De-risk your migration to SAP HANA with services from HPE Pointnext

[HPE_Alliances]

By Nick Crnkovic

You know it has to get done. You can also clearly see the very impressive benefits that will be yours when you complete your migration to SAP HANA. What’s not so clear is what you’ll encounter during the migration itself. 

Will it be full of chaos and confusion with pitfalls and dangers at every turn as they show on some of those animal-themed channels on cable television? You know. Fierce predators, rampaging rivers, endless deserts dotted with the bones of unsuccessful previous migrations. Or will it be one of those nice ones where the camera flies with or next to a flock of birds that seem to be above all obstacles and impervious to most dangers? 

The answer largely depends on who you select to assist you. If your choice is HPE and HPE Pointnext, you’ll be flying with the birds rather than being pursued by predators. 

From Any-DB to SAP HANA 

HPE Pointnext has developed a process based on best practices that makes the migration a Smooth Transition. The process has been proven to work in one of the largest and most complex SAP HANA migrations ever undertaken: HPE’s own. Tried, tested, improved, evolved, and refined, our process consists of four major activities:

1. Assess, with the goal of defining/reviewing key SAP HANA migration steps, plans, and roadmaps
2. Prepare to ensure completion of operating system (OS), database management system (DBMS), and hypervisor upgrades. This activity also involves system preparation and migration testing
3. Upgrade/Migrate that encompasses complete deployment, production migration, SAP certification, and acceptance
4. Manage with its emphasis on training, knowledge transfer, and transition to operations. Decommissioning of legacy systems is also involved 

De-risking best practices

Throughout the four activities listed above, we implement a set of best practices that not only de-risk the migration but also enhance the overall environment and prepare it for success. These include: 

Performing housekeeping tasks that get rid of “junk” like abandoned projects, unneeded schemas, obsolete customizations and custom code. These tasks also involve cleaning archive data to reduce the footprint of the data, accelerating the migration goes faster and leading to better HANA performance. Technical data, application logs and system logs are also included in the clean-up.

Utilizing a strict migration methodology dedicated to the following guiding principles:

• Don’t cut corners and take shortcuts
• Leverage expertise, SAP notes and best practices
• Prepare the source system with latest fixes and support packages
• Chose the right Migration Tool, typically DMO. This option of Software Update Manager (SUM) offers SAP’s latest generation migration tool for a combined update and migration

Prove, prove and prove again through the use of:

• Mock migrations and rehearsals
• Proper testing that involves checking the data, interfaces, and user connections. Also requires the performance of an end-to-end transaction
• An approach that scripts and times the cutover 

De-risked defined

HPE recently proved the effectiveness of our de-risking process by helping a large financial Institution on its journey to HANA. The project was a combination of an upgrade and migration to HANA that had HPE dealing with:

• 25TB SAP BW Database on Oracle
• Custom Developed  Data Load Tools
• Small Outage window 

Using the HPE best-practice-based approach, we were able to: 

• Redevelop their load process using standard tools
• Migrate 10TB of data in 12 hours (~800GB per hour)
• Achieve transfer rate in 2 test runs
• Complete the upgrade process in an additional 10 hours
• Limit downtime to 22 hours 

Details? Definitely  

Check out the Services for SAP and HANA Family Guide for more information on how HPE Pointnext can de-risk your migration process and make it absolutely de-lightful: