SAP S/4 cloud Migration strategy

Cloud migration is the process of moving digital assets — like data,

workloads, IT resources, or applications — to cloud infrastructure. Cloud
migration commonly refers to moving tools and data from old, legacy
infrastructure or an on-premises data center to the cloud.

It can also refer to moving from one cloud to another cloud. A migration may
involve moving all or just some assets
What are the types of cloud migration strategies?
There are three basic types or patterns of cloud migration. In
the order below, they run from easiest and fastest (with some
drawbacks) to more difficult (with bigger benefits). 

Lift and shift

Move and improve
Rip and replace

1. Lift and Shift (Rehosting)

What are the advantages of a lift and shift (also called “rehosting) approach? It’s
quick and requires minimal refactoring. But (and this is a big but) the 
downsides of lift-and-shift include the fact that you may miss out on benefits you’d
see if going cloud native because you’re performing the bare minimum changes
needed.
2. Move and Improve (Replatforming)
The move-and-improve (or replatforming) approach to migration includes making
some modern updates to your application — like, say, introducing scaling or
automation — without throwing the whole thing out.

3 Rip and Replace  (Refactoring)

This approach (also called refactoring or re-architecting) means rebuilding your
workload from scratch to be “cloud-native.” It takes an investment in time and skills
development (particularly reskilling and upskilling your existing talent), but it pays
out with the maximum benefits available in the cloud. 
Migrating SAP HANA to cloud
There are two different options you can use to migrate your SAP HANA database to
cloud:
OPTION 1: Asynchronous Replication uses SAP’s built-in replication tool to provide
continuous data replication from the source or primary system to the target or
secondary system which in this case will be residing on cloud. It’s best for mission-
critical applications for which minimum downtime is a high priority, and for large
databases. In addition, the high level of automation means that the process
requires less manual intervention.
OPTION 2: Backup and Restore relies on SAP’s backup utility to create an image of
the database that is then transferred to cloud, where it is restored in the new
environment. Downtime for this method varies by database size, so large databases
may require more downtime via this method versus asynchronous replication. It
also involves more manual tasks. However, it requires fewer resources to perform,
making it an attractive option for less urgent use cases such as smaller systems or
non-production systems where longer migration cutover time is tolerable.
GCP has its own list of migration services.
Transfer Service — Execute large-scale data transfers from online and on-
premises sources to Google Cloud Storage.
Transfer Appliance — For offline bulk data migration, Transfer Appliance lets
you securely capture, ship, and upload data using 100TB or 480TB models.
Migrate for Anthos — Migrate and modernize existing workloads to containers.
Migrate for Compute Engine — Get enterprise applications running in Google
Cloud while data migrates in the background. Validate, run, and migrate
applications without reworking them.
BigQuery Data Transfer Service — Let your analytics team set the foundation
for a BigQuery data warehouse and schedule and automate data transfers from
your SaaS applications.
Deploying an SAP HANA system on Google Cloud
Google Cloud offers SAP-certified virtual machines (VMs) optimized for SAP products,
including SAP HANA and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, as well as dedicated servers for
SAP HANA for environments greater than 12TB

Moving an SAP HANA Database to Google Cloud

There are two different options you can use to rehost your SAP HANA database to Google
Cloud, and each has pros and cons that you should consider when deciding on your
approach.
Option 1: Asynchronous replication uses SAP’s built-in replication tool to provide
continuous data replication from the source system (also known as the primary system) to
the destination or secondary system—in this case residing on Google Cloud. It’s best for
mission-critical applications for which minimum downtime is a high priority, and for large
databases. In addition, the high level of automation means that the process requires less
manual intervention. Here’s where you can learn more on HANA Asynchronous Replication
.

Option 2: Backup and restore relies on SAP’s backup utility to create an image of the
database that is then transferred to Google Cloud, where it is restored in the new
environment. Downtime for this method varies by database size, so large databases may
require more downtime via this method vs. asynchronous replication
SAP HANA Scale-up and Scale-out

In a scale-up scenario, you utilize the compute, memory, network, and I/O capacity of
a single instance If you require more capacity, you can resize your instances to a
different instance type.

In a scale-out scenario, you add capacity to your SAP HANA system by adding new
instances to the SAP HANA cluster. For example, once you reach the maximum memory
capacity of a single instance, you can scale out your SAP HANA cluster and add more
instances.

One can go with either Scale-Up or Scale-Out. In this case the maximum for Scale up
and Scale Out can be 3TB/node.
 Points for migration
1 High availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) for SAP HANA solutions are
important considerations for business continuation
Check native automatic recovery feature
2 It is important to achieve HA/DR for HANA system on cloud
3 host auto-failover fault recovery feature in scale out system
4 Deploy HANA in high-availability cluster –use
multiple availibility zones
4 Is storage level replication & system l replication
SAP HANA hardware partners offer a storage-level replication solution, which
replicates the SAP HANA storage volumes (data, logs, etc.) or file system on a remote,
networked storage system to recover the SAP HANA system with low RTO during a
disaster.

45HANA System Replication HANA System Replication (HSR) is a high availability and
disaster recovery solution provided by SAP. HSR follows the “N+N” approach, where
you configure the same number of nodes for both the primary and the secondary
system.
HANA BACKUP & RESTORE
Although SAP HANA is an in-memory database, it persists all changes in persistent
storage to recover and resume from power outages without any loss of data.
Persisted SAP HANA data and log files can be regularly backed up to a remote
location for disaster recovery purposes