HPE Superdome Flex: New innovation to empower your data-driven enterprise

[ComputeExperts]

Learn about the long list of exciting innovations for HPE Superdome Flex, including solutions for SAP HANA and more capabilities to address your mission-critical computing needs. 

Last December, HPE launched the HPE Superdome Flex, a powerhouse compute platform ideal for powering your critical applications, enabling real-time analytics and tackling in-memory high performance computing (HPC) workloads. With the platform, we also introduced HPE Superdome Flex Solutions for SAP HANA. These offerings have been enhanced over time. Just this June, we announced new innovations that continue to address your demands for technology designed to empower the data-driven enterprise. Here’s a closer look at the new capabilities. 

Even more flexibility and choice with HPE Superdome Flex

We’ve just announced support for hard partitions, HPE nPars, on the HPE Superdome Flex. Now, you can add flexibility to your environment by dividing a single physical server into a set of independent partitions. These are fully and electrically isolated partitions, providing strong workload isolation and more efficient maintenance cycles. Partitions can boot independently of each other, and each partition runs its own OS and applications in isolation from the others. You can reconfigure partitions as necessary, splitting a single partition into smaller partitions, or combining existing partitions into fewer, larger partitions.

In addition to flexibility, electrically-isolated partitioning also provides protection from hardware or software failures in other partitions, as well as a high degree of security. What’s more, this also can help your TCO, as you can optimize software licensing for Oracle and Microsoft with HPE nPars as a license boundary.

We’re also announcing Superdome Flex certification with Windows® which means you now have freedom of choice for your SQL Server deployment with both Linux and Windows supported. To find out more about SQL Server in-memory and how you can take full advantage of it, listen to this 30-min web talk with Bob Ward, Principal Architect, Microsoft Database Systems: SQL Server In-Memory.

Finally, we also announced even more choices in processors and I/O on the HPE Superdome Flex. We also released HPE OneView 4.1 which includes Superdome Flex monitoring, enhancing the platform’s management ecosystem.

These new innovations further augment the capabilities of Superdome Flex, adding to its scalability—4-to-32 sockets as a single system, 768 GB to 48 TB shared memory—and VMware and Oracle Linux certifications delivered earlier this year.

For more on the platform’s unique modular architecture and Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) capabilities, please read these blogs or listen to these ~20-min podcasts featuring our experts:

• Superdome Flex Architecture: Blog, Podcast
• Superdome Flex RAS: Blog, Podcast

New consolidation possibilities, the largest SAP-certified system, and the highest performance for your SAP HANA environment

Recent milestones surrounding SAP HANA and HPE include:

• Gartner released its May 2018 research note titled What You Need to Know When Selecting a SAP HANA Server Vendor. We believe it’s an enlightening must read. (Registration required to download.)
• HPE Superdome Flex Solutions for SAP HANA offer an unmatched combination of performance, scale, flexibility, and availability, the industry’s largest certified system on the Intel Scalable Processor family with up to 16 sockets and 12TB of memory for scale-up or scale-out workloads. HPE SAP HANA configurations allow you to follow SAP’s recommendation to scale-up before scaling out. With support for HPE nPars, we now also offer a consolidation architecture for SAP HANA use cases, allowing you to deploy multiple, heterogeneous SAP HANA instances and optimize your data center footprint.

And testifying to the high performance of Superdome Flex for SAP HANA, I also want to share with you a set of record results in one of SAP’s standard benchmarks:

• OLAP modern analytics workload modelling: SAP Business Warehouse (BW) edition for SAP HANA standard application benchmark. The HPE Superdome Flex achieved the top single-database-node eight-processor performance on the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system at 10.4 billion initial records on the SAP BW edition for SAP HANA standard application benchmark. For analytics workloads, the volume is critical, especially for mission-critical business with future expected growth in data needs. No other vendor has published a single-DB-node result with this massive amount of initial records, attesting to HPE engineering prowess. For all the details on the benchmark and results, read the performance brief.

HPE’s market leadership in the SAP HANA space means peace of mind

HPE is the #1 provider of system solutions for SAP HANA, with over 23,000 systems deployed.[i] Thousands of SAP HANA customers—including several Fortune 100 companies—deploy SAP HANA on HPE infrastructure and HPE holds a market share of approximately 40%[ii] of SAP HANA deployments worldwide. We know that a majority of SAP HANA projects are transformational, critical and directly tied to the company’s strategy. Therefore, our market leadership translates into peace of mind for customers choosing HPE solutions for HANA, as our vast expertise in this space, accumulated over years of SAP HANA infrastructure market leadership, keeps growing.

Always-on, always-secure environments

Extending the value of our platform offerings, we have also been busy innovating in our mission-critical software ecosystem in two top-of-mind areas for customers: security and high availability.

Achieving security compliance in minutes: HPE Workload Aware Security for Linux (WASL)

HPE WASL is an easy-to-use security compliance tool designed to secure Operating System instances and applications together. It automates security compliance for SAP HANA workloads and the underlying Linux Operating System, reducing to minutes what commonly requires several days and IT manpower to do manually. This new product can really make a difference in how you achieve and maintain security compliance. For more information check out the HPE WASL Home Page

HPE Serviceguard for Linux (SGLX): High Availability for your Linux workloads

HPE SGLX is a proven integrated suite of high availability and disaster recovery software. Fully automated and easy to deploy and manage, HPE SGLX is designed to protect against faults within a data center and enable downtime-free maintenance and upgrades. Recent enhancements to HPE SGLX enable you to achieve improved availability for your SAP S/4HANA workloads and extend Disaster Recovery protection across three datacenters. To learn more click here: HPE SGLX Home Page.

We will continue to develop compelling capabilities for HPE Superdome Flex and mission-critical software products and solutions like SAP HANA—so we can continue to address your most demanding technology and business challenges. 

---

Meet Server Experts blogger Diana Cortes, Marketing Manager, Mission Critical x86 Solutions, HPE.

Diana has spent the past 20 years working with the technologies that power the world’s most demanding environments and is interested in how solutions based on those technologies impact the business. A native from 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.

[i], ii Gartner research note, “What You Need to Know When Selecting a SAP HANA Server Vendor” (May, 2018)