How CSPs can deploy mission-critical cloud architectures with HPE

[ComputeExperts]

Learn how cloud service providers can meet the demand for mission critical database as a service with world class performance, RAS, scalability, and financial flexibility from HPE.

More and more businesses are moving their workloads from traditional on-premises infrastructure to modern, consumption-based services. And that includes mission-critical applications and their associated databases like SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server.

Running these vital applications off premises would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. But thanks to the power and broad acceptance of cloud services, cloud service providers (CSPs) are finding growth in these areas today.

To deliver mission-critical service levels for SAP HANA and other databases, CSPs need the right infrastructure, whether as a service or in a traditional model.

At HPE, we’ve created a server solution that is ideal for CSPs who want to provide database as a service. It’s called Superdome Flex 280, and it can give you big advantages in performance, availability, management, and economics—like the ability to start small, scale up in 2-socket increments, and eliminate up-front payments and overprovisioning with HPE GreenLake. It’s part of the larger Superdome Flex family, a unique scale-up x86 platform for modern database applications.

Leading CSP oXya is already using this solution to provide in-memory computing as a service for its customers. So, why are they and other CSPs moving away from running their own infrastructure?

Why delivering database and ERP as a service isn’t easy

Database and ERP applications like SAP HANA power day-to-day operations at every kind of company. They have traditionally been run on local servers because these applications and databases are truly mission critical—no business can afford downtime or performance issues here.

CSPs hoping to offer SAP HANA as-a-service therefore need to deliver:

• Enterprise-class availability
• Excellent performance at scale
• Cost-efficient solutions

There are a few different server options that claim to meet these requirements. But there’s another challenge I haven’t yet mentioned. CSPs also need to stay agile and financially flexible to meet their own business needs. For example, they need to be able to onboard new customers quickly—without the financial risk of buying and deploying a mission-critical environment up front.

Mission-critical servers aren’t generally known for their affordability or ease of deployment—so what’s the answer?

Superdome Flex 280 is the building block for cloud services

Superdome Flex 280 is ideal for overcoming these challenges. It’s a highly scalable, reliable and secure mission-critical server that starts at just 2 sockets, so CPSs can start small and scale up as customer needs grow.

When it’s time to scale up, Superdome Flex 280 enables CSPs to do so in cost-efficient 2-socket increments, all the way up to eight 3rd-Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. So with this platform you get:

• Plenty of room to grow performance and capacity as customer needs change
• No need to overprovision because there’s no need to add 4 processors when 2 will do, or to buy additional systems
• Simplified management of a single scale-up platform
• Ability to consolidate smaller physical servers into fewer systems, again reducing complexity

And with HPE GreenLake, CSPs can pay monthly for Superdome Flex 280 with consumption-based billing. HPE GreenLake eliminates the upfront costs of acquiring infrastructure. It makes configuring resources for customer solutions easy. And HPE GreenLake enables you to quickly scale up and down to meet changing needs with an on-site capacity buffer—and no overprovisioning. You have all the flexibility you need to get infrastructure in place to serve customers.

This removes many barriers for CSPs thinking of offering SAP HANA, Oracle, or SQL Server as a service. Superdome Flex 280 can power these services without the financial risks of other server options.

As the global leader in SAP HANA deployments, HPE also provides the partnership, expertise, and services via HPE Pointnext to help you over any bumps in the road.

But what about meeting customers’ mission critical service levels? How does Superdome Flex 280 stack up there?

World record database performance

Of the 177 performance world records set by HPE servers this year, Superdome Flex 280 has won the most. And many of the wins were in SAP HANA benchmark tests.

Superdome Flex 280, and the whole Superdome Flex family, gets a performance edge from its unique modular scale-up architecture. With up to 8 sockets and 24 TB memory, it’s an ideal choice for in-memory databases. And with 6 UPI links per processor, it provides higher bandwidth and faster data rates than previous generations.

These performance briefs summarize the results of recent benchmark tests:

• Superdome Flex 280 is the 8P leader on SAP Business Warehouse
• Superdome Flex 280 holds 4P world records for decision support benchmark
• Superdome Flex 280 achieves six world records for compute-intensive workloads

As well as delivering excellent performance at scale, Superdome Flex can use its large, shared memory and scale-up capacity to run large virtual machines, including the largest possible VMware instances on the latest Intel x86 architecture, and open-source Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVM)—with room to spare.

Superdome Flex 280 is also ready to run the Kubernetes container orchestration platform, which helps to make deploying services easier for CSPs.

Cloud leaders are choosing Superdome Flex

Cloud service providers are already choosing these systems to power their cloud architectures.

oXya, France’s leading SAP-certified provider of cloud services, is using high-availability HPE Superdome Flex servers to support large in-memory processing for their customers’ mission-critical use cases. “We’ve built our reputation delivering best-in-class SAP HANA cloud services,” says Frédéric de Belloy, President at oXya. “With trusted, innovative technology from HPE, we continue to have the leading infrastructure, expertise, and scale to best meet our customer needs.”

It's not just about the technology. It’s about the partnership and services HPE provides for growing CSPs.

Take the next step

If you’re a cloud or managed service provider with plans to grow your as-a-service business, HPE Superdome Flex family can provide the infrastructure to help you meet customer needs and become more profitable.

Whether purchased with traditional finance, or pay-as-you-use with HPE GreenLake, HPE Superdome Flex 280 offers flexible and accessible solutions, cost-efficient scaling, and the performance, security, and reliability that mission-critical applications like SAP demand.

Talk to your HPE representative about how to benefit from the HPE Superdome Flex family today.

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Meet Compute Experts blogger Diana Cortes, Product Marketing Manager for HPE Mission Critical Solutions

Diana has spent the past 23 years working with the technologies that power the world’s most demanding IT environments and is interested in how solutions based on those technologies impact the business. A native of Colombia, Diana holds an MBA from Georgetown University and has held a variety of regional and global roles with HPE in the US, the UK and Sweden. She is based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Compute Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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