Hyperconverged SAP HANA® customer says HPE “keeps us as leaders in the market”

It’s always better to hear feedback from the customer directly on a new hyperconverged deployment. Miguel Sotomayor, CIO and IT director at Productos Metalúrgicos S.A. (Promesa) and one of the world’s first SAP HANA® customers on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), was kind enough to take some time and share his recent user experience. “HPE SimpliVity is becoming the innovation spearhead in this company. I believe this choice keeps us as leaders in the market.”

His comment is indicative of a broader market response, as far as I can tell. In October2018, HPE announced the certification of HPE SimpliVity with SAP HANA at SAP TechEd, and the response from the IT community has been extremely encouraging. The momentum for SAP HANA on HCI is great because of the value that the solution brings in terms of cost, consolidation and management.

HPE SimpliVity powered by Intel® provides a robust platform that delivers proven performance, resiliency, and as much as 91% of an IT organization’s time back for innovation and new projects, according to an IDC operational efficiency study. HPE SimpliVity has seen even greater traction because of the all the built-in features and capabilities which enhance an SAP HANA Database plus application deployment: data protection, deduplication, compression, and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities. A significant number of HPE SimpliVity customers recognized the value of the combined HPE/SAP solution, and had been running HANA in dev/test environments even before the certification program was announced by SAP.

From Test/Dev to Production Environments

Approximately a month after announcing certification, HPE SimpliVity made its debut for SAP HANA as an orderable SKU with worldwide availability. From there the HPE SimpliVity platform quickly secured one of the first SAP HANA deployments on hyperconverged infrastructure in the world.

The customer, Promesa, based in South America, distributes hardware and auto parts to 6,000 resellers across Ecuador. Their infrastructure consolidation project started three years ago with a long list of objectives, from reducing multi-vendor costs and complexity, to simplifying operational management, improving performance, and supporting 10-year growth. With SAP HANA at the core of their business, they required a platform where these services and apps could run smoothly across all their locations.

Promesa was running SAP HANA in a non-production HCI environment and had been waiting for HPE SimpliVity to be certified for production deployments. Sotomayor was pleased that his organization was able to capitalize on the opportunity as soon as the certification was in place. “HPE SimpliVity … delivered efficiency, speed, agility, and what the company expected the most: a disaster recovery site. This allows for availability of all applications, which has always been the main objective.”

The auto parts distributor was able to consolidate and migrate their applications for production, development, and QA, along with SAP HANA Database to HPE SimpliVity. With this migration, Promesa has realized:

• SAP HANA Database size of 520 GB (data) and 60 GB (log data) running on HPE SimpliVity 380 Gen10
• SAP HANA Pre-production Sandbox size of 600 GB running on HPE SimpliVity Gen 9
• 10:1 deduplication rates
• 20:1 data efficiency
• 63% reduction of devices
• Greatly improved recovery point objectives
• Reduced maintenance windows from hours to minutes
• Availability raised to over 99.9%

With HPE SimpliVity in their production environment, Promesa is getting as much as 250:1 data efficiency.

Momentum is building for SAP HANA on HPE SimpliVity

No one knows large-scale SAP HANA deployments like HPE. As part of the HPE SimpliVity solutions team, it is a great feeling for me to know that the solutions HPE provides are not only helping address customer problems, but also delivering great value and benefits on top of it. HPE and SAP have continued to maintain a strong alliance relationship for over 20 years. This high availability deployment, the momentum for SAP HANA on HPE SimpliVity, and the additional value provided by the HPE ecosystem, help explain why HPE is the largest vendor for SAP HANA deployments in the world.

What You Need to Know When Selecting a SAP HANA Server Vendor, Gartner 2018

Possibly the best news of all is what the future holds for our joint SAP HANA/HPE SimpliVity solution. Together, HPE and SAP are now heads-down working towards the delivery of technical collateral, assets, and services that will provide additional proof-points to the leadership of the HPE SimpliVity platform, and HPE as a vendor to choose for your infrastructure needs.

Stay tuned…

In the meantime, take a look at the new SAP HCI Best Practices Guide for the HPE SimpliVity 380. It includes HPE SimpliVity requirements for production SAP HANA environments, and tips for choosing the right hardware.