The Business Value of Deploying SAP HANA on HP Hardware

Organizations seeking to quickly extract maximum value from all the data in their environments often choose SAP HANA® in-memory database technology. Then they’re faced with a second choice to make: Deciding which hardware platform will best serve their strategic and overarching IT goals. Hewlett-Packard may have the answer.

HP and SAP have designed and released an optimally configured SAP HANA appliance based on HP x86 servers with preloaded software. The solution is scalable, reliable and sized right for enterprises using SAP applications. At its core is HP Converged Infrastructure, a groundbreaking approach that seamlessly and cost-effectively combines servers, storage, management software, networking, power and cooling, security and services.

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Here are nine questions organizations need to ask to determine whether HP’s SAP HANA solution will meet their needs:

1. What are the advantages of an HP infrastructure for enterprises running SAP HANA?

HP utilizes computing, networking and storage equipment designed to work together, which reduces support complexity. That means a single HP technician can answer any question related to the hardware, whereas the competition often needs to call upon several technicians to resolve an issue.

2. What is HP’s performance when running SAP HANA? HP has the only certified result in the SAP BW Enhanced Mixed Load Benchmark, the first standard performance measurement of near real-time, ad hoc analysis and reporting on continuously updated data. The benchmark showcases the ability of SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on SAP HANA running on HP AppSystems to exceed customer expectations for high-performance analytics with near real-time data sets. For a detailed independent white paper describing the testing environment and business value, visit ExperienceSAPHANA.com. Additional details can be found at http://www.sap.com/benchmark.

3. What kind of support does HP provide?HP offers services closely aligned with SAP, with support for servers and storage handled by a single team. That makes the process seamless and allows HP to manage all support directly via a single, expedited telephone number. A one-stop team handles all SAP HANA needs, including hardware, operating system and software.

HP offers two categories of support for SAP HANA: reactive and proactive. Reactive support provides direct access to HP’s team of response engineers in second-level support, who have many years of experience supporting SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator (SAP NetWeaver BWA) and SAP HANA. This team is integrated with the SAP support organization so it can engage SAP if needed. HP’s proactive support includes access to local HP engineers who provide SAP HANA services such as OS and firmware updates and SAP HANA system health checks.

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4. How does HP address disaster tolerance requirements?HP offers a scale-out solution that has been tested, validated and certified by SAP. Organizations can host a second SAP HANA system — at a separate location — that can take over for their production systems in the event of a significant outage. With this certification, HP is now the only company in the world to deliver a disaster tolerance solution for SAP HANA, certified for synchronous replication and failover to distances up to 30 miles. Organizations can choose to dedicate the disaster system for disaster recovery or repurpose it altogether.

5. What is HP’s experience delivering SAP software on HP hardware?HP has developed a core competency for in-memory computing with SAP, demonstrated by its long experience with SAP NetWeaver BWA, dating back to 2006, and now with SAP HANA (using the same concepts: blades and SAN storage). In fact, HP has been a trusted SAP hardware partner for more than 20 years, with more than 77,000 installations of SAP applications worldwide, and it runs nearly half of all SAP installations in the world. This vast experience translates into the following capabilities:

• Design: HP engineers in Waldorf, Germany, have worked with SAP since the early 1990s on SAP infrastructure design, most recently on the SAP NetWeaver BWA design. HP’s Solution Design Team works with customers to size and configure the appropriate system to meet their requirements for performance, high availability and growth.

• Build: The HP factory integration process is well established for SAP appliances: integrating the hardware, loading software and customer network settings, delivering the appliance on-site and installing it in the data center.

• Implementation: While delivery and install are the last steps for most SAP partners, HP has learned that it’s critical to finish with a comprehensive implementation and training session for its customers’ teams (included with every SAP HANA deployment). HP’s team of consultants counts many years of SAP NetWeaver BWA and SAP HANA implementation experience.

6. How will HP infrastructure support future growth?HP’s scale-out solution is made to grow on the fly without downtime. In fact, nodes (blades or racks) can be added during SAP HANA operation without interruption.

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7. How does HP ensure high availability? The HP architecture for high availability with automatic failover is more robust than with competing solutions, especially at switchback (some vendors’ designs require downtime for switchback). New and repaired nodes can be added to the system without restarting a productive SAP HANA environment. With the SAP HANA scale-out solution, HP implements node failover using a standby blade server. Specifically, failure of an active node (i.e., a blade) initiates an instantaneous failover to the standby blade. In fact, hardware resiliency in HP’s industry-leading DL980 servers results in better availability and reliability than with commodity x86 hardware. And HP’s scale-out design is based on a shared-storage architecture rather than local storage, ensuring fast, reliable failover.

8. What will it cost to operate SAP HANA on HP hardware? HP utilizes efficient central storage in its scale-out solution, which reduces redundancy and investment in storage, as well as energy and maintenance costs. Furthermore, HP’s solution reduces total cost of ownership because it takes complexity out of the operations and maintenance of the SAP HANA file system, which is based on the widely known NFS standard. This is unlike some other solutions that require operators to learn and maintain knowledge of the proprietary General Parallel File System. In addition, unlike the competition, HP has a trans-parent cost structure that does not surprise the customer with costs for services or file system licenses added later.

In fact, HP’s pricing covers all services needed to deploy and support its SAP HANA solution, including factory integration, installation, implementation and training, along with support from HP’s SAP HANA team, including local HP engineers who apply updates and provide health checks.

9. What are the advantages of the standard file system used by HP? With NFS, HP utilizes a modern file system that is an accepted Internet standard protocol, widely known and easy to administer. This is in stark contrast to competitive offerings that utilize GPFS, a proprietary file system that has 20-year-old roots and is limited by I/O and workload performance issues when processing a large number of metadata operations. More details on HP’s shared storage architecture can be found in HP’s white paper on SAP HANA disaster tolerance at www.hp.com/go/saphana.