How to get the most out of your move to SAP HANA

IBM POWER – BUYER’S GUIDE

Companies running SAP software on anything other than the SAP HANA database should know that they will only receive technical support until 2025.

While that may seem some time off, for anyone locked into an Oracle contract or with a significant investment in other infrastructure, it’s not that far off at all.

SAP has spent some time and effort explaining its case, which boils down to two things: SAP’s flagship business suite (S4) needs HANA to perform at its best and migrating data across to HANA is straight forward.

How to get the most out of your move to SAP HANA

In this eBook you’ll learn:

• Why digital disruption is driven by the explosion of data

• How HANA enables you to extract value from this data

• Why IBM Power is the ideal platform to run HANA

1

Many businesses are finding that their existing systems and approaches to data processing are inadequate to not only meet current business requirements, but to innovate with a view to the future. This is driving the need for simple and flexible data management. More than just a powerful in-memory database, SAP HANA is a digital platform for SAP customers and others to combine everything from transactions and the Internet of Things to big data analytics, in a single system. It creates a single version of the truth that defines and meets customer needs instantly, with the flexibility demanded by the accelerating pace of change.

This enables one of the major issues associated with the explosion in data to be addressed; namely velocity. The key is the simplicity of design. As databases have been required to work harder and process more and more requests, architectures have become more complex to cope. HANA allows architectures to be simplified, allowing more speed and, according to a recent Forrester study, reducing TCO by an average 37%.

The benefits of SAP HANA are clear but users need to assess whether their current and proposed server infrastructure can support it in the face of:

· Growing performance requirements.

· The demands of tomorrow’s SAP workloads.

· The need for more robust security.

What’s so special about SAP HANA?

Forbes recently outlined what it saw as the main technologies which will drive digital disruption. At the heart of these is the explosion of data.

Top 5 technologies for digital disruption

· AI and Cognitive technologies

· IoT

· Augmented and virtual reality

· Hybrid wireless technologies

· Intelligent agents

2

Today’s explosion of information is creating workloads that are stretching servers to their limits. This is restricting the capabilities of HANA.

To really make the most of HANA, as well as the applications leveraging its capabilities, you need to deploy it on a platform that provides unmatched flexibility, rock-solid resilience and industry-leading performance. We believe that platform is IBM Power Systems.

3

Unleash HANA by deploying it on IBM Power Systems

Designed specifically for big data workloads such as SAP HANA, IBM Power Systems provides substantial performance benefits compared to x86 architectures including:

· Greater threads per core

· More memory bandwidth

· Larger processor cache

IBM Power Systems can execute more threads per core than x86-based servers, enabling the platform to handle more instructions per clock cycle, meaning less time spent by users waiting for workloads to complete.

These factors make the Power architecture an excellent choice for the challenges faced by businesses undergoing digital transformations.

4

Performance

IBM Power Systems provide superior flexibility to meet the needs of organisations deploying SAP HANA.

One aspect of that flexibility is that robust virtualisation is supported out of the box. It consolides multiple SAP HANA virtual machines on a single Power Systems server.

IBM PowerVM virtualisation is fully supported by SAP, allowing customers to deploy SAP HANA in a virtual environment that supports both dedicated and shared processor resources, as well as running both production and non-production workloads on a single server.

Another contributor to the flexibility of Power Systems is that they are designed to be deployed as part of SAP’s Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) model. The goal of this approach is to reuse existing IT resources such as server, storage, and networking assets.

By supporting TDI in the deployment of SAP HANA, Power Systems give organisations superior choice over the technology they use, compared to the rigidly defined hardware appliances used in many competing SAP HANA infrastructures.

5

Flexibility

Mission-critical, 24/7 reliability is built into Power Systems by default. This factor is increasingly vital as customers consolidate SAP HANA workloads onto fewer physical systems, following the vendor recommendation from SAP.

For example, taking advantage of robust support for virtualization out of the box, customers can create virtual footprints as failover targets on scale-up production systems. This approach dramatically improves efficiency compared to the necessity of providing idle spare nodes on traditional scale-out architectures.

IBM Power Systems also runs sophisticated heuristics in the background of SAP HANA workloads, that provide predictive failure alerts to warn system administrators when a failure is likely to occur.

This capability can dramatically reduce the risk of unplanned outages, enhancing the overall availability of the system.

Resilience

6

Deploying SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems is a step forward towards ensuring technology enables companies, instead of hinders them. IBM Power Systems provide an excellent basis for the SAP HANA ecosystem, enabling businesses to get the most out of their migration.

For both on-premise and cloud-based deployments, IBM Power Systems is the platform of choice to drive businesses using SAP HANA for many years to come.

To get started running SAP HANA on high-performing IBM Power Systems, get in touch.

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Get the most out of your move to SAP HANA