You may not realize it, but each SAP Enable Now instance is hosted at one of 9 or 10 global datacenters (the exact number depends on where you look). For any given customer, the datacenter used is in the country the customer is located in (or close to it). There are datacenters in Australia (AP1), Canada (CA1), China (CN1), Germany (EU1), Japan (JP1), The Netherlands (EU3), Saudi Arabia (SA1), The United Arab Emirates (AE1), and (two in) the United States (US1, US3). Whenever a user accesses content stored in SAP Enable Now, it is retrieved from the single datacenter on which the instance is located.
This generally works well for customers that are located in a single country – and ideally in one where a datacenter is located – but multi-national companies, who may have users located in multiple countries across the globe, this could result in some delays. Personally I’ve not heard of any issues, but I do hear the occasional grumbling from customers located the other side of the world from their datacenter, with a [relatively] low-bandwidth internet connection. But for those customers who do experience lags at their ‘more remote’ locations, help is now at hand, through a partnership with Akamai.
Akamai is a company that provides a Content Delivery Network (CDN) service, which will replicate the contents of your server on multiple other servers in its network (it has more than 330,000 around the world). Then, when a user requests content, it is retrieved from the Akamai server closest to them, instead of from the datacenter on which the instance is located. SAP started using Akamai for SuccessFactors earlier this year, but support for SAP Enable Now was only added in the 2206 release.
This is obviously a paid service. Starting costs are approximately US$21,000 for as 12-month commitment, and covers 1TB of data transfer), and Akamai has indicated that customers can choose which countries (or clusters?) you want to replicate to – which may be handy of you want to avoid more restrictive regimes (such as China) that may impose additional content ‘verification’ requirements.
From a technical perspective (and to give you an idea of the ease of set-up), the basic steps for using Akamai’s services / servers are as follows:
- Sign up with Akamai. You can probably do this from akamai.com, although you’ll likely have to go through their Sales department to get a contract signed.
- Contact SAP Support and ask for an Akamai-compatible property file for your SAP Enable Now instance. Details are a bit patchy on exactly who to contact about this, but you can always just open an Incident and they’ll get back to you.
- Confirm to Akamai that you have control over your SAP Enable Now domain (https://{client}.enable-now.cloud.sap). This is easiest done by creating a DNS token in your Akamai Control Center (which you’ll have access to after Step 1) and then sending this token to SAP Support (again, exact contact unclear) so that they can put this into your instance’s back-end. Once that’s been done, you can go back into the Akamai Control Center and validate this. Effectively, this makes sure the DNS token specified in Akamai is the same as the DNS token in the SAP Enable Now instance back-end, which confirms that you ‘own’ the server you want to replicate (because if you have access to write a DNS token to the back-end, you must have admin access).
- Once ownership has been confirmed, you can activate replication, via the Akamai Control Center.
- Finally, contact SAP Support (again) and tell them that your Akamai system is all set up. SAP will then edit the DNS settings for your SAP Enable Now instance so that all requests for content are now directed to Akamai’s CDN, instead of to the SAP datacenter. Akamai will then take care of routing users to their nearest server.
And that’s all there is to it. It’s relatively simple (and the Akamai Control Center interface is fairly easy to navigate – SAP should pay attention for the Fiori Admin Console!) and aside from the back-and-forth with SAP Support, won’t take long to set up.
I have heard rumor (currently unconfirmed) that SAP will further simplify things by offering Akamai’s CDN as a paid service. Presumably then, SAP would handle the contract with Akamai and all of the configuration (basically all 5 steps above) and you’d only need to sign an agreement with SAP (or add it on to your existing licensing agreement). Again, I’d expect that to be a paid service (and most likely with an ‘administrative uplift’ by SAP for their troubles…).
[Following para updated following contact with Akamai]
Akamai’s technical team say that content is replicated across Akamai’s servers “instantly”. I’m assuming that applies to all access – both read and write – so if an Author in the U.S. Starts Editing on an object, it is instantly locked so an Author in Australia couldn’t Start Editing it at the same time.
If you’re interested, contact your SAP CSP, or contact Akamai direct via their website, akamai.com.
