Filestore Enterprise: File-sharing done right for SAP customers

Google Cloud’s ability to raise the bar on SAP application productivity and performance is an important source of value for our enterprise customers who run SAP environments. And now, we've got another success story to share from Google Cloud’s focus on SAP: giving customers the ability to leverage Google Cloud Filestore Enterprise as a file-sharing solution for their SAP deployments.

Filestore Enterprise gives SAP customers a number of important capabilities, including a high-availability regional file-sharing service with a 99.99% SLA, scalable capacity that can grow or shrink effortlessly based on current needs, and some of the industry's best security controls for protecting and maintaining control over business-critical SAP application data. 

Today, we're going to take a closer look at what makes Filestore Enterprise such a unique and important new offering for our SAP customers, and at how it fits into the big picture of our SAP enterprise storage services.

Filestore Enterprise for SAP: More than meets the eye                    

We know that many of our SAP customers look at Network Files System (NFS) solutions and see an ordinary, check-the-box capability. But there are good reasons to consider how a file-sharing solution fits into a big-picture assessment of your SAP cloud technology landscape. There's more to the NFS picture than meets the eye, so it’s important to look closely to ensure that you’re getting the best possible file-sharing reliability and performance for your business-critical SAP applications.

The first thing our SAP customers should know about Filestore Enterprise is how it's designed from the ground up to keep application data secure, available, and ready to work at peak performance. That means:

• Giving SAP customers a highly available, regional file-sharing service with a 99.99% SLA.

• Seamless and non-disruptive file access in the event of zonal disruptions.

• Massively scalable capacity that can expand or contract, instantly and effortlessly, based on a customer's real-time SAP workload requirements.

• A fully managed solution that SAP customers can stand up and maintain with minimal impact—keeping your in-house team free to focus on more important initiatives.

• Advanced controls, including VPC-SC and IP based access control with root squash, that ensure best-in-class data security and integrity.

The freedom of a fully managed NFS solution

Many of our SAP customers are currently working with home-brewed or third-party NFS solutions, or they're considering these types of solutions as they plan their SAP cloud migrations. Both approaches have proven their value over time and can work well for these enterprises. But they’re also costly in terms of in-house development and management bandwidth, and often force them to deal with multiple vendors, management toolsets, and storage architectures.

Filestore Enterprise gives SAP customers a compelling alternative: a robust, massively scalable and highly secure NFS solution that's fully integrated with their Google Cloud deployment and management toolsets. Filestore Enterprise can meet the NFS solution requirements for even the biggest and most complex SAP deployments—fully managed and ready to work, without the time and trouble of building a bespoke NFS solution or dealing with third-party storage providers.

The gold standard in NFS availability

Filestore Enterprise is setting new standards in high-availability NFS storage for SAP customers. With a few mouse clicks or a few simple Google Cloud API calls, customers can provision NFS shares that replicate and synchronize seamlessly across three zones within a region. If one zone within a region goes down, Filestore Enterprise will stay up—serving data and running at peak performance, without any customer intervention or even awareness that an outage has occurred.

In addition, Filestore Enterprise allows customers to take periodic file system snapshots and retain as many recovery points as they need. If a recovery operation is required, customers can recover compromised data—whether that's a single file or an entire file system—in a matter of minutes from any system snapshot

File storage for SAP—the big picture

There's one more key requirement to consider, and that’s how your NFS solution fits into a comprehensive SAP storage strategy. Working together, Filestore Enterprise and Google Filestore Basic give SAP customers a set of flexible, secure, fully managed file storage solutions that address a wide range of use cases and performance requirements: 

Unique capabilities for SAP customers

Filestore Enterprise gives SAP customers a secure, reliable, highly available file-sharing storage solution that's fully managed and easy to deploy. Along with Filestore Basic, it gives customers the freedom to choose the right mix of storage capabilities for their SAP application environments. And with our multi-zonal architecture, Filestore Enterprise delivers a level of reliable performance that’s unique among hyperscale clouds.

Ready to learn more about how Google Cloud gives our SAP customers the industry's best all-around support for their business requirements? Browse more benefits.