LogiPlus Managing Director Axel Kunkelmann reports on the success guarantees for migrating IBM Power systems to SAP S/4 HANA
As Axel Kunkelmann presents in the June issue of the professional magazine DV-Dialog, there are complexities and stumbling blocks when switching to SAP HANA on IBM Power, but these can be mastered in a targeted manner by taking the right measures. He outlines how to approach such a migration and what to look out for. As a long-standing IBM expert, he differentiates between the topics of Power infrastructure, hosting, operations and application migration.
Kunkelmann sees the areas of power infrastructure and hosting as relatively uncritical. “If you look at the IBM Power infrastructure, there are only a few hurdles that need to be jumped when converting to SAP S/4HANA. This is because S/4HANA is based on the SAP HANA Platform, which in turn is based on Linux,” describes the SAP and IT expert.
And there are some small differences in hosting, such as a Hardware Management Console (HCM). But in general, these deviations are quite small compared to the hosting of SAP S/4HANA on x86 and thus relatively easy to manage.
In contrast, there are serious differences in the operational area. “The extent of these differences depends primarily on where the “SAP classic customer” comes from and what business model they operate. Effects occur, for example, in the areas of backup or high availability,” says the LogiPlus managing director, explaining one of the central challenges.
But he has a very concrete solution proposal ready for this. “A customer can prepare for this very well, however, for example by installing a small SAP S/4HANA sandbox and testing on this installation in advance.“
For Kunkelmann, however, the application changeover is one of the most significant challenges in migration. “This is usually associated with considerable effort. First of all, all “inhibitors” that could jeopardize a successful conversion from ERP to SAP S/4HANA must be identified and cleaned up. This means cleaning up the legacy system (“housekeeping”) is necessary, as is the identification of in-house developments, so-called Z-programs. These are to be adapted to conform to S/4HANA as part of the changeover.”
The resulting advantages with HANA on IBM Power are immense: highest flexibility for the actual resource requirements (memory and cores), significantly higher availability for business-critical S/4HANA workloads, better performance and improved TCO compared to x86.
