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.
Disk striping is a technique that's been used for decades to improve disk I/O performance. Apart from simple RAID 0 configuration, there are several variations on the "divide and conquer" strategy, like Oracle's and SQL Server's table and index partitioning across multiple files. In turn, the database files can be distributed across disks to improve parallel I/O performance. Disk striping may also be considered to mitigate the IOPs limitations of some disk types. Four P30 premium disks will give you 20,000 provisioned IOPS, while one P50 has 7,500. This configuration will give you almost three times the IOPS for the same disk capacity. Setting up disk striping is relatively easy, but extending capacity is not a trivial task. With that in mind, SAP introduced the ability for HANA 2.0 to stripe I/O across multiple files located on different Azure disks, so essentially, data partitioning as seen in other databases.
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.