As an SAP user, you may already be familiar with SAP Landscape Management (SAP LaMa) — a specialized product that supports centralized management of your SAP landscape. SAP LaMa is useful for a wide range of SAP customers and use cases, but it’s especially important to large enterprises that manage very large, diverse, and often geographically dispersed SAP landscapes.

Google Cloud recently released a free connector that our SAP customers can deploy on an existing or new SAP LaMa instance. It’s a potentially important contribution for enterprises that need to address the growing complexity associated with multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud application strategies.

Let’s take a look at how SAP LaMa works, how it fits into a customer’s SAP landscape, and what kinds of benefits they can expect. We’ll also run through some adjustments that SAP admins will need to make in order to launch the connector.

SAP LaMa: Bringing simplicity to SAP landscapes

The Google Cloud Connector for SAP LaMa is distributed as a Java archive — provided free of charge — that customers can deploy on a SAP LaMa system that already exists on premises, or on another cloud, or as part of a new SAP LaMa deployment on Google Cloud. SAP LaMa itself is a centralized SAP management tool designed to simplify, automate, and orchestrate a variety of management and administration tasks across your entire SAP landscape. Some examples of use cases for LaMa include:

• Getting a single, comprehensive overview of your organization’s full SAP landscape
• Automating day-to-day system administration tasks, like system refreshes
• Executing mass stop/start operations across your landscape
• Deploying custom operations and workflows within the SAP application environment

SAP admins can reclaim a significant amount of time by creating SAP context sensitive automation routines that can execute without human intervention, and by completing system maintenance tasks more quickly and consistently. SAP LaMa also elevates service quality by using automation to remove manual intervention (and thus human error) from the system admin process.

The Google Cloud Connector builds bridges for SAP customers

The Google Cloud connector functions as a trigger that extends LaMa functionality to SAP systems deployed on Google Cloud. The connector enables standard SAP LaMa execution scenarios, such as:

• Listing Google Cloud projects, zones, and VM instances within SAP LaMa’s landscape overview
• Mass stop/start of Google Compute Engine (GCE) instances, using either the SAP LaMa user interface or the scheduler
• System clone, copy, and DB refresh with Post Copy Automation
• Resizing of machine types
• Relocating SAP application instances to another VM instance
• SAP HANA failover to a replicated SAP HANA HA system  via the SAP Host Agent

By supporting native SAP automation and orchestration, the Google Cloud connector contributes to the overall value customers get from using SAP LaMa. What may be just as important, however, is how the connector makes life easier for customers running Google Cloud as part of a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud SAP landscape. That’s an increasingly important advantage, given recent research revealing that 82% of enterprises are currently deploying hybrid clouds.¹

Before getting started with the Google Cloud connector, it’s important to be aware that you’ll have to run it on SAP LaMa 3.0 (the current version), and that you will need to have an SAP Landscape Management – Enterprise Edition licence provided by SAP to support all functionality.

In addition, getting access to the full SAP LaMa feature set for your Google Cloud SAP environment will require you to deploy SAP systems using SAP’s adaptive design principles. These include:

• Using SID (SAP system ID) and instance-specific disk mount points
• Using alias IP for virtual host mapping and portability
• Configuring DNS to manage virtual hostname (aka. FQDN) for all VMs
• Using a local NFS host to manage shared files, as well as copying, migrating, and managing solutions like Filestore and NetApp separately

Because meeting these requirements may require altering your production systems, you’ll have to assess the pros and cons of doing so to take full advantage of the Google Cloud Connector.

Google Cloud is constantly looking for ways to support our SAP customers in running more efficiently and in making the most of their hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies. Releasing the Google Connector for SAP LaMa is one more reflection of our commitment to creating value for customers any way we can. Learn more about Google Cloud offerings for SAP customers.

Editor’s note: When Europe’s largest mobile communications company, Vodafone, was asked by the European Commission to help understand population movement across the European Union and the UK to help fight COVID-19, it was able to provide anonymized mobile network-based insights to answer the call. Here’s how Vodafone, with the support of Google Cloud, rapidly mobilized the COVID-19 frontline, while respecting its customers’ privacy.

With the emergence of COVID-19 in early 2020, the European Commission—the executive branch of the European Union (EU)—knew that technology would be instrumental in its fight to control the pandemic. With various lockdowns imposed across its member states, the Commission was keen to predict and prevent the spread of COVID-19 and to manage the related social, political and financial impacts. 

Mobile network data helps track COVID-19 across the EU

Mobile networks produce location data, which can be turned into useful anonymous insights to understand population movement within a geographic area. The European Commission, working with mobile industry association GSMA (Groupe Speciale Mobile Association), asked Europe’s major mobile phone operators for help in producing insights to support the fight against COVID-19. As the largest mobile network operator within the EU, Vodafone saw this as a critical opportunity to participate. 

Vodafone had previous experience of using mobile network data to support pandemic research. For example, in 2019, Vodafone provided mobility pattern analysis to help track the spread of Malaria in Mozambique. And, during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic (prior to working with the European Commission), Vodafone assisted the Italian and Spanish governments in understanding their citizens’ mobility patterns. Vodafone had also previously offered anonymized and aggregated population mobility insights to support public transport and tourism authorities and retail organizations in a number of countries. Consequently, Vodafone was perfectly placed to play a greater role in supporting the European Commission’s response to the pandemic. 

When asked to assist the European Commission, Vodafone first considered how it could safely share its data with the governing body without providing details on the individual movements of its customers. It realized it could achieve this through an elaborate set of anonymization and aggregation techniques. Insights are aggregated from a minimum of 50 users and Vodafone only shared these anonymous insights and never the actual raw data with the Commission. As specified by the EU, these insights are then presented onto a large geographical region, typically a city or a county with thousands of people living in that area.

These insights illustrate how people move, helping to determine how lockdowns and self-isolation measures were impacting behaviors.

Using Google Cloud to collate and store population mobility data

In April 2020, Vodafone began migrating its operations, including its mobile data, to Google Cloud on servers in Europe and the UK with elaborate security safeguards, including encryption, building on a previous partnership. 

With the data residing in EU and UK data centers and not the United States, Vodafone could then retrieve anonymous insights from Google Cloud Storage instantaneously. Before supplying any information to the European Commission, however, Vodafone used Dataflow to validate the data and run a series of tests to ensure the database had accurate data, before ingesting and archiving the relevant metrics. For instant access, the data was then made available to the European Commission using a Redis database on Google Kubernetes Engine.

To ensure aggregate Vodafone customer data was always safe, secure, and anonymous, all entry points to the front-end were protected behind Google Cloud Armor, where only specific IP addresses were allowed. Using these tools, seamless data pipelines fed in predefined key performance indicators from each specified European market. While data quality measures ensured the definitions for metrics across markets were consistent and could be accurately compared.

The architecture (pictured below) shows how Vodafone integrated and anonymized its data on Google Cloud.

Live interactive dashboard shows population mobility in real-time

With its data integrated on Google Cloud, Vodafone created a live, interactive dashboard to track mobility patterns and share relevant information with the European Commission in real-time. 

The European Commission Joint Research Center (JRC) was able to gather valuable information from these insights, which enabled them to see where population mobility was aiding the spread of the disease, when cross-referenced with health data. It could also assess the implications of lockdowns on different populations and forecast cross-country spreading.

Mobile data aids disease modeling for multiple stakeholders

The Vodafone data became instrumental in modeling the likely course of the disease too. For example, the University of Southampton in the UK used it to predict the outcome of different coordinated COVID-19 exit strategies across Europe. This research was published in Science Magazine in September 2020. 

The Vodafone data dashboard continues to be used by individual governments, NGOs and organizations to further investigate the impacts of the pandemic and to measure the effectiveness of response strategies alongside the rollout of vaccination programs. The project also helped Vodafone win a DataIQ award for most effective stakeholder engagement. 

Using the learnings from this project, Vodafone has been able to adapt its own B2B solution, called Vodafone Analytics, by adaptIng and migrating the code to work in Google Cloud Platform. This solution has been rolled out across Germany, Greece, Portugal and South Africa, and new countries are being onboarded every day. Vodafone Analytics already has more than 100 customers leveraging it for a variety of use cases—Italian fashion retailer OVS, uses it for its smart retail operation, while global real estate company, JLL, uses it to understand the footfall passing through its properties. 

Working together, Vodafone and Google Cloud continue to help a range of organizations, governments, and NGOs navigate through the ongoing pandemic,  optimize their operations, and help the greater good, without infringing individuals’ fundamental rights to privacy.

To learn more about Google Cloud and Vodafone, watch our full interview here.

After three migrations to different cloud providers, the company managed to migrate with no system outages for the first time, supported by partner Sky.One.

Results

• Migrated four SAP environments and four servers in just one month with no system outages
• Zero unavailability periods since migrating
• Less time spent worrying about operational issues increases the focus on business

50% savings on monthly cloud costs

Rossi Residencial, one of Brazil’s largest construction companies and real-estate developers, with around 150 employees, hundreds of business and engineering partners, and nationwide service, has used SAP solutions for financial management since 1999. Taxes, accessory obligations, accounting requirements, and other processes are managed through the system in an integrated and automated manner, which provides the business with crucial support.

Over the past few years, the company has begun to promote independent, sustainable business units to focus on strategic locations and products. This prompted its technology team to adapt as well, and they saw the cloud as an opportunity to add flexibility to SAP’s management.

“If I need to open a new branch or break ground on a project, the entire system core is already in the cloud and I don’t have to worry about local infrastructure,” explains Eduardo Araújo, Rossi’s IT Manager. “It also means our operational costs are significantly reduced.”

A few years ago, the company started working with the ECC component in the EHP 8 version, using modules such as FI (financial accounting), CO (controlling), MM (materials management) and TRM (treasury and risk management). But the dollar’s high exchange rate in 2020 increased costs with their then provider too much. The team was also not satisfied with the provider’s service, leading it to look for a new provider and a partner to support migration.

An essential requirement the new provider had to offer was high availability and scalability. Potential partners had to perform migration in a short time window (as the contract with the other service was about to expire) and be familiar with the previous provider to ensure the operation’s success. After spending some time searching, the company chose Google Cloud and Sky.One for the project.

“Out of the cloud options we researched, Google Cloud offered us the best financial conditions and a solution that truly catered to us. And out of the many partners we contacted, Sky.One offered the best work planning and service.”—Eduardo Araújo, IT Manager, Rossi Residencial

First migration with no system outages

The tight migration deadline meant the company would not have the time to install every app in Google Cloud from scratch, so Rossi asked the Sky.One team to mirror its entire previous architecture, that is, migrate the virtual machines from the company’s four SAP environments and four servers from other apps directly to Google Cloud.

After mapping the source structure in detail along with Rossi, the partner was able to complete migration planning in a month. “If you map before migrating and thus understand the customer’s environment well, you are able to prepare the destination so it has every integration and its respective access,” says Ricardo Nunes, Solution Expert at Sky.One.

The tool chosen to move the environments was Migrate for Compute Engine (previously known as Velostrata), which streamlines, facilitates and reduces risks for app migration to Google Cloud. Sky.One selected an expert in this solution to conduct the process, which was also supported by Google Cloud experts to make any needed adjustments.

The process took just a month to complete. The environments were successfully migrated with zero impact on operations, an unprecedented feat for the company. Now SAP environments run in a new infrastructure consisting of Compute Engine, a service for creating and running VMs, and Cloud Storage for data storage.

“This is the first time, after three previous migrations to private and public clouds, that our users have not felt any impact and we didn’t have system outages. It was a six-hands project that worked very well.”—Eduardo Araújo, IT Manager, Rossi Residencial

Flexibility to deal with every business need

Since the migration, Rossi has not suffered system outages or handled related user requests and incidents. Performance has remained high even after the team resized the VMs. The flexibility to add or subtract resources based on the company’s demands proved crucial. “Rossi operates in a segment with elasticity. In any given year, we can have two/three projects or ten. That’s why it’s important to have that resource in the cloud,” says Araújo.

Since the company does not operate 24/7, another benefit from migrating was the ability to schedule when to switch on and off servers, bringing cost savings. Furthermore, billing in reais at a fixed exchange rate with dollars led to a 50% cost reduction versus the previous provider.

The ease of integration between Google Cloud and SAP’s tools pleasantly surprised the team. “We were worried about potential incompatibilities, and we didn’t know if we would be able to work like before. Today we can work even better than before,” says the IT manager. According to Sky.One, the fine adaptation between the solutions becomes noticeable right after migration.

“Google Cloud’s solutions support all SAP migration steps, but after migrating we noticed that daily operations had become even more tightly integrated.”—Ricardo Nunes, Solution Expert, Sky.One

The cloud’s stability and security have streamlined the IT team’s daily routine. They no longer have to go to the company outside business hours to perform updates or repairs. Currently, employees can work remotely with peace of mind and maintain business continuity throughout Brazil.

With more time to focus on business needs instead of operational issues, the team is contemplating the addition of new Google Cloud tools. Rossi’s next challenge is to bolster its business operations and customer service even further using data analytics and AI solutions, making the most of its broad database.