Fortune 500 Electronics Manufacturer Makes Collaboration a Competitive Advantage…and Saves $2 Million A Year
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When electronics manufacturer Sanmina adopted G Suite several years ago, its goals were clear: reduce licensing costs, simplify management—particularly of its messaging tools—and cut hardware expenditures.
Fast forward several years and the Fortune 500 company has achieved those goals and more. By moving to Gmail, Sanmina reduced more than 110 email servers by over 90%, freed up its IT support function from basic administration to focus on more valuable tasks, and saved $2 million a year on total cost of ownership (including over $1.5 million a year on IT licensing).
A long-term plan: cloud collaboration
For Sanmina CIO Manesh Patel, the impressive returns are part of a bigger plan. From the beginning, Manesh recognized the potential of moving to the cloud to facilitate collaboration across Sanmina’s global operations. With more than 45,000 employees across 26 countries delivering different elements of a global value chain from design to delivery, the benefits of improving collaboration were clear. It could open up innovation by drawing on ideas from different locations and teams and enhance quality control throughout the manufacturing process.
As the first step towards this compelling vision, Manesh focused on rolling out Gmail and Calendar. Both applications were already familiar to many employees and offered a straightforward route to embrace cloud services. With cost savings quickly following, colleagues across Sanmina could see clear benefits from the shift to the cloud.
At the same time, Sanmina made the full suite of tools available and allowed adoption to occur organically across the organization.
Driving adoption
As interest in cloud computing grew, G Suite provided an ideal platform for employees to explore new ways of working together—with some parts of the business swift to develop effective uses for the collaborative tools. Building on the work of these leaders, Manesh has promoted adoption of the suite on several fronts over the past 18 months. Manufacturing, Quality, Engineering, and Supply Chain are a few examples of early adopters that benefit from the improved collaboration in G Suite.
The company also looked to build greater awareness of new G Suite features and functions. It engaged with Google partner Maven Wave. “Maven Wave has been a terrific and responsive partner,” he says. “They’re open and adapted their approach to our needs, while bringing a core competency on G Suite.” Maven Wave brought the experience of working with other global companies on similar initiatives, and an effective change management methodology that was tailored to fit Sanmina’s culture.
“Hangouts Meet fundamentally changes how people interact; you can put a face to a name and really engage with your team. It’s as close as you can get to meeting in person.”
– Manesh Patel, CIO, Sanmina
The messaging tools were not being used to full effect either. When Gmail was first introduced, training was optional; some of the teams were therefore not familiar with features such as attaching documents from Google Drive or archiving content. To help ensure the whole business was using Gmail to its full potential, there has been strong internal promotion of Google’s easy-to-use, online G Suite Training tools. “It’s very easy to consume and very effective,” says Manesh.
Embracing collaboration
Today, Sanmina employees rely daily on several G Suite tools, including Docs, Sheets, Slides, and most recently Hangouts Meet.
“More and more of our employees use Hangouts Meet. Our employees often work as part of teams that are dispersed around the world, so they don’t have the chance to actually meet their colleagues,” Manesh explains. “Hangouts Meet fundamentally changes how people interact; you can put a face to a name and really engage with your team. It’s as close as you can get to meeting in person.”
Manesh acknowledges that this is not simply a result of technological change, but a cultural shift as people grow more comfortable with video calls in their personal lives. Hangouts Meet brings that same ease of use to professional settings—and even well-traveled executives are adopting Hangouts Meet, appreciating its versatility across multiple platforms.
To encourage further use, the IT team has committed to equipping at least one room in every Sanmina facility around the world with Hangouts Meet hardware. “We definitely expect to save time and reduce travel costs with Hangouts Meet,” Manesh confirms. “But the bigger benefit for us is definitely the way it brings people together.”
Collaborating across teams and communities
With that goal in mind, Manesh has also promoted several other collaboration tools—in particular Hangouts Chat, Reveal, and Team Drives.
“More and more of our communications take place via Chat, whether in a team environment or one-to-one setting,” he says. “It’s the asynchronous tool that works alongside Hangouts Meet, for synchronous collaboration.”
Similarly, the use of Reveal—a corporate video sharing platform developed by Maven Wave and Google—is growing. “We’ve just started using Reveal to distribute regular video messages from the CEO to our employees and we also expect it to be a big part of our internal communications,” Manesh says. These videos help keep Sanmina employees aligned with company goals and increase a sense of connectedness across the global organization.
Sharing files between dispersed teams
The move to increase use of Team Drives, meanwhile, is one of Manesh’s priorities. “In every one of our factories worldwide, we have a shared drive on a shared server. We’re in the process of moving those to Team Drives, which will provide a big benefit in terms of infrastructure and in terms of how we work.”
“G Suite enables us to collaborate efficiently and create complex process documents that help us adhere to strict quality control requirements.”
– Manesh Patel, CIO, Sanmina
Manesh and his team have spent a lot of time and effort improving capacity, redundancy, and failover capabilities in preparation for the change. Team Drives should reduce storage requirements and remove challenges and costs tied to back-up and maintenance.
More importantly, the use of Team Drives will mean that files can be shared across multiple sites to further improve collaboration across teams.
Bringing collaboration to the factory floor
The power of G Suite is evident across the organization—from its corporate offices to its factories worldwide. “We’ve had employees creating a Google Sheet, sharing it with five team members, and then displaying it on a big screen on the manufacturing floor so everyone can see the project status,” he explains.
Another key process that is being transformed is quality reporting. The quality team has identified that moving large quantities of required documentation from legacy technologies to G Suite can assist with transparency and version control, routing, and approvals. “G Suite enables us to collaborate efficiently and create complex process documents that help us adhere to strict quality control requirements,” Manesh says.
“We need to empower employees to get the information they need, when they need it, on any device. G Suite makes that happen.”
– Manesh Patel, CIO, Sanmina
Gaining a competitive edge
Sanmina continues to achieve solid year-over-year returns on its investment in G Suite, and those returns will grow with increased adoption. “G Suite really is at the heart of our efforts to get people to work in ways that are more efficient and effective,” Manesh says.
For a company with a rich history of innovation and service, the expanded use of G Suite is another way that Sanmina stands out from competitors. “We need employees to be empowered to get the information they need, when they need it, and on any device. G Suite makes that happen.”
Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital Cuts IT Support Tickets By 80% With Google
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About Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital
Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital specializes in treating eye conditions such as cataracts; glaucoma; corneal problems such as ulcers, inflammation, and thinning; and retinal issues such as degeneration and detachment. The business operates 62 hospitals in cities across India and 14 hospitals in 8 countries in Africa, including Zambia, Nigeria, and Ghana.
Founded by the late Dr. J. Agarwal, Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital, headquartered in Chennai, India, operates 62 hospitals in cities across India and 14 hospitals in 8 countries in Africa, including Zambia, Nigeria, and Ghana.
According to Dilip Ramadasan, GM-IT, Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital, the business is the second-largest network of eye-care hospitals globally and aims to provide the best eye care in the world.
“We have focused on service over the last couple of years and decided to completely revamp back-end operations such as information technology and finance,” says Dilip.
“Realizing our vision involved moving to a completely new infrastructure that could deliver the scalability, agility, and performance our evolving application stack required.”
Replacing Aging Desktop Hardware and Applications
The business placed particular emphasis on upgrading its aging desktop fleet and traditional productivity applications.
“When I arrived in 2015, we only had 35 hospitals and all of them were using desktops that were five years or older,” Dilip says. “These desktops were due for replacement within the following six months to a year, so I had an ideal opportunity to upgrade our capabilities and address issues such as excessive support costs and resource requirements.”
For example, if a desktop at a hospital in a remote location experienced a problem, Dilip had to dispatch one of his technology team members to fix the issue. This could take up to five days, while the employee whose desktop was underperforming or failing often needed to wait until the fix was applied before resuming work.
Three Criteria for Improvement
When evaluating options to enhance the hospital’s information technology environment, Dilip applied three criteria: increasing revenue, increasing efficiency, and reducing costs.
Dilip elected to replace the traditional desktops and applications with Chromebase devices running Google Chrome and G Suite applications. “This option aligned perfectly with our efficiency and cost criteria,” he says.
The business started a four-month pilot of Chromebase devices with G Suite in October 2015 at four newly-opened hospitals.
“We wanted to see how users would react to the Chromebases running G Suite compared to the traditional desktops and applications,” he adds. “A large component of the project entailed educating users about the benefits of G Suite applications such as Google Docs and Sheets.”
Chromebases Running G Suite Deployed to 600 Users
Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital has completed the deployment of Chromebases running G Suite to 600 users. This group comprised team members who needed to access a billing application or a human resources management system and doctors who needed to access patients’electronic medical records.
“My desktop total cost of ownership fell by up to 70% when I deployed these devices,” Dilip says.
With G Suite running on Chromebase devices, Dilip has been able to resolve many desktop support issues remotely, minimizing the need to send support team members to distant locations.
“The number of support tickets we used to process on the desktop computing side has fallen by a full 80%,” he says. “As a result, I’ve been able to cut the number of desktop support team members from eight to three and redeploy them to server and application management and support.”
Dilip cites Sheets and Google Drive as the G Suite applications most beneficial to the business.
Sheets enables hospital team members to share important cost and revenue numbers without having to attach multiple versions of spreadsheets to emails, while Google Drive facilitates collaboration by enabling the team members to store and view shared documents.
“Team members are able to spend more time on core activities rather than on picking up numbers and sharing them with regional managers,” Dilip says.
The business also uses Google Vault to protect management data held in emails and help ensure compliance with legislative requirements.
Google Cloud Platform Products Under Evaluation
Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital is evaluating extending its deployment of Google Cloud Platform products to Google BigQuery and Google Data Studio.
“We are looking to add a business intelligence layer over applications running in other cloud environments, and Google potentially provides an option to do that,” Dilip says.
“This layer would enable us to analyze electronic medical record data to increase our understanding of patterns such as how a particular disease affects an individual across various stages of life and what types of interventions would deliver the best results.”
“Google has introduced the flexibility we need to reposition our engineers as needed, improved the relationship between the information technology team and operations teams, and given the information technology team greater confidence in resolving issues,” adds Dilip. “We will be continuing to scout for opportunities across Google platforms to increase our revenue and efficiencies while decreasing our costs.”
2022’s First Cloud CISO Perspectives: Recap of the Megatrends, Releases and News
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I’m excited to share our first Cloud CISO Perspectives post of 2022. It’s already shaping up to be an eventful year for our industry and we’re only in month one. There’s a lot to recap in this post, including the U.S. government’s recent efforts to address critical security issues, like open source software security and zero trust architectures. We’ve also released new resources from our Google Cybersecurity Action Team like the Cloud Security Megatrends and the Boards of Directors whitepaper on cloud risk governance.
Cloud Security Megatrends
We’re often asked if the cloud is more secure than on-prem (and why) so we shared our answer in a recent blog post. At Google Cloud, security by design is our priority. We’ve long adopted zero-trust principles for our baseline security architectures and built a global network that relies on defense in depth layers to protect against configuration errors and attacks. But security is always evolving and that is why we also take advantage of the following megatrends:
- Economy of scale: Decreasing the marginal cost of security raises the baseline level of security.
- Shared fate: A flywheel of increasing trust drives more transition to the cloud, which compels even higher security and even more skin-in-the-game from the cloud provider.
- Healthy competition: The race by deep-pocketed cloud providers to create and implement leading security technologies is the tip of the spear of innovation.
- Cloud as the digital immune system: Every security update the cloud gives the customer is informed by some threat, vulnerability, or new attack technique often identified by someone else’s experience. Enterprise IT leaders use this accelerating feedback loop to get better protection.
- Software-defined infrastructure: Cloud is software defined, so it can be dynamically configured without customers having to manage hardware placement or cope with administrative toil. From a security standpoint, that means specifying security policies as code, and continuously monitoring their effectiveness.
- Increasing deployment velocity: Because of cloud’s vast scale, providers have had to automate software deployments and updates, usually with automated continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) systems. That same automation delivers security enhancements, resulting in more frequent security updates.
- Simplicity: Cloud becomes an abstraction-generating machine for identifying, creating and deploying simpler default modes of operating securely and autonomically.
- Sovereignty meets sustainability: The cloud’s global scale and ability to operate in localized and distributed ways creates three pillars of sovereignty. This global scale can also be leveraged to improve energy efficiency.
If you’re an IT decision maker, pay attention to these megatrends that will continue to drive and reinforce cloud security and will outpace the security of on-prem infrastructure well into the future.
U.S. Federal government cybersecurity momentum
- Open source software security: Earlier this month, Google participated in the White House Summit on open source software security. The meeting came at a critical time for the industry following December’s Log4j vulnerabilities and was both a recognition of the challenge and an important first step towards addressing it. The open source software ecosystem is not homogenous, despite the fact that the industry often thinks of or treats it this way. Some of it, like Linux, is highly curated, while other critical software is supported through diffuse communities including technology companies and other stakeholders. There is also a long tail of many other critical projects driven by a dedicated community of maintainers around the world, including Googlers. In light of this reality, we welcomed the chance to share our recommendations to advance the future of open source software security. Some work we’ve done includes founding the Open Source Security Foundation, which has been instrumental already in making security improvements. We’ve also helped drive a number of key security initiatives within the open source community including security scorecards, the SLSA framework to improve the security and integrity of open source packages, and Secure Open Source Rewards to financially incentivize improvements to critical open source security projects.
- OMB’s Federal zero trust strategy: The publication of the Office of Management and Budget’s zero trust architecture strategy marks an important step for the U.S. federal government’s efforts to modernize under Executive Order 14028. Google Cloud supports this approach, which recognizes the immense security benefits offered by modern computing architectures. For the past decade, Google has successfully applied zero trust principles through our BeyondCorp and BeyondProd frameworks for providing end-user access and securing our cloud workloads. And we’ve brought these best practices from our own journey to global governments and businesses of any size through solutions like BeyondCorp Enterprise and capabilities like Binary Authorization and Anthos Service Mesh, which are embedded in Anthos, our managed application platform. For Federal agencies embarking on this zero trust journey, the Google Cybersecurity Action Team will offer our expertise by conducting Zero Trust Foundations strategy workshops, which can help organizations in the public and private sectors develop actionable and achievable strategies and plans for zero trust implementation.
Google Cybersecurity Action Team Highlights
Here are the latest updates, products, services and resources across our security teams this month:
Security
- Democratizing security operations: We recently announced that Siemplify, a leading security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) provider, is joining Google Cloud to help companies better manage their threat response. Providing a proven SOAR capability with Chronicle’s approach to security analytics is an important step forward in our vision to advance invisible security and democratize security operations for every organization.
- Security by design: The Highmark Health security team is using “secure-by-design” techniques to address the security, privacy, and compliance aspects of its Living Health solution with Google Cloud’s Professional Services Organization (PSO). Google has long advocated for and followed security by design principles, which is why we’re continuously building enhanced security, controls, resiliency and more into our cloud products and services.
- Secure collaboration for hybrid work environments: The Google Workspace team shared its recommendations for businesses as they prepare for the future of work, where the hybrid/flexible work model is becoming standard practice and a new approach to security is essential.
- Anthos Policy Controller CIS Benchmark enforcement: A big part of our shared fate philosophy is to build secure products and not just security products. A recent example of this in action is embedding CIS benchmark policy conformance in the Anthos Policy Controller. We believe the more we embed approaches like this into our products, the more application and infrastructure teams can intrinsically embed security at the start and reduce toil for the security team.
- DevOps for technology-driven organizations and startups: A key success factor for many security programs is the partnership and integration with development teams, and there are some great resources and lessons in our DORA research.
- Security by design with Chrome OS: ABN AMRO’s Asia-Pacific region team recently shared how they are using Chrome OS and CloudReady to work securely in the cloud, reduce total cost of ownership, and add flexibility for employees. This is a great example of secure by design principles in the use of Chromium.
Risk & Compliance
- Boards of Directors summary guide to cloud risk governance: The latest whitepaper from the Google Cybersecurity Action Team outlines how boards of directors can prioritize safe, secure, and compliant adoption processes for cloud technologies within their organizations.
- TruSight Risk Assessment of Google Cloud: TruSight recently released a comprehensive
risk assessment report on Google Cloud. Our Enterprise Trust team collaborated on this robust assessment of Google Cloud services to validate the design and implementation of controls. TruSight’s risk assessment of our security controls will help customers accelerate and complete their risk management due diligence. - Data governance: Check out this new blog series on data governance where our teams explain the role of data governance, its importance, and the necessary processes to run an effective data governance program. Implementing data governance will help maximize value derived from business data, build user trust, and ensure compliance with required security measures.
Controls and Products
- Encrypting Data Fusion: To help meet the security, privacy and compliance requirements of customers in regulated industries like finance or public sector, we announced the general availability of Customer Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) integration for Cloud Data Fusion, which enables encryption of both user data and metadata at rest with a key that customers can control through our Cloud Key Management Service (KMS).
Don’t forget to sign-up for our newsletter if you’d like to have our Cloud CISO Perspectives post delivered every month to your inbox. We’ll be back next month with more updates and security-related news.
How Arvind Fashions Ltd leads the fashion industry with powerful data analytics on BigQuery
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Arvind Ltd has been in the apparel industry for more than 90 years, with its retail powerhouse Arvind Fashions Ltd being the backbone of well-known names in the retail fashion industry in India.
Arvind Fashions Ltd (Arvind) has seen significant growth in its portfolio with new franchises being added every year. The six high conviction brands include Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Sephora, Arrow, U.S. Polo Assn. & Flying Machine.
To secure a foundation for future growth, the company has embarked on a digital transformation (DX) journey, focusing on profitability and improving the customer experience. The key objectives for Arvind’s DX is to unlock the value of existing applications, gain new insights, and build a solid workflow with resilient systems.
Getting Google Cloud to address the challenges around insights & analytics was a natural step forward, since Arvind had already formed a relationship with Google Cloud, starting with its productivity and collaboration tools during the pandemic.
Key Challenges
Arvind’s enterprise applications estate is a mix of SAP, Oracle POS, logistics management systems and other applications. Having so many different applications made it a challenge for the company to bring all of this data together to drive retail insights and at the same time maintain the freshness of its products.
As a case in point, the existing sales reporting and inventory reconciliation process had been enabled by a mix of automated and semi-automated desktop applications. There were challenges to scale the infrastructure in order to process large amounts of data at a low latency.
The synchronization of master data across functions was critical to build the data platform that provides consistent insights to multiple stakeholders across the organization.
Solution Approach – Modern Data Platform
There are several ways to solve the challenges above and do more by building a modern data analytics platform. For example, using a data lake based approach that builds use case by use case, hybrid data estates and so on. Regardless of the approach, it is important to define the solution based on certain principles.
In Arvind’s scenario, the key business principles considered are that data platforms should support Variety, Variability, Velocity and Volume. Each of these 4 V’s are critical business pivots to successful fashion retailing. Variety in SKU’s to deal with myriad fashion trends every season, Variability in shopping footfalls due to different festivities, weekends and special occasions, Velocity to be agile and responsive to customer needs, and Volumes of data that bring richer insights.
This is where Google BigQuery enabled data platform comes in, as it is able to meet the needs above.
Solution Architecture – Current Capabilities & Future Vision
BigQuery is the mothership of the data and analytics platform on Google Cloud. Its serverless construct ensures that data engineering teams focus only on insights & analytics. Storage and compute is decoupled and can be independently scaled. BigQuery has been leveraged to service both the raw as well as the curated data zones.
With BigQuery procedures, it is possible to process the data natively within the data warehouse itself. Procedures have been leveraged to process the data in a low latency manner with the familiar SQL.
But then what happens to advanced analytics and insights? With simplicity being our key guiding principle, BigQuery machine learning ensures that data analysts can create, train and deploy analytics models even with complex requirements. It can also consume data from Looker Studio, which is seamlessly integrated with BigQuery.
Here are the key principles and highlights of the data platform that have been achieved:
- Simple, yet exhaustive – We needed a solution with vast technical capabilities such as data lake & data warehouse, data processing, data consumption, analytics amongst others. And at the same time it needed to be simple to implement and run ongoing operations.
- Agility – High quality analytics use cases typically require a significant amount of time, effort and skill set. While building a simple solution we ensured that the selection of technology services ensured agility in the long term.
- Security – An organization can be truly successful if the insights and analytics operations are democratized. But while data is made available to a wider community, we need to ensure data governance and security.
- Ease of operations – Data engineering teams spend a lot of time doing infrastructure setting and management operations. With BigQuery, teams can put in more effort on building the data pipelines and models to feed into analytics instead of worrying about the infrastructure operations.
- Costs – Decoupling storage and compute allows for flexible pricing. A pay-as-you-go model is the ideal solution to managing costs.
Business Impact
The ingestion frequency of the store level inventory (~800 stores) has now been changed to daily. With the additional data volumes and processing the scaling on BigQuery has been seamless. There are new processes and dashboards to address the reconciliation and root cause analysis. Operational efficiencies have improved leading to better productivity and turn around time of critical processes.
The discrepancies in various reconciliation activities have drastically reduced by an order of magnitude of 300X due to the capabilities offered by the data platform. Not only is it possible to identify discrepancies but the data platform has also enabled in identifying the root causes for the same as well.
Arvind Fashions Ltd have also been able to enhance some of the existing business processes and systems with insight from the data platform.
It’s going to be an exciting journey for Arvind Fashions Ltd and Google Cloud. There are several initiatives ready for kick off such as getting more apps on the edge devices, warehouse analytics, advanced customer data platforms, predicting the lifecycle of designs, style codes and other exciting initiatives.
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How the UK’s Football Association Turns to Tech to Ensure its 29 Teams Deliver World-Class Performance
The FA is an iconic British institution responsible for overseeing all aspects of football in the UK, from the grassroots club level across the country to the national teams who play at Wembley.
However, even icons like The FA must evolve to stay at the top of their game and they realized their old methods of pen and paper needed to change.
So The FA partnered with Google Cloud to transform itself into a digital leader. The first step was to implement G Suite to get all 29 professional national teams on the same page.
For all 350+ staff at St. George’s Park training facility and coaches throughout the country and on the road, G Suite provides an intuitive and easy way for all these entities to work together.
Coaches could communicate through Hangout; analysts could
compile and share data in Sheets; AI training plans could be distributed
and executed using Slides; and Drive helped support players on the
move, giving immediate access to important information, like dietary
requirements, training data, travel docs and more.
Watch the video to find out more.
Two Ways to Deploy SAP HANA System on Google Cloud
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Many of the world’s leading companies run on SAP—and deploying it on Google Cloud extends the benefits of SAP even further. Migrating your current SAP S/4HANA deployment to Google Cloud—whether it resides on your company’s on-premises servers or another cloud service—provides your organization with a flexible virtualized architecture that lets you scale your environment to match your workloads, so you pay only for the compute and storage capacity you need at any given moment. Google Cloud includes built-in features, such as Compute Engine live migration and automatic restart, that minimize downtime for infrastructure maintenance. And it allows you to integrate your SAP data with multiple data sources and process it using Google Cloud technology such as BigQuery to drive data analytics.
SAP server-side architecture consists of two layers: the SAP HANA database, and the Netweaver application layer. In this blog post, we’ll look at the options and steps for moving the database layer to Google Cloud as a lift and shift or rehost, a straightforward approach that entails moving your current SAP environment unchanged onto Google Cloud.
Deploying an SAP HANA system on Google Cloud
Google Cloud offers SAP-certified virtual machines (VMs) optimized for SAP products, including SAP HANA and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, as well as dedicated servers for SAP HANA for environments greater than 12TB. (For a complete list of VM and hardware options, visit the Certified and Supported SAP HANA Hardware Directory.)
Before proceeding with a rehost migration to Google Cloud, your current (source) environment and Google Cloud (target) environments should meet these specifications:
Prerequisites:
- The configuration of the Google Cloud environment (i.e., VM resources, SSD storage capacity) should be identical to that of the source environment. If the underlying hardware is different, however, you must use Option 2 for your migration, detailed below.
- Both environments should be running the same operating system (SUSE or RHEL Linux).
- The HANA version, instance number, and system ID (SID) should be identical.
- Schema names must remain the same.
- Establishing the network connection between the on-premises environment and Google Cloud will be required in this phase to support rehost of the SAP application.you can use Cloud VPN or Dedicated Interconnect. Learn more about Dedicated Interconnect and Cloud VPN.
Note: Depending on your internet connection and bandwidth requirements, we recommend using a Dedicated Interconnect over Cloud VPN for production environments.
We offer a number of automated processes to accelerate your cloud journey. To deploy the SAP HANA system on Google Cloud, you can use the Google Cloud Deployment manager or Terraform and Ansible scripts available on GitHub with configuration file templates to define your installation. For more details, see the Google Cloud SAP HANA Planning Guide.
Note: To deploy SAP HANA on Google Cloud machine types that are certified by SAP for production, please review the Certification for SAP HANA on Google Cloud page.
Moving an SAP HANA Database to Google Cloud
There are two different options you can use to rehost your SAP HANA database to Google Cloud, and each has pros and cons that you should consider when deciding on your approach.
Option 1: Asynchronous replication uses SAP’s built-in replication tool to provide continuous data replication from the source system (also known as the primary system) to the destination or secondary system—in this case residing on Google Cloud. It’s best for mission-critical applications for which minimum downtime is a high priority, and for large databases. In addition, the high level of automation means that the process requires less manual intervention. Here’s where you can learn more on HANA Asynchronous Replication.
Option 2: Backup and restore relies on SAP’s backup utility to create an image of the database that is then transferred to Google Cloud, where it is restored in the new environment. Downtime for this method varies by database size, so large databases may require more downtime via this method vs. asynchronous replication. It also involves more manual tasks. However, it requires fewer resources to perform, making it an attractive option for less urgent use cases. Here’s where you can learn more on SAP HANA database Backup and restore.
How to migrate the SAP HANA database to Google Cloud using Asynchronous Replication
- Create and configure Dedicated Interconnect or Cloud VPN between the current environment and Google Cloud.
- Set up SAP HANA asynchronous replication. You can configure system replication using SAP HANA Cockpit, SAP HANA Studio, or hdbnsutil. See Setting Up SAP HANA System Replication in the SAP HANA Administration Guide.
- Be sure to use the same instance number and HANA SID in the template as the primary instance.
- Configure the Google Cloud instance as the secondary node for using HANA Asynchronous replication.
- Perform data validation once full data replication is completed to the SAP HANA database in Google Cloud. To learn more: HANA System Replication overview.
- Perform an SAP HANA takeover on your standby database. This switches your active system from the current primary system onto the secondary system on Google Cloud. Once the takeover command runs, the system on Google Cloud becomes the new primary system.To learn more: HANA Takeover.
How to migrate the SAP HANA database to Google Cloud using Backup and Restore
- Create a full backup of your SAP HANA database in your current environment.
- Create a new storage bucket in your Google Cloud environment. Visit Creating Storage Buckets in the Google Cloud Storage documentation.
- Download and install gsutil onto the source environment and run it to upload the HANA backup to the Google Cloud storage bucket. To install gsutil utility on any computer or server, visit Install gsutil in the Google Cloud Storage documentation.
Note: You can run parallel multi thread/multi processing in gsutil to copy large files more quickly. - Recover the HANA database on Google Cloud using SAP’s RECOVER DATABASE statement. See RECOVER DATABASE Statement (Backup and Recovery) in the SAP HANA SQL Reference Guide for SAP HANA Platform.
Note: BackInt agent is an integrated SAP interface tool used for HANA database on Google Cloud.Backint agent for SAP HANA can be used to store and retrieve backups directly from Google Cloud Storage. It is supported and certified by SAP on Google Cloud. To learn more: SAP HANA Backint Agent on Google Cloud.
In summary, we recommend using Asynchronous Replication (Option 1) for mission-critical applications that require the lowest downtime window. For all other applications, we recommend Backup and Restore (Option 2), as this approach requires fewer resources. It’s also a great way to implement the backup and restore functionality on Google Cloud.
A rehost migration is the most straightforward path to getting your SAP on HANA system up and running on Google Cloud. And the sooner you migrate, the sooner you can take advantage of the many benefits Google Cloud brings to your SAP solution. For more information on the different migration options please review: SAP on Google Cloud: Migration strategies.
Learn more about deploying SAP on Google Cloud. Technical resources can be found here.
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Let’s face it: in the globalized world, which is now more than ever a digital demand world, you need to scale and reach your customers right where they’re at. Translation is a critical piece of that, whether you’re translating a website in multiple languages or releasing a document, a piece
YoungCapital Scales Up with Ease With Chrome Enterprise and G Suite
When your business is rapidly adding new employees, expanding to new countries, and always focused on staying ahead of the competition, you have to take a hard look at the tools that are slowing you down—and swap them out for better ones that can keep pace with the company. We’re
