Infrastructure Built for Data and SAP HANA
If you have made the decision to run SAP HANA, congratulations. SAP HANA provides your organization the ability to gain real-time insights from your internal data and external data sources. It does this by building a business warehouse for your data that operates in-memory.
SAP HANA is a powerful application. You must now decide which deployment solution is best for you. We discuss considerations for on-premise, hybrid cloud, and private cloud in another article. [Link to Blog 1]
As you can see from our previous article, we feel that many organizations would benefit from running SAP HANA on-premises. There are many interdependencies between systems. Internal enterprise applications and external sources will be constantly feeding data into your business warehouse. It helps if the majority of those applications are connected with high-speed network connections.
IBM Power Systems Are Built for Data
IBM Power Systems were redesigned from the ground up to process massive volumes of transactions in light of today’s data intensive workloads. That describes SAP HANA perfectly. Technology research firm Clabby Analytics compared the performance of the IBM POWER8 processor with the XEON processor and this is what they found:
- 2x the overall performance
- 4x more threads per core
- 3x memory bandwidth per core exploits
- 4,600 SAPS per core versus 2,000 on x86
- Up to 32TB of RAM and 192 processor cores per cluster
- More on-chip and L2 cache.
Ideal Platform for SAP HANA
These performance gains make a real difference when it comes to an application like SAP HANA that will exploit every performance gain that you can provide it.
Originally SAP HANA was only available on Intel-based appliances. In 2015, SAP certified HANA for the IBM Power Systems platform running Linux distributions from Red Hat and SUSE. At that time, IDC created a white paper, For the First Time, Architectural Choice for SAP Customers That Want to Move to HANA. that advocates the use of IBM Power Systems for SAP HANA deployments.
In that white paper, IDC states, “HANA requires a platform that can run massive transactional and analytical workloads on the same hardware, with a processor architecture that is designed to handle these types of workloads. It is of critical importance for customers to make the right infrastructure choice, one that can support the current and future system requirements for HANA applications such as BW and SAP S/4HANA.”
Additional Benefits of IBM Power Systems for SAP HANA
Advanced Virtualization:
- Highest performance virtualization solution for SAP HANA
- Lowest virtualization layer overhead on multi-threaded HANA workloads
- Fully exploits the HANA scale-up approach
Ease of Management:
- Fewer systems required for SAP HANA deployment
- Reduce server sprawl, simplified management, and lower data center costs
SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems Use Cases
These customers also have seen impressive benefits:
50% Faster Processing of Back-end Jobs
United Breweries, the largest brewer in Asia, saw 50% faster processing of back-end jobs when switching to SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems.
8X Faster Transaction Processing
South Shore Furniture realized 8X faster transaction processing when they moved to SAP HANA on IBM POWER8.
We believe that IBM Power Systems are the ideal platform for on-premise SAP HANA deployments.
Originally published at convergeone.com on May 11, 2017.
