
Morning All,
while preparing the "call notes" for next week's #SAPSysArchs S/4HANA call something
struck me, and I know I'm going to get shot for this, for stating a no-brainer, but I don't
think it is such a no-brainer for the wider SAP community and Customer base.
Question: Does S/4HANA run on Oracle ?
Answer: No it runs (in the on-premise scenario) on SAP's Hana database
There's more to it than this...
Most people who have been around SAP's Hana db for the last few years will know and
understand that SAP have rolled out Hana in a very very controlled way.
From the beginning, there were very tight controls on:
. Hardware that a Customer can run Hana on - only a Certified Appliance from a Certified
Hardware Vendor - This is the Appliance Model
. In the beginning only SUSE Operating System was supported
The consequence of this was challenging for the following reason. For most large SAP
Customers, who might run their Enterprise SAP systems on for example on HP/UX&Oracle
or AIX&DB2, if these Customers would need to install a new SAP Product Landscape,
normally all they would need to do is request their Infrastructure Team to provision a (Virtual)
Server and Operating System and then make the installation, and often in such an Operation
the Infrastructure Team has a pretty fast turn around for provisioning Server capacity.
With the (as it was then) new SAP Hana, and the Appliance Model, if a Customer wanted to
install a new SAP Product Landscape on Hana, the Customer normally would not have a Hana
Appliance on the shelf and would need to go through the whole long process of selecting a
Vendor, purchasing a Hana Appliance, getting it installed and provisioned in their DataCenter
and finally probably after a number of months, doing the installation/migration to Hana. This
has had a huge impact on Customer's agility for implementing Hana and the take up of Hana.
Subsequently during Hana db's journey to maturity, the democratisation of Hana provisioning is
happening.
Today, Customers may decide whether to:
. Implement Hana using the Appliance Model
. Implement Hana using TDI - Tailored DataCenter Integration
With Tailored DataCenter Integration, basically the Customer has the freedom to purchase
Hardware for running Hana and doing their own installations and operations of the Hana db.
Consequently, for a Customer implementing TDI, once the Customer has the TDI Hana
Infrastructure Platform in place, the Customer's agility for reacting to and implementing
new Business Demands forimplementations on Hana will be much faster because provisioning
Hana infrastructure will be much faster.
And now back to the point of this blog and the question, Does S/4HANA run on Oracle ?
We all know the answer is no, we all know S/4HANAneeds Hana db and only runs on Hana db.
I think we can also agree there are currently more SAP Customers who do not have Hana in
their DataCenter than do.
The Customers who do not yet have Hana in their DataCenter are going to need to have Hana
infrastructure in place before they can even think about moving to S/4HANA - are we really sure
that everybody understands the impact of that and the lead times which are going to be involved
in putting Hana infrastructure into their DataCenters ?
Already I am seeing Lines of Business coming back from TechEd and Sapphire and asking for
the timeline and road map for moving to S/4.
In the past migrating a BW db to Hana was a nice to have.
With SAP ERP, the next version of the product is S/4HANA, most Customers have an upgrade strategy,
be it every year, every two years, every three years, unlike the nice to have of migrating BW to
Hana, upgrading ERP to S/4HANA is not a nice to have but an unavoidable must have.
And with S/4HANA, the next version of the SAP ERP Component, if a Customer wants to
implement the shall we say, next version of SAP, they're going to need to have Hana servers
in place. to go to the next version of SAP.
During the Hana journey so far, from what I can see, penetration of the Hana db in the Customer
base has been gentle, with the next version of ERP only running on Hana we will see during
the coming years an exponential increase in the number of Customers running Hana.
My message to colleagues at SAP is this, I suggest, in parallel to preparing everybody for
S/4 Hana, also keep reminding the Customers that to upgrade/transition to S/4HANA, they
need to be asap preparing their SAP Hana Hardware/Server Infrastructure for provisioning Hana
infrastructure to enable the S/4HANA transition to even happen.
There are a lot of nice blogs on the subject of preparing for S/4 Hana, especially from owen.pettiford3
. Beginners Guide to Transitioning to S/4HANA 1511 On Premise edition for Existing SAP ERP 6.0x users
. S/4 HANA is the next version of Business Suite (R/3) - What to do now
Still, I've not seen enough of the clear message, to go to S/4HANA you need to get Hana into your DataCenter,
there is a lead time for getting Hana into your DataCenter, including:
. Choosing the Vendor
. Choosing the Hardware
. Choosing the Operating Model
. Designing your internal Infrastructure and Basis Operating Model
. Securing the Hana infrastructure
. Planning the Maintenance of the Hana Infrastructure
etc
What do you think ?
Andy.
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