Virtustream Migrating SAP Systems to Cloud

Rodney J. Rogers, CEO

The projected growth and performance of a business depends on the efficiency of an enterprise in managing resources. SAP environment accelerates data processing and management of resources, and enables enterprises to handle information from a single screen with ease. But running mission-critical applications on-premise in SAP can reduce their performance while increasing the expense in maintaining servers locally. Virtustream, a part of Dell Technologies provides cloud services for SAP solutions, enabling enterprises, government agencies, and service providers to move any production and mission-critical applications to cloud. The company provides trusted application environments that are transparent, continuously monitored and readily complies with industry and government regulations. The trust is ensured with a reliable infrastructure, assured performance Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and integrated multi-level security and encryption.

Virtustream’s xStream is a cloud management platform that optimizes SAP environment with better performance, faster time to market, and increased efficiency to free up resources across people, capacity, and budgets. The platform can be integrated to data centers, virtualization environments, or deployed as a greenfield solution to provide enterprise class public, private, community, or hybrid clouds to its customers. This integration delivers economic and business benefits for entire portfolio of applications—including SAP. xStream allows its users to move into the cloud, and automate, optimize and outperform traditional operations in ERP, CRM, database, mail, or web apps. With the platform on-board, enterprise IT is enabled to run custom applications in the cloud with SLAs structured at the application performance level instead of traditional on-premise infrastructure.

At the core of the platform lies Virtustream’s cloud resource management technology—μVM resource management. The technology follows a consumption-based approach that enables customers to provision and measure resources in cloud through the platform.

We collaborate with the SAP team on a regular basis to build new and innovative solutions

This yields significant advantages compared to the allocation-based method of other clouds, including unified measurement and billing across clouds, improved performance, efficient resource utilization, and true consumption billing. By leveraging the technology, the xStream platform calculates and accumulates μVM consumption data on a per-workload basis by equipping the underlying virtual and physical machines with necessary measuring instruments. Post accumulation, xStream makes this data available to the user via the xStream management portal. The platform also uses the information to customize resource allocation for meeting workload requirements.

Enterprises deploy SAP for running critical production systems including ERP and CRM efficiently but the migration of IT infrastructure of Domino Sugar, a manufacturer and distributor of sweetener products, to vendors was not optimal. The client needed a solution to migrate their systems to cloud for enhancing IT operations, reducing risk, and offloading IT management. With Virtustream’s consumption-based cloud platform, Domino gained the ability to handle complex production applications by moving their complete IT infrastructure on xStream. Virtustream’s utility billing model offered Domino the ability to pay only for the precise computing power. As a result, Domino’s SAP systems were operating at twice the speed on xStream and are highly available and secure. In three years, the client’s total cost of ownership decreased by forty percent. The cost savings enabled business growth and the flexibility obtained from running applications on the cloud allowed Domino’s team to focus on delivering business value instead of managing hardware.

Moving ahead, Virtustream has plans to improve the capabilities of their offerings and simultaneously enable their clients to migrate their SAP system to cloud more efficiently. The company will be innovating on the designs of workflow and consumption methods and support their clients in adopting different models of cloud including SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS.