SAP® Migrations are a daily part of any SAP BASIS administrator’s life and possibly one of the most meticulously planned processes which can happen in the lifecycle of an SAP landscape. The migration alone could be to move one or all of the SAP applications , data and technology to either the same or totally different platform. As these landscapes are typically considered business critical any migration needs to be done within a specified time frame with planned contingencies for any issues.
This is the first Part of a four part series about moving seamlessly between SAP HANA hosting types using storage. The other posts in this series can be found at these locations.
SAP HANA Data Mobility Part 1 : Introduction
SAP HANA Data Mobility Part 2 : pHANA on-premises migration techniques
SAP HANA Data Mobility Part 3 : pHANA to vHANA and vHANA to pHANA
SAP HANA Data Mobility Part 4 : Hybrid Cloud
The focus of this blog post series is to identify how a well architected data platform like Pure Storage® FlashArray™ and Pure’s Cloud Block Store™, powered by the Purity Operating Environment, can be used to migrate between different platform types using snapshot and replication technologies.
This blog series will showcase the following storage platforms ,features and functionality as examples for each data mobility technique :
- FlashArray//X – An All-Flash , 100% software driven and 100% NVMe storage platform.
- Pure’s Cloud Block Store – Cloud Block Storage is block storage stored in the cloud. It shares a common platform with FlashArray//X.The Purity Operating environment which powers FlashArray has been taken and purpose built for different cloud platforms. Sharing the purity operating environment between the two products allows for more dynamic mobility as volumes can seamlessly replicate between them.
- VMware® Virtual Volumes (vVols) – A layer of complexity is removed in a virtualization environment by allowing virtual infrastructure to work directly with storage.
- Asynchronous Replication – The replication of volume snapshots between one or more FlashArrays.
- ActiveDR™ – The continuous replication of data between two FlashArrays.
- ActiveCluster™ – Synchronous replication of one or more volumes between two FlashArray systems. Data can be read and written to both arrays.
- Protection Group – A protection group is the management object used to manage and replicate volume snapshots. Protecting Groups are used when doing asynchronous replication or snapshot offload to a third party.
- POD – A POD is the management object used to manage and replicate volumes. POD’s are used in scenarios requiring the functionality provided by ActiveDR or ActiveCluster.
When referring to a deployment platform for SAP HANA I will be implying any one of the following :
- Physical on-premises bare-metal server(s) (referred to in this blog series as pHANA)
- Physical on-premises virtualization using VMware (referred to in this blog series as vHANA)
- Public Cloud hosted deployments such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure (referred to in this blog series as cHANA)
In the next part of this series , Part 2: pHANA on-premises migration techniques, the concepts introduced in this blog post will be expanded upon to showcase how different migration techniques can be used to perform multiple migration types with physical bare-metal systems.