Cloud Appliance Library – CAL

Do you remember what did it take to do simple PoC based on some SAP solution? Usually it is not that easy. While doing it on premise it is pain. Even in private cloud it is not that easy. To solve things related to such a deployment and basically to enable customers to deploy test, training, evaluation or demo systems easily SAP introduced Cloud Appliance Library (CAL) or sometimes called SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC).

How does it work? With the CAL it is possible to deploy SAP system from preconfigured SAP software appliance. The final system will run in one of cloud (hosting) providers. In most cases the provider is Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure. Of course one who does the deployment must have an cloud provider account upfront as there is a payment associated for running it on their infrastructure. But the point is to do not lose the time while deploying. An access to the system is via web interface so user needs web browser only.

What systems are available at the CAL:

There are following types of the systems to be deployed available in the library. Standard SAP solutions like Business Suite on HANA, Rapid Deployment Solutions (RDS) products e.g. ERP, CRM; technology components NW: ABAP Application Server.

NB: There is more to say about pricing. Two use cases are here. Trial – only fee for infrastructure to cloud provider exists. Subscription – It is bring in your own license (BYOL) for particular SAP solution type of thing. Plus the license for CAL is applied. Of course fee for using of infrastructure goes to the hosting provider on top of these.

  

Useful links:

CAL homepage

SCN CAL community

What is difference between HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) and HANA Enterprise Cloud Platform (HEC)?

These two terms are actually pretty tricky. There are plenty of articles available on web trying to explain those two. Actually none of them satisfied my curiosity to understand them. This is basically the reason why I wrote this post. One thing to consider is that these two SAP offering are rapidly changing. Also some of SAP definitions of cloud computing terminologies (like IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) are different from industry's perspective definitions.

Basic facts

Both HCP and HEC are cloud platforms and are built around SAP HANA. Very basic fact is that SAP started HANA as database. This database evolved over the time to platform. They both use the same infrastructure. What is different is their purposes and different types of users.

HCP - is cloud platform (Platform-as-a-Service) intended for independent software vendors and developers to create and test cloud apps on HANA using its infrastructure, database and existing app. The platform is Java-based, relies on open standards and leverages industry leading tools to accelerate ramp-up and maximize developer productivity.

Former name of the HCP was SAP NetWeaver Cloud or NetWeaver Neo (neo = SAP HANA Cloud Console Client) or OnDemand Cloud Platform.

more info on HCP

HCP community

SAP NetWeaver Cloud – We’re open!

HEC - private managed cloud as hosting service where SAP provides the infrastructure (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) and the services needed to host SAP apps (e.g. Business Suite) deployment. This can include HANA custom and out-of-the box applications and SAP NetWeaver Business Information Warehouse software, all on a single instance of the HANA in-memory database platform. Also customer having already HANA license can user by moving it from their on-premise to cloud. In case of not having license an subscription model can be used. SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud runs on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

more info on HEC and also here

More details on the topic can be found in following ASUG article