SAP HANA on Hyperconverged Infrastructure

There are several data center trends to pay attention to: edge computing, all-flash solutions, hybrid cloud, data center efficiency like air flow, liquid cooling etc. – but one that stands out is hyperconverged technologies. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) can significantly simplify data center design allowing new agility and scalability because it more closely couples previously separate components like compute, storage, network, and other components by leveraging software-defined solutions. 

SAP is committed to helping customers get the most out of their SAP HANA deployment. Driving openness and cost effectiveness is part of our commitment to delivering customer value. SAP knows from customer feedback that the majority of organizations using SAP HANA want to continue using proven IT processes and harnessing their IT infrastructure investment for SAP HANA. And, increasingly, customers want to benefit from highly flexible and cost-cutting approaches – including commodity hardware and cloud deployment models.

That’s why SAP continues to look into new ways to bring down TCO by leveraging latest technologies. With certification now available on hyperconverged infrastructures, SAP and its ecosystem of technology partners delivers the next big step in driving down cost, increasing simplicity, and paving the way to the cloud.

HCI is an IT framework that combines compute, storage, network and other components into a single system which reduces data center complexity and increases scalability. It includes a hypervisor for virtual compute nodes that typically run on commodity servers. In the future, HCI solutions may also leverage public infrastructure-as-a-service solutions and will be a foundation for hybrid solutions managing on-premise and IaaS cloud deployments.

To pass the SAP certification criteria all components of an HCI solution need to pass a dedicated validation. At the end, all combined components need to pass as an end-to-end solution that ensures isolation, so that other workloads do not affect SAP HANA operations.  

Several HCI partner solutions are certified.  (https://www.sap.com/dmc/exp/2014-09-02-hana-hardware/enEN/hci.html)

The solutions are designed to serve mission-critical workloads and we worked with our technology partners to put a global support process in place for HCI for SAP HANA.

In a nutshell:

Hyperconverged Infrastructure simplifies management of your private cloud deployment and can build the bridge to public cloud. HCI can reduce total cost of ownership and helps you to support your business faster and with higher flexibility.

The future will tell if HCI will keep its promise to simplify management and increase infrastructure utilization. If the performance results and memory sizes for HCI meet your demands, SAP HANA customers can take that first step confidently and explore the HCI value potential.