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Enterprise data is growing in leaps and bounds. Professor Dr. Hasso Plattner mentioned in his SAPPHIRE 2019 keynote that 70 petabytes of global data resides in SAP ERPs. According to IDC’s Data Age 2025 study, the annual size of global data is expected to grow 300 percent from 2019 to 2025[1]! As businesses evaluate migrating their SAP applications to HANA, a key consideration would be scaling them cost effectively to address the data growth.

While SAP HANA compresses the data loaded into memory, data in memory increases year on year. With cost of memory and processor cores being the significant portion of the systems cost, compute infrastructure plays a critical role in scaling SAP HANA cost effectively. But scalability is just one parameter in lowering overall TCO of SAP HANA landscape. As more business-critical SAP applications move to HANA, the cost of downtime also increases accordingly. So, system availability becomes another critical factor.

IBM Power Systems has been delivering best of breed scalability and availability since it was certified for SAP HANA in 2015. This is the first system that provided virtualization capabilities for SAP HANA infrastructure and continues to provide the largest virtualization scalability of 24TB in the market for both OLTP and OLAP workloads. In fact, virtualization is the most important differentiator that sets IBM Power Systems apart from the rest. It lowers TCO by driving up system utilization that leads to fewer systems, lesser number of network and SAN ports, and reduced energy consumption.

IBM Power Systems has now further advanced its leadership in virtualization of SAP HANA landscape with the latest innovations-support for shared processor pools in production that increases utilization and virtual persistent memory that enables faster restart of HANA-based applications during planned maintenance.

Shared processor pools simplify and optimize SAP HANA deployments by enabling dynamic sharing of processor cores between not only HANA production environments but also with SAP application servers, non-production and other non-SAP workloads. Clients can define the priority of the workloads and system will autonomously manage the CPU resources. This results in better consolidation and utilization of resources.

Helge Tautorat, Director of Global Infrastructure with Richemont (an early adopter of this capability) said that “Using Power Systems, the cost for HANA landscape just drops by 50 percent.”

This capability is an industry first for the SAP HANA landscape and is only available in Power Systems today!

The Virtual persistent memory (PMEM) with PowerVM capability helps clients to restart HANA applications faster during planned or unplanned outages by creating persistent memory volumes using existing DRAM technology that our clients already own. Unlike persistent memory technology offered in x86 platforms, which requires procurement of new memory and has a performance penalty compared to DRAM, this is a hypervisor defined feature in Power Systems. Hence, clients get the flexibility of virtualization that allows them to change PMEM allocation on demand. All clients need to do to get this capability is upgrade their PowerVM firmware at no additional cost! Read more about the IBM Power Systems persistent memory technology roadmap for SAP HANA.

Success driven by unmatched customer experience

IBM Power Systems entered this market in 2015 with capabilities that address the key infrastructure challenges SAP HANA customers were facing. Today, there are thousands of customers running HANA applications on this platform and 50+ MSP/CSP’s offering a SAP HANA hosting solution on Power Systems. This success has been driven by continuous focus on creating the best customer experience for deploying and maintaining SAP HANA environments.

This is reflected in many of our customers winning SAP Innovation Awards in 2019 and IBM Power Systems winning the SAP Pinnacle Award in 2018.

Learn more about IBM Power Systems for SAP HANA.

[1] IDC’s Data Age 2025:https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/our-story/trends/files/idc-sea...

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