. Increase Insights: Validation uses rules-based detection to find HA configuration issues and ensure quality. Continuous check-in production can also help reduce the chances of an outage. Proactive monitoring can help find and resolve issues before they occur, preventing costly outages. Users can also gain unique insights into SAP HA clusters. Collaboration Different sized companies have different needs as they migrate to SAP S/4HANA, but they all have similar hopes for what SUSE can offer them during the migration. “The customer can expect agility in certification and no gap in the life cycle support,” Yu said. “We provide extended life cycle support for mission critical workload like HANA. Another advantage as to why a company would choose to work with SUSE is the very large customer references. They feel confident that other of the world’s largest companies are running SAP on SUSE.” SUSE works with customers to test and tweak solutions and find challenges so they can be ready to help when any issues occur. “SUSE works a lot with customers behind the scenes,” Yu shared. “The engineering team hosts a customer advisory board that consists of the world’s largest customers from various industries. That’s where they gather feedback from customers directly.” Those customers are invited to pilot Project Trento, a new solution that monitors the SAP landscape, checks configurations against best practices, automatically reflects hyperscalers’ requirements, stays up-to-date with recommendations and visualizes the complete SAP environment. Yu added, “This project is very evolutionary because SUSE observed challenges with the raw configurations in cluster. Trento was developed to validate the environment and also identify drifts in Day 2 operations. For example, one of the world’s largest nationwide retailers, being part of that advisory board, tested Trento during the development phase and provided feedback to the engineering team, which was incorporated into the final release.” SAP Partnership Being the development platform of SAP HANA, SUSE works closely with SAP to address issues identified by customers as they introduce new products or features. “Once the customer challenge is identified, SUSE works on a solution with SAP. Then they start with a prototype that they pilot with a customer who requested that scenario or feature, fine-tuning it in an open-source way,” said Yu. By collaborating with both SAP and the customer, SUSE can more quickly bolster customer capabilities and patch problem areas. Open Source Collaboration is key at SUSE. Beyond working with SAP and the companies on its advisory board, SUSE touts itself as the world’s largest, independent, open-source company on the market. Working as an open-source company enables SUSE to collaborate more freely. “Open source enables industries to work together to strengthen the solution,” Yu said. Independence is also key. According to Yu, “The independent status allows us to work in open source and keep customers’ best interests in mind because there is no conflict in terms of technology. We take the best open-source technology and bundle in our product to support customers.” Reducing Downtime High availability is key for reducing downtime, streamlining processes and maximizing efficiency. Yu says SUSE is keenly aware how even the smallest hiccup can create massive knock-on effects. “For SAP customers, reducing downtime is one of the top priorities,” Yu said. “Because we have the world’s largest companies like customer goods and manufacturing, one minute of downtime could cost millions of dollars.” Though SAP already has some built-in HA functionality, SUSE further improves reliability and reduces TCO through new and improved HA scenarios for SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver through its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications. “We can provide solutions to automate the failover for SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA and the NetWeaver,” Yu stated. “Those solutions don’t just get created out of nowhere because SUSE works closely with SAP and with the customers. As the market leader, SUSE is always on the lookout to identify customer challenges, sometimes by listening to challenges from SAP but sometimes directly from a customer.” Configuration errors are one of the main culprits behind outages. These often take the form of smaller issues that snowball into a larger problem. Therefore, it’s important for businesses to make sure they have a clear view of the SAP landscape as early as possible during their migration journey. “In order to help them have a quick and precise configuration, SUSE provides solutions to identify configuration issues and drifts in Day 2 operations,” Yu said. “We provide insights into the SAP landscape to help them identify issues in early stages because what we have seen is the outages are the result of accumulated minor issues. In order to avoid outages, we help customers discover minor issues and fix them as soon as possible.” Security Many companies have strict security policies that require patching; however, security patching is a time-consuming endeavor that often requires a reboot of the production systems. Live patching not only enhances security but also dramatically reduces planned maintenance downtime. SUSE has extended support of live patching not only in kernel but also in user space. OpenSSL and glibc, two dependencies of SAP HANA, are the libraries most commonly affected by security vulnerabilities. Without the user space live patching, a patch on these libraries will require a system reboot. SUSE offers a dedicated update channel with patches, fixes and updates tested ahead of time to work seamlessly with SAP applications. That allows businesses to remain on the cutting edge while not worrying about whether their most critical systems are stable. German technology and services company Bosch Group plans to utilize SLE Live Patching. Volker Fischer, Senior Manager of Server Services for AIX and Linux at Bosch Group, said, “It will allow us to apply patches to the Linux kernel without rebooting our systems and keep our applications running smoothly to get even closer to zero-downtime deployments.” Looking Deeper When evaluating partners in business technology transformation, some companies make the mistake of looking only at surface-level services. Yu points out that it’s important to look beyond what is being offered and consider the expertise behind those solutions. “The devil is in the details,” she says. “When it comes to issues, the customers may not be aware of the fact that before one solution is released, SUSE worked with SAP to identify customer challenges and brainstorm solutions. It took SUSE years of development and working with customers in the pilot phase and also gathering feedback from customer advisory meetings to keep enhancing the solution before releasing it. That’s why SUSE, including the support, has very in-depth knowledge when customers have issues to troubleshoot and reaches a resolution in a timely manner.” A significant amount of behind-the-scenes work went into the quality of the documentations, support, trainings and webinars that SUSE offered. They include development, productization, QA and maintenance. SUSE also collaborates with a wide set of technology peers and cohorts to provide integrated and custom solutions to address specific customer challenges and issues. Conclusion Although this transformation journey may seem intimidating at the outset, businesses can use it as an opportunity to enhance their capabilities by utilizing the wide array of services provided by cloud technology. By relying on SUSE’s thought leadership in this area, companies can effectively accelerate the migration, minimize downtime and quickly troubleshoot issues that may arise while also maintaining security throughout the process.