How HP Inc. scales and manages mission-critical SAP workloads on AWS (MAM241)

Here's a detailed summary of the video transcription in markdown format:

HP's Journey to Migrate and Modernize their Mission-Critical SAP Workloads on AWS

HP's Background and Transformation Journey

• HP is a 85-year-old technology company with two main product lines: Personal Systems and Printers.
• In the early 2000s, HP embarked on a strategic program called SIMP to standardize and consolidate their global IT landscape from 14-15 environments to a single global SAP environment.
• This transition was completed around 2020, resulting in a single S/4HANA system running around 90% of HP's revenue.
• HP's SAP landscape includes mission-critical business processes like order management, logistics, and financial reporting, with a database footprint of over 120,000 operations per second.

Drivers for Modernizing SAP Workloads on AWS

The key business drivers for HP's migration and modernization efforts were:

• Standardizing business processes across the organization
• Enabling rapid scalability and flexibility
• Addressing technical debt and improving reliability

These business requirements translated to technical requirements such as:

• Reducing technical debt
• Improving scalability and reliability
• Leveraging AWS's native cloud capabilities for high availability and disaster recovery

HP's SAP Landscape on AWS

• HP has migrated 14 SAP landscapes to SAP Rise on AWS, comprising Dev, QA, Pre-Prod, and Prod environments.
• They also leverage various AWS services like BTP, Ariba, IBP, and SaaS solutions like Workday and ServiceNow.
• The decision to choose AWS was driven by HP's existing AWS footprint for non-SAP workloads, AWS's SAP certifications, and the migration support provided by AWS.

Architectural Patterns for Scaling SAP Workloads

HP has adopted both scale-up and scale-out patterns for their SAP Hana database deployments:

1. Scale-up: Resizing EC2 instances to provide more capacity to the SAP Hana database. HP has completed 15 such scaling events, with 13 being scale-up.
2. Scale-out: Migrating from a scale-up SAP Hana deployment to a scale-out architecture on multiple EC2 instances. This involved careful planning to ensure optimal table distribution and cross-node data access.
3. Selective Scale-out: Carving out a specific data segment (e.g., SAP IBP data) from the main scale-up deployment and creating a new scale-out cluster for that data.

Key considerations for these scaling workflows include instance placement within the same AZ, cluster placement groups, and ongoing management of the scale-out architecture.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery for SAP on AWS

HP's HA and DR strategy includes:

• Hot standby configuration for HA, with a warm standby system in a different region for DR.
• RTO of 15 minutes or less, and RPO of 15 minutes or less, achieved through automation and close collaboration with the business.

Transitioning to SAP Rise on AWS

HP's key learnings and considerations for the SAP Rise migration:

• Importance of the pre-migration agreement with SAP, including software, services, and compliance requirements.
• Thorough testing, with a focus on data integrity and seamless integration with existing change management processes.
• Establishing a strong operational governance model with SAP and AWS teams.
• Continuous improvement by leveraging the latest AWS capabilities for SAP workloads.

Next Steps and Recommendations

• Ongoing migration to SAP 2023, with a focus on Gen2 initiatives.
• Continuous evaluation of AWS capabilities to further enhance the SAP landscape.
• Feedback to the organizers to help improve future sessions.