The course is part of this learning path
Storage Solutions for SAP on Azure builds on storage topics discussed in Design an Azure Infrastructure for SAP Workloads and Design and Build High Availability and Disaster Recovery for SAP Workloads (coming soon). Data storage needs to be fast, responsive, and secure, but above all, continually available.
This course delves into greater detail on previously discussed topics and introduces new, more complex subject matter and its application to SAP workloads to ensure business continuity.
Learning Objectives
- Understand the various disk types available in Azure
- Learn how Azure Shared Managed Disks and Storage Spaces Direct can be used for SAP workloads
- Learn about scale-out file system
- Understand what disk striping and disk caching are
- Learn when and how to enable disk write acceleration and how to encrypt disks with SAP workloads
Intended Audience
This course is designed for anyone looking to explore the Azure storage solutions available for SAP workloads.
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this course, you should already have some experience working with SAP and Azure. Before embarking on this course, we recommend you take a look at Design an Azure Infrastructure for SAP Workloads and Design and Build High Availability and Disaster Recovery for SAP Workloads first.
In addition to standard caching, Azure VMs have a feature called BlobCache, a combination of the machine's RAM and local SSD (the D:\ drive on a Windows VM), to provide high-speed read caching for database operations. A BlobCache could be likened to a hard disk cache on steroids. This feature is only available on high scale virtual machines in combination with Premium SSDs. Disks over 4TiB in size don't support disk caching, but a combination of disks, each less than 4TiB that exceeds 4TiB in total do. Be aware that modifying a disk's cache setting will temporarily detach the disk from the VM. If it is the OS disk, the virtual machine will stop and must be manually restarted, possibly resulting in data loss if not properly planned.
Hallam is a software architect with over 20 years experience across a wide range of industries. He began his software career as a Delphi/Interbase disciple but changed his allegiance to Microsoft with its deep and broad ecosystem. While Hallam has designed and crafted custom software utilizing web, mobile and desktop technologies, good quality reliable data is the key to a successful solution. The challenge of quickly turning data into useful information for digestion by humans and machines has led Hallam to specialize in database design and process automation. Showing customers how leverage new technology to change and improve their business processes is one of the key drivers keeping Hallam coming back to the keyboard.