Liz McMillan

Addressing the demands of customers for more choice in managing cloud and virtualized infrastructures, SAP AG on Tuesday announced short and mid-term product and partner-related plans around cloud computing and virtualization management. As part of its product strategy, the company detailed a new solution designed to manage SAP system landscapes in data centers using modern virtual infrastructure and clouds.

With a focus on accelerating technology collaboration with some of its key technology partners, SAP announced that it is helping partners to create new reference architectures for best-of-breed virtualization hardware offerings from Dell and IBM in order to offer more choices to customers seeking to advance their SAP landscapes to virtualized private clouds. SAP's announcement of its collaboration with Cisco, EMC, VMware and the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) was the first such instance of collaboration with technology partners. SAP has seen continued momentum from customers such as Columbia Sportswear Company for running SAP software on virtualized private cloud architectures in their quests to deliver enhanced agility and reduce total cost of ownership.

Landscape Management Solution from SAP for Virtualized and Cloud Infrastructures
Virtualization and cloud technologies are unstoppable, undeniable trends in today's data centers. Virtualization and cloud computing continue to be the top two technology priorities for CIOs, according to Gartner(1), and a recent internal study among SAP customers indicated that 70 percent surveyed are actively evaluating virtual and cloud platforms.

SAP is designing a landscape management solution to help reduce the capital investment and operational costs of SAP systems while improving business agility. The solution aims to simplify and automate the effort required to provision, deploy, monitor and manage SAP systems and landscapes focusing on virtualized and cloud infrastructures for on-premise SAP systems. The landscape management solution is planned to be able to integrate with existing system management frameworks as well as with the SAP Solution Manager application management solution.

This new solution, being developed with on-going input and involvement from more than 40 customers and partners, is expected to provide a unified view and management of the virtualized infrastructure and the SAP landscape layer. Planned features include SAP system clone and copy framework, automated capacity management, SAP landscape visibility in all layers, and capabilities intended to help simplify the provisioning and management of SAP systems in virtual and cloud infrastructures.

The SAP offering is designed to integrate with the offerings of SAP partners working in a complementary fashion. This solution is planned to be available to customers in the fourth quarter of 2011.