This ESG Solution Showcase was commissioned by Dell EMC and Intel® is distributed under license from ESG. © 2019 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Overview

Transformation is the new mantra for IT as businesses seek to deliver higher levels of personalized digital experiences to improve loyalty and drive revenue. Modern IT environments are also transforming from centralized data centers to distributed environments connected to public clouds and, increasingly, edge environments. As a result, the network plays a more important role in ensuring connectivity to key applications and a positive customer experience while using those applications.

There are several key initiatives driving these transformations. ESG research highlights the rapid adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives, with 36% of organizations reporting active IoT projects and another 41% planning to launch one in the next 12-24 months. In addition, digital transformation initiatives are also on the rise, with almost one-fifth (17%) now reporting mature transformation initiatives and another 40% with transformation initiatives in process.1 As IoT initiatives drive compute to the edge for real-time analysis and digital transformation creates new business processes and opportunities, mission-critical workloads like SAP will face increased pressure to adapt to these modern IT environments and deliver more meaningful results.

Maximizing the potential of business data, such as the insights offered by SAP HANA, S/4HANA, and SAP Leonardo, will be essential to business survival. Unfortunately, the business cannot stop while IT redesigns the infrastructure to take full advantage of its SAP implementation and most enterprise IT organizations already have existing highly virtualized, mission-critical SAP environments requiring daily care.

1 Source: ESG Research Report, 2019 Technology Spending Intentions Survey, February 2019.

Maximize the Value of SAP from the DC to the Cloud to the Edge with the Dell EMC Networking SolutionsDate: March 2019 Author: Bob Laliberte, Senior Analyst

Abstract: The ability to collect data from every corner of the enterprise to quickly and efficiently turn that data into knowledge and wisdom is a competitive advantage in a modern, digital economy. Among the complex and diverse workloads managed by IT organizations, SAP often ranks among the top in both its importance to day-to-day operations and its potential to identify new business opportunities. Unlocking the value of all this increasingly distributed data and taking full advantage of enterprise SAP offerings requires the appropriate network connectivity to support SAP workloads in encompassing edge, cloud, and core environments.

Solution Showcase

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Solution Showcase: Maximize the Value of SAP from the DC to the Cloud to the Edge with Dell EMC Networking Solutions 2

© 2019 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Internal Use - Confidential

With SAP, transforming from a centralized to a distributed environment can be a challenge. Businesses must ensure that existing deployments are retained while new environments are created. Modernized IT environments need to provide the connectivity with the necessary resiliency and security, while delivering the performance, management, automation, flexibility, and scale to support these complex environments. Simultaneously, IT must provide a smooth path to SAP HANA, S/4HANA, and SAP Leonardo at distributed locations. To accomplish this transition successfully, IT needs a partner who understands all facets of this environment. Dell EMC, a recognized leader in IT infrastructure, can ensure the appropriate level of connectivity and experience. By leveraging its network portfolio of open networking, software-defined networking, storage networking, and SD-WAN solutions, Dell EMC can enable organizations to optimize modern SAP deployments.

Modern Network Environments Are Critical to Successful SAP Deployments

In these modern and highly distributed environments, it will be critical to ensure the proper connectivity for existing and new SAP deployments. To do that, organizations need to partner with technology companies that understand all facets of SAP and its associated network requirements.

More specifically, as organizations evolve their SAP environments to SAP HANA and S/4HANA and deploy Data Hubs and Leonardo to accommodate distributed environments, it will be important to work with partners that understand and can deliver the appropriate network solutions. Typically, for SAP deployments, organizations need to consider the following network environments:

• Client connectivity – This is the access part of a network responsible for connecting users to applications. This used totypically be an IP-based connection to a centralized application for users, which would normally reside in the datacenter. However, in modern IT environments, users could be anywhere and using a variety of devices, such assmartphones, to connect, so it is critical that this network provide the appropriate levels of access, security, androbustness to provide a good experience, regardless of location, and span the campus, branch, and even mobileusers.

• Data center network – This network connects SAP application nodes to other data center resources and to end-users.It is also typically IP-based, but with a requirement that it be highly available, meaning that it needs to provide fullredundancy and no single points of failure. This becomes more complex as the number of servers, storage, and usersincreases. It is imperative to ensure that these connections have enough bandwidth and performance to handle peakloads and the increasing amount of east-west traffic patterns. Note that as the complexity increases, it is even moreimportant to find network solutions that can enhance productivity and streamline operations.

• Storage network – Although SAP is an in-memory database, best practices dictate persistent storage arrays that arereplicated and that support a robust backup environment, as well. Typically, large organizations have deployed FibreChannel (FC) or IP-based storage area networks (SANs) to leverage shared enterprise storage. As previouslymentioned, the storage network would also include functionality to support business continuity or disaster recoveryefforts. This may include supporting synchronous or asynchronous replication based on a desired recovery pointobjective (RPO). These networks move massive amounts of data through the SAN and across metro or wide areanetworks, so it is important that your partners understand and have experience with these networks. Also, as flashstorage technology continues to advance, the SAP environment needs to take advantage of end-to-end low latencyfabrics leveraging non-volatile memory express (NVMe).

• Wide area network (WAN) – Separate from the potential use of the WAN for replication, as SAP environments adaptto distributed environments, the WAN will play a more important role in collecting data from both cloud and edgeenvironments. SAP has introduced Data Hubs (including Vora) to help incorporate the vast amounts of data at theselocations. Furthermore, SAP Leonardo enables organizations to deploy tools for real-time analysis at remote locations

Solution Showcase: Maximize the Value of SAP from the DC to the Cloud to the Edge with Dell EMC Networking Solutions 3

© 2019 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Internal Use - Confidential

to accommodate this shift. However, even if the data is analyzed remotely, it will still likely be transferred back to a core data center or cloud environment for historical analysis, and organizations need to plan for the appropriate WAN connectivity.

In order to accommodate the evolving technologies and expanded uses of SAP/HANA, IT organizations need modern network solutions to transform from the core to the cloud to the edge.

The Value of Dell Networking Solutions for SAP

To optimize an SAP environment, it is critical to deploy effective solutions across servers, storage, and networking. Dell EMC is dedicated to providing complete solutions to support SAP that not only incorporate its own open networking hardware and software but that also leverage a “better together” partnership with a rich ecosystem of network operating software vendors and close integration with VMware solutions. These solutions include:

• Open networking solutions – Dell EMC’s unique open networking portfolio spans the data center, campus, and branch with a full line of Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches and software solutions to power SAP environments. These solutions will provide the appropriate IP or Fibre Channel connectivity to power client connectivity and data center server, storage, and converged infrastructure (CI)/hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) requirements. Much like today’s choice of operating systems on computing platforms, disaggregating the operating system from the switching hardware enables enterprises to choose the network software that best fits their needs. However, it should be noted that Dell EMC also delivers its own operating system (OS10 Enterprise Edition powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors) to deliver end-to-end management solutions. Included in the OS10 software is SmartFabric services that can help customers simplify and automate the design, deployment, and operation of fabric interconnects. Leveraging partners like Aerohive and Ruckus for wireless connectivity will ensure that everyone who needs access to SAP can easily connect regardless of location or device.

• Storage and replication environments – Relying on its vast experience in storage networking and replication environments, Dell EMC can provide a wide range of solutions to suit the most demanding recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) for highly available SAP environments. This is very important as it requires different skills to interpret the IP, FC, or NVMe storage requirements and translate them to networking requirements. To guarantee the highest levels of performance for SAP solutions, Dell EMC can deliver full end-to-end NVMe fabric solutions powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors. Dell EMC also has several different solutions to accommodate synchronous and asynchronous data transfer, as well as backup and archiving solutions to ensure that SAP data is properly protected.

• Overlay networks – Many organizations want to take advantage of software-defined networking solutions to further increase flexibility and agility for their SAP environments. Solutions like VMware’s NSX, running on Intel® Architecture, enable organizations to build out a software-defined network as part of an overarching software-defined data center. These solutions can accelerate new deployments and access. However, it is important to remember that these overlay networks require an underlay network to support them. Dell EMC’s open networking solutions discussed previously are designed to provide a robust, high-performance underlay network to support VMware’s NSX solution for SAP environments.

• SD-WAN – When connectivity is required from remote locations to the data center or directly to a cloud environment, SD-WAN technology is rapidly becoming the de facto choice to secure and optimize private links and internet broadband connections. Dell EMC can assist organizations by providing VMware NSX-SD-WAN by Velocloud software solutions on Intel® Architecture, and the Virtual Edge Platforms (VEP) specifically tuned to run SD-WAN, as well as other solutions like Leonardo by SAP. This consolidation helps to minimize the remote hardware footprint, enabling SAP functionality at the edge, and ensuring secure data transport.

Solution Showcase: Maximize the Value of SAP from the DC to the Cloud to the Edge with Dell EMC Networking Solutions 4

© 2019 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Internal Use - Confidential

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© 2019 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Figure 1. Dell Network Portfolio Benefits for SAP

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group

The Bigger Truth

SAP is a critical part of the IT modernization process. Organizations need to ensure a successful transition to modern SAP environments like HANA, S/4HANA, and Leonardo. It will be critical for IT to support these new environments and provide robust connectivity and positive user experiences. Organizations that can successfully modernize the underlying IT infrastructure, and specifically the network, to support these innovative SAP environments will be better able to reap the rewards. In a digital economy, data is considered a strategic asset and it is important to have a modern IT infrastructure to enable SAP solutions to unlock the value of that data for competitive advantage.

Workloads such as SAP are simply too important to trust to a partner without the level of innovation, experience, and resume of Dell EMC. With innovations and tools tailored to the specific needs of SAP, Dell EMC’s Open Network portfolios, with Intel® architecture-based platform, offer modern connectivity solutions, enabling businesses to harness the full potential of their specific SAP environments, which drives business success today and into the future.

Dell EMC provides additional value for your SAP transformations by providing organizations the ability to procure all the requisite servers, storage, and networking technologies from a single vendor reinforced by professional services and supported on day two and beyond by a global support team.

For more information, visit DellEMC.com/

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