Taking a look at the Packathon SAP Data Intelligence Platform

Earlier this year, we had the pleasure to be invited to be part of the SAP Packathon intiativates , working with SAP, Dell and their key partners to power their business scenarios with SAP Data Intelligence Platform. 

There are two tracks for the event, one focused on Data & Analytics, and the other one Data Orchestration and Intelligence. 12 key partners and over 110 participants joined in. At the event, partners delivered 19 business use cases across different industries, which are all powered by Red Hat portfolio solutions.

SAP Data Intelligence Platform with Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat Openshift platform is the enterprise container orchestration layer which is the platform powering the SAP Data Intelligence solution for the Packathon event.

There are several key advantage running SAP Data Intelligence on top of Red Hat Openshift Platform:

• Hardware enablement not only for NVIDIA GPUs

• Consistent experience with Red Hat OpenShift anywhere (on-premise, virtual, cloud, bare metal)

• Integration with VMware vSphere with built-in support for OpenShift installer

• Red Hat OpenShift runs also on the edge systems enabling the IoT use-cases

• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management to manage and monitor all dev test and prod clusters

To share a bit more on what is running under the hood, below is an architecture diagram and VM sizes that was used to set up the Red Hat Openshift Container Platform (OCP).

Architecture:

Red Hat Openshift Container Platform (OCP) VM Specs (totals):

• 3 control plane nodes
  • 18 vCPUs
  • 72 GiB RAM
• 3 ODF compute nodes
  • 54 vCPUs
  • 240 GiB RAM
  • 12TB storage space
• 4 compute nodes dedicated to SAP DI
  • 50 vCPUs
  • 340 GiB RAM
  • 4 × GPU NVIDIA Tesla V100 32GB

Software Components:

• SAP DI 3.1
  • 20 tenants in total
  • 136 user accounts
  • 205 built graphs/pipelines

• OCP & ODF 4.6
  • Initial OCP 4.4.19 on Sep 9 2020
  • since then updated 11 times up to the current OCP 4.6.46
  • 2 partner namespaces
    • 9 pods
    • 45 built images
  • Individual Object Storage Bucket for each team 

• NVIDIA GPU Operator 1.6.2

All the software components were running in virtual machines that were periodically backed up by PowerProtect Data Manager. Thanks to that and the native high-availability built in the OpenShift Container Platform, all the attendees had a resilient and robust environment to work with. The cluster was able to recover itself from a couple of unplanned outages all on its own.

Red Hat maintained SDI Observer ensured seamless integration with OCP. One of its components is the image registry that was hosting SAP Data Intelligence container images mirrored from SAP repositories and built locally in DI’s Pipeline Modeler.

OpenShift Data Foundation was spread across three different datastores to ensure high availability and redundancy which paid off during disaster recovery.

NVIDIA GPU Operator provided kernel modules for GPU units in PCI passthrough mode. AI/ML container images provided by SAP DI ship with GPU accelerated libraries that partners were utilizing.

The benefits of RHEL for SAP

Just like the rest of Red Hat’s portfolio for SAP, the Red Hat Openshift Container Platform is aligned with SAP releases. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is certified for SAP applications and SAP HANA database. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions subscription services also includes long term support life cycle. Red Hat Insights provides proactive monitoring for your SAP environment. And in-place upgrade ensures the latest security patches can be updated to your SAP production system without reboot. 

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is another solution that can save SAP sysadmin a lot of time maintaining their environment. Starting from simple tasks like installing the operating system, SAP software to configuring HANA system replication and setting up the high availability for failover. All this can be managed from the existing playbooks from Ansible. 

Summary

Overall, the event was a great success. Many partners built and demonstrated their solutions across different industries on top of SAP Data Intelligence platform in a short period of time. This was made possible by an integrated technology stack from SAP, Dell and Red Hat. If you would like to learn more about how other enterprises are adopting the Red Hat Openshift Container Platform or other Red Hat for SAP solutions, please leave a comment below the blog or reach out to sap@redhat.com for more details.

Shang Wu is a currently an Associate Principal Solution Architect for Red Hat.
Michal Minar is currently a Senior Software Engineer for the Red Hat SAP Tech Alliance team.