Son of Beast – 6 TB and 12 TB VMs for SAP HANA on Azure @ SAPPHIRE

SAPPHIRE Now ended last week. Together with SAP we had a fantastic show with lots of great customer and partner interactions. In addition to several great ASUG sessions we also had a booth where we highlighted several topics that we and our partners have been working on during the last few months.

Our in-booth theater presentations attracted quite a lot of interest followed by in depth discussions at one of our pods. Colleagues from Microsoft, but also partners and SAP talked about their experience running SAP Systems on Azure, leveraging ML, IoT or other Azure PaaS services together with services from the SAP Cloud Platform or simply talked about new features that were recently introduced.

Here we also talked about how Microsoft runs SAP on Azure and what it took to get more than 50 TB of on-prem data into Azure!

These in-booth sessions were followed by several ASUS sessions by SAP, partners and of course Microsoft. You can find most the presentations here, but I will certainly dig into some of them later and highlight a few topics that I think are extremely relevant to most customers.

• Driverless Supply Chain Using SAP IBP, Azure and Ariba
• Learn about Microsoft’s Security & Compliance journey as applicable to SAP on Azure & SAP Cloud solutions
• Microsoft POC of S/4 Group Reporting Consolidation on S/4 Central Finance
• SAP Analysis for Microsoft Office Road Map
• Digital Commerce Transformation and Modern Customer Experience with Microsoft Azure and Billing Solutions with SAP Customer Experience
• Git For SAP
• Learn how Microsoft enables Telemetry for ERP, S/4HANA & SAP SaaS on Azure
• Learn about Microsoft’s journey with BPC 11.0 on BW/4HANA & HANA 2.0 on Azure

Of course we also had quite a lot of announcements. The Embrace announcement from SAP is probably something that you will hear quite a lot about in the future. I will go into more details on this soon.

Next to that we talked about

• Largest Bare Metal Instance with Intel Optane for SAP HANA
• Integration of Azure AI in SAP’s digital platform
• SAP Data Custodian on Microsoft Azure is now available
• Managed business continuity with Azure Backup for SAP HANA
• Simplified integrations with Logic Apps connector for SAP
• Boosted productivity and enhanced security with Azure Active Directory and SAP Cloud Platform

You can read much more about this here. Again I could talk about each of these announcements in more details — but this will come. What I finally want to highlight is this:

6 TB and 12 TB VMs for SAP HANA on Microsoft Azure

With the new Mv2 series in Azure we are now offering up to 6TB RAM on a single VM. This means you can easily spin up a fully SAP HANA certified virtual machine in minutes, deploy a SAP HANA system and shut it down — only paying for the few minutes that the VM was actually running. Or you can do a system refresh of your productive landscape and keep it running for weeks or month. Or you can run your productive workload and have it running for years, probably leveraging our Reserved instance to get a good discount.

This is by far the largest-memory SAP HANA-certified configuration offered on any virtual machine in the public cloud. 6TB Mv2 VMs are generally available and production certified in U.S. East and U.S. East 2 regions. U.S. West 2, Europe West, Europe North and Southeast Asia regions will be available in the coming months.

If you want to give a try, then head over to portal.azure.com and spin-up your first 6 TB VM!

So what about “Son of Beast”? Well, if you saw to Mark Russinovich, CTO Microsoft Azure, during the last //build presentation last week you know why. If not, well, then I can highly recommend taking a look!