The memory and storage sizing from the SAP landscape sizing section were mapped to a VxRail solution using the VxRail sizer and the SAP TDI certification guidelines for VxRail.

A like-for-like comparison for both on-premises and AWS solutions was made using the following assumptions:

Note: See the TCO calculator that is linked within the Appendix of this document.

• The SAP S/4 HANA environment running on AWS is integrated with on-premises systems, and users connect through a dedicated network connection through AWS Direct Connect. A 1G direct connect and associated data processing charges over the bandwidth are assumed.
• SAProuter is deployed in a public subnet and assigned a public IP address that is reachable from the Internet to enable integration with the SAP OSS network through a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) connection.
• A network address translation (NAT) gateway enables instances in the private subnet to connect to the Internet or other AWS services, but prevents instances from receiving inbound traffic that someone on the Internet initiates. For NAT gateway traffic, assumptions are made that there is a data transfer from HANA landscape on AWS to SAP Marketplace. More charges will be incurred based on the traffic that is processed using the NAT gateway.
• The AWS region is Sydney and there are two availability zones for DR requirements.
• The operating system licenses pricing includes the operating system licenses cost. For Red Hat Enterprise Linus on AWS there are two options available:

• Buy from AWS Marketplace
• Bring Your Own License (BYOL)

• VMware license pricing includes the cost of VMware licenses. It does not include the following VMware components, which are also sold to the customer:

• VMware ELA
• vCloud Suite Standard x 20
• NSX DC Advanced x 20
• VMware SM (25 pack)

Table 7.      AWS licensing options by operating system

Note: This table is provided as an overview and is not clickable, however, specific information about software licensing on AWS can be found here.

• For EC2 instances, three categories of EBS volumes are allocated, for example, GP2 SSD, PIOPS SSD, and EFS. Because different file systems for the HANA database have their own performance requirements, the following assumptions are made:

• /HANA/DATA and /HANA/LOG are Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) and Backup file system.
• /HANA/Backup uses the EFS file system type.
• Other volumes use the GP2 SSD types.

• There is a difference in memory for the EC2 instance compared to the VxRail node. The memory requirement of 1.5 TB is not available from AWS. The next available EC2 instance type, x1.32xlarge, is used.
• Database year-on-year growth is set to 15% (like on-premises sizing).
• S3 was assumed as the backup storage medium and Cloud Watch was assumed for detailed monitoring.

SAP systems are distributed between two availability regions. Production and QA systems (database and APPS Server) are in one AZ and DEV, and SBX and DR systems are in other AZ. It has been assumed that the customer is replicating data between production HANA database and DR Database using Async log replication mode. The customer can connect to each of the systems within a specific AZ using an SAP Router string where required. The current backup assumes that copies of database backups are stored in S3 strategy as per the following design:

Figure 1.   AWS architecture

AWS sizing is outlined in the following table.

Table 8.      AWS sizing

The following table compares AWS and VxRail three-year commercial pricing:

Table 9.      VxRail compared to AWS three-year commercials (USD)