SAP HANA gets certified on HPE SimpliVity – why this is important to you

The world is running on realtime data. Application software giant SAP is helping over 400,000 customers worldwide work together to manage that data more efficiently and use business insights more effectively.  With 46 years of history and innovation, SAP has established itself as the market leader in enterprise application software, situated at the center of today’s business and technology revolution.

SAP HANA enables customers to run a business data platform to deliver data-driven insights throughout their business and predict realtime outcomes.  SAP HANA is an analytic-transactional data platform, bringing current live data together to enable customers to make decisions and take action. HPE and SAP have partnered to certify this intelligent analytics product to run on the HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged platform powered by Intel®.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) reduces costs and eliminates complexity as compared to traditional siloed stacks of IT infrastructure.  Fully-converged platforms, such as HPE SimpliVity, have the following defining characteristics:

• Seamless integration with mature, market-leading hypervisors to run myriad virtualized workloads on a single, cohesive all-flash, x86 resource pool
• All functionality managed through existing native hypervisor consoles (i.e., vCenter, SCVMM), rather than introducing additional management interfaces thereby exposing the underlying infrastructure management chore to the end userHigh resiliency at all layers of the architecture with integrated and automated data protection capabilities, eliminating the need for third-party products with their additional licensing costs and management consoles
• Performance-enhancing data virtualization platform technology with features such as data locality, all-flash storage media, and always-on inline deduplication and compression applied to all data, all the time, wherever it exists
• Guaranteed efficiency, performance, simplicity, management, scalability, and availability, with a cost of acquisition savings of up to 48% and reduced total cost (TCO) of 69% as compared to legacy IT

SAP HANA now can be run on the HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged platform not only in test and development environments, but also in production environments. HPE SimpliVity for HANA is certified on the most mature hypervisor in the market – VMware vSphere. This provides the option of running half socket SAP HANA VMs as well, which enables more HANA VMs (2) per CPU, a feature that is not supported on other hypervisors today.

With the hardware consolidation that HPE SimpliVity HCI provides, IT organizations get the simplicity of running an appliance-like model for HANA, but at a much lower cost. Along with that, having the same vendor supporting the HCI software and hardware reduces the burden on the customer for securing and managing support contracts from multiple vendors.

HPE SimpliVity goes beyond traditional HCI by providing high performance features and advanced data services included at no additional cost. In-line deduplication and compression provide space savings and improve performance by eliminating redundant I/O’s. The HPE SimpliVity data virtualization platform is architected for performance, and the platform is certified to run HANA with SSD storage (as opposed to requiring NVMe storage).

Built-in data protection features include guaranteed restores and backups of terabyte VMs within 60 seconds, protecting SAP HANA infrastructure VMs. The HPE SimpliVity RapidDR solution orchestrates the failover/failback of VMs from one site to another in case of a disaster. An IT administrator can resurrect the SAP environment within seconds, while specifying IP schema, and pre and post startup scripts for the failover site. The RapidDR tool can also be used to spin up clones of production SAP environments for test and development purposes.

Architectural opportunities for HCI with SAP HANA

One of the best parts of having HPE SimpliVity certified for HANA is the range of architectural topologies that can be deployed. For existing and new customers, this certification provides new opportunities and benefits from a cost, infrastructure and operational perspective.

Existing customers running HANA in test and development environments on HPE SimpliVity can now streamline their end-to-end SAP landscape from production to test to development and vice-versa on the same infrastructure. The speeds at which HPE SimpliVity can move data around from site to site revolutionizes datacenter agility for SAP customers. Environments can be moved from production to development within seconds and then new changes rolled back into production at similar speeds. This agility moves the focus from data center maintenance and management to customer innovation, and greatly reduces time to market.

Built-in data protection with rapid remote backup, restore, cloning allows rapid provisioning of Dev/Test environments

Customers like Productos Metalurgicos Promesa in Ecuador are excited about the prospect of running their databases and applications on the newly certified solution. “Promesa runs our Development and Quality environments of SAP S4 HANA a couple of times for more than two weeks each time, with excellent results on HPE SimpliVity, and without any impact on operations,” states Miguel Angel Sotomayor Gutierrez, CIO.  “We are very excited to see that a mature, stable solution including HPE SimpliVity and VMware ESXi is now certified to run SAP HANA for in-memory databases and applications.”

Mr. Gutierrez adds, “We are currently working on two large SAP projects (WMS and system conversion from S/4HANA 1503 to S/4HANA 1709) and both projects have the Sandbox running in HPE SimpliVity with the results always of excellence.”

Learn more about hyperconverged infrastructure, download Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Dummies. To understand more about the various solutions and applications supported, along with analyst reports and customer references, please visit the SimpliVity references page https://www.hpe.com/us/en/integrated-systems/simplivity.html#resources.