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.
For the majority of SAP workloads, Azure Premium managed disks are recommended minimum specification. Ultra disks and Azure NetApp Files with lower latency and higher throughput will deliver better system performance for intensive database workloads. NetApp files are a storage, not a disk type, so can't be used to host a virtual machine's operating system. For Premium disks to meet SPA HANA requirements, the Write Accelerator must be enabled on the log volume at least. Write Accelerator is only available when premium disks are attached to an M series virtual machine.
Shared disks can be attached to multiple virtual machines. The maximum number of VMs that can simultaneously access a disk is denoted by the MaxShare parameter, which increases with disk capacity. Shared disks are designed to work with clustered applications. SAP systems need to be resilient and are characterized by clusters of redundant virtual machines. Not only can compute nodes be clustered but so can storage. Scale-out File System is both a clustered compute and storage design that supports multiple levels of redundancy as well as high performance due to the increased bandwidth of multiple VMs accessing shared storage. Storage Spaces Direct is software that enables you to combine multiple drives into an internally redundant volume, which in turn is mirrored across the volumes of the other nodes in the cluster.
This table summarizes and compares SAP relevant Azure storage technologies. Azure NetApp Files can be replicated to another region by utilizing NetApp SnapMirror to only send changed blocks. SnapMirror compresses the replicated blocks, reducing the amount of data transmitted and associated costs.
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.