Transform Your SUSE Subscriptions from Bring Your Own Subscriptions (BYOS) To the Google Cloud Marketplace for SAP HANA

Savings Are Easier Than You Think

Taking control of your costs in the Cloud

Making the right spending choice is essential in moving to Google Cloud. In any cloud migration journey, cost is central to the business case discussion. In a previous webinar, we reviewed the advantages of purchasing SUSE through the marketplace.

Once upon a time, the story of a customer migrating to Google Cloud

You already had SUSE subscriptions on-premises, and your contract was still valid, so you decided to bring the subscriptions to the cloud through Bring Your Own Subscriptions (BYOS), simply because the project timeline didn’t allow thorough investigation of the options on the cloud marketplace.

However, your purchasing department signed a committed Cloud spend with Google last week. Centralizing supplier purchases in one place is making procurement quicker, more efficient, and cost-effective. It is checking a lot of boxes to meet its business objectives. Their strategy is to increase consumption on the marketplace because they negotiated discounts out of the volume of transactions on the marketplace, and they are asking you if you can prioritize marketplace: Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) or Committed Use Discounts (CUDs).

IT spending is a core part of the FinOps strategy of your IT department. Your management has decided to reinforce the FinOps strategy and take a close look at your bills; you know that you can make some progress here, but you didn’t really have time to think about it – oops!
On top of that, after a few months of experience with Google Cloud, now that your team fully understands the specificities and advantages of the cloud, you might be wondering why you’re paying for a full-year subscription in BYOS when the VM uptime is only 100 hours a month, that represents roughly 14% of the entire year…

You’re now wondering how to switch your BYOS SUSE subscriptions to Marketplace SUSE subscriptions…

The discussion begins here: “Dear customer, please don’t worry; it’s never too late. We have a solution for you.”
Since SAP HANA databases are normally the largest source of spending, let’s start from there.

Use HANA System Replication to Change the Consumption Model

In most cases, switching instance and consumption models can be tricky and require downtime. The following techniques and procedures can be followed to help customers achieve a smoother process for SAP HANA.

SAP HANA System Replication

SAP HANA system replication (HSR) provides the ability to copy and continuously synchronize an SAP HANA database to a secondary location in the same or another data center. SAP supports using HANA System Replication, for instance, exchange with minimum downtime.

In this technique, the user can set up HANA system replication between the databases running on a BYOS SLES for SAP Applications instance (source) and a PAYG/CUD SLES for SAP instance (target); both are running SAP HANA. The version on the target must be the same or higher, and the configuration, such as SID and Instance Number, must be identical (please refer to the SAP manual for details). Once the source database is replicated to the target system, perform a takeover to make the target system the new primary, direct applications to connect to the new primary HANA database, and unregister the System Replication configuration; now the HANA system is running on the PAYG/CUD instance. The old source instance can be repurposed or disposed of.

The downtime for changing the instance will be the runtime of the takeover from the primary system to the secondary system. Usually, this is within the range of a few minutes. For more information, see SAP Note 1984882: Using HANA system replication for Hardware Exchange with Minimum Downtime.

Prerequisite: Both the source and target instances should be listed in the Certified and Supported SAP HANA Hardware Directory.

Use Case

Because SAP HANA System Replication allows minimum downtime, it has many use cases. The change consumption model is one of them. Other usages include instance resize, instance retirement, OS upgrade, change region, etc. Customers are strongly recommended to perform testing in non-production first.

Conclusion

Converting BYOS Subscriptions into Marketplace Subscriptions is a very common question that we receive from many of our customers; we hope that this blog answers your questions.

If you need any support and want to discuss with the Google Cloud team, please feel free to contact us at google@suse.com. 

By Elodie Mallea and Sherry Yu