Cisco, SAP Partner For An End-To-End Solution That Spans On-Prem To AWS

Hybrid cloud may be the new trend in data storage and deployment — but while the popular alternative to the rigid choice of on-premises or full migration may provide greater flexibility, it also poses complexities in the transport of data between multiple environments.

To facilitate enterprise goals in hybrid cloud, Suhail Syed (pictured, left), senior OpenStack product manager at Cisco Systems Inc., and Dr. Lars Dannecker (pictured, right), big data architect and development manager at SAP SE, have partnered to build a solution to multicloud woes in the form of simplified end-to-end Kubernetes management.

Syed and Dannecker spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed the new SAP, Cisco, Amazon Web Services Inc. answer to hybrid transformation. (* Disclosure below.)

Walls: You guys came up with a partnership earlier this year that’s gone very well. Talk about the partnership and what each is bringing to the table.

Syed: Cisco is not known to be a software company, but we are making the pivot now from hardware to software and building new solutions around containers, security and connectivity. As Cisco is embarking down this multicloud journey, so is SAP. What Cisco is doing is providing pristine upstream Kubernetes, but fully supported in a turnkey fashion, and that was very interesting to SAP.

Dannecker: SAP always has the goal to transform enterprise companies into what we call intelligent enterprise. [We] basically allow buildup of data-driven applications across locations, stores, systems and applications and make a fully integrated solution for our customers. When we designed the SAP data hub, a modern data orchestration and refinery solution across cloud and on-premise, we were searching for a solution [to] deploy it in a turnkey fashion.

We [decided to go with] Kubernetes, but managing this on-premise is really a challenge. [With this] solution, now the customer plugs [in] the container platform, his Kubernetes cluster into his recs in his data center, pushes the power button, gets the whole thing up, installs the SAP solution on top of that, and he’s done. He can operate and run it, gets full tech support from Cisco, software support from SAP, and has a complete enterprise-ready, production-ready solution with one push of a button.

Warren: Where’s the connection between the data and the Kubernetes side of things?

Dannecker: The SAP data hub [is like] a bridge between on-premise and cloud. Now we are building pipelines that allow an end-to-end workflow to read data from one source [and] transform the data seamlessly. The data is completely containerized [by] Kubernetes. Especially with enterprise customers, they have a lot of data they don’t want to bring into the cloud yet, and they need a hybrid solution. Now they can get the hybrid cloud aspect into the game and into the hands of our customers.

Warren: How do you help customers decide which things they should put into the cloud and which they should run on your solution?

Syed: We do all the plumbing for you so you don’t have to worry about it. You have a single dashboard with an application that’s also multicloud, running in AWS and on-premise. You can view the underlying infrastructure, which is the Kubernetes nodes, and how well the application is performing. You get the best of both worlds — great support from SAP and Cisco, with an end-to-end solution that spans from on-premise to AWS. We’re not talking about a one-off kind of a solution; it’s a solution that can do monitoring, migration, [and] scaling very easily. – Silicon Angel