By Fanny Osorio
Whether you are starting your HANA journey or considering a refresh of your existing HANA infrastructure, there are many options to choose from. With over a dozen of certified hardware vendors and cloud hosting providers, choosing the right partner may feel sometimes overwhelming.
Here is a list of reasons why HPE is your safest bet as your partner for SAP HANA.
1. Leader in SAP and SAP HANA market share (as per Gartner report) - HPEโs track record engineering, implementing and supporting solutions for SAP HANA is impeccable. This is demonstrated in the latest 2018 Gartner report: โWhat You Need to Know When Selecting a SAP HANA Server Vendorโ. This study clearly showcases HPE leadership position across several different categories, with an impressive 40% market share (more than the 3 next competitors combined). Whether appliance or TDI, BWoH or SoH, On-premise or cloud, HPE has been the platform of choice by the majority of HANA customers out there. We have been able to maintain this leadership position through our excellence in solution engineering, superior technology and best-in-class services.
2. Most scalable solution on Skylake processors - To date, HPE is the only hardware vendor with a certified 16-socket solution for SAP HANA using latest Intel Skylake architecture on HPE Superdome Flex. HPE Superdome Flex offers a unique modular design that allows you to scale from 4 to 32-sockets and potentially 48TB of memory. While other vendors have certified their 8-socket servers with Skylake processors and 12TB of memory, they need to use very costly 128GB DIMMs in order to exceed 6TB of Memory. Superdome Flex can achieve 12TB of memory using the much more affordable 64GB DIMMs, while providing a solution with considerable more compute capacity at a lower price point. Also, no other vendor offers an x86 platform scalable to 32-sockets. Although not generally certified for SAP HANA with more than 16-sockets (yet), it may be possible to work closely with SAP on a case-by-case basis to support larger configurations.
3. Higher RAS / Most mission critical x86 platform available - Once again, HPE Superdome Flex brings unique value to our x86 solution offering with unique RAS features not found in other x86 servers, making it the most mission-critical server in the market today. Robust RAS has always been a designed-in philosophy for HPE Superdome servers, and HPE Superdome Flex builds on that strategy. Features like Adaptive double device data correction (ADDDC), HPE Superdome Flex Grid with adaptive routing, predictive fault handling from Error Analysis Engine, HPE Firmware First are just a few of the unique capabilities included in Superdome Flex, not typically found in other x86 platforms, that make it the most resilient server for you SAP HANA implementation. More details are available in whitepaper: HPE Superdome Flex server architecture and RAS
4. Based on open standards / x86 Intel processors - HPE solutions are part of a large and growing ecosystem founded on open, industry standard Intel architecture based solutions. Intelยฎ processors and the SAP HANA platform evolved togetherโIntel provided the original reference architecture for the SAP HANA platform. That synergy is still strong today, making it the most widely deployed processor for SAP HANA by a large margin (+95%)
5. Large range of solution offerings: appliances, TDI, from entry-level to large scale - HPE has the most complete portfolio of HANA solutions available, that range from certified appliances to custom TDI solutions, using a large variety of certified or supported compute and storage solutions, including entry-level 2-socket systems, our composable infrastructure suite of products, or our mission critical product line for the most demanding HANA needs. In terms of storage, our list of HANA certified choices are plenty as well, from entry-level MSA solutions, unique Nimble All-flash and Hybrid offering, all the way to our very scalable 3PAR and XP product lines.
6. Best in class HA/DR solutions with HPE Serviceguard - HPE Serviceguard for Linux (SGLX) is a high availability clustering software suite designed to protect applications and services from planned and unplanned downtime. SGLX helps streamline and ensure 24x7 availability for SAP HANA by automating system or site failover during maintenance or in the event of an outage. Unique features like Smart Quorum, SafeSync, data integrity mechanisms, full HPE engineering and support, make it the best-in-class clustering solution to protect your most critical HANA instances.
7. Implementation services / HANA expertise - HPE draws on rich proven experience in the SAP HANA space, providing system solutions and services to thousands of customers across all industries, worldwide. Hundreds of HPE SAP HANA experts are available to help SAP HANA customers design, modernize, and implement system solutions tailored to their needs. Having delivered over 20,000 HANA systems worldwide, majority of them implemented by HPE Pointnext HANA consulting organization, give HPE a breadth of experience you wonโt find anywhere else.
8. Best support in the industry: SAP HANA CoE - HPE support services offer an enhanced call experience with advanced technical expertise and end-to-end case ownership, which improves availability and helps optimize your SAP HANA infrastructure. HPE Center of Excellence (CoE) for SAP HANA offers a complete solution-level support experience, prevention with predictive analytics, personalized analysis with recommendations and advice, paired with rapid access to technical experts to help rapidly resolve any problem. You also benefit from the specially aligned, collaborative, reactive processes between HPE and SAP. This is available to our Convergedsystems customers, or TDI clients with datacenter care support contract. With the addition of Infosight to provide predictive analytics capabilities to our storage product line, this support experience is bound to get even better.
9. WASL - Only Workload-aware security solution for Linux targeting SAP HANA - HPE Workload Aware Security for Linux (WASL) is a one-click security compliance tool designed to secure operating system and Applications. HPE Workload Aware Security for Linux (WASL) assure security compliance for SAP HANA workloads and the underlying Linux Operating System instance. Security compliance can be established before deploying the system into production and continue to utilize WASL to assure continued compliance while running. The basic Operating System is checked for Security compliance to the C4S OS security benchmark for Linux from the Center for Internet Security (CIS). WASL offers to protect HPE SAP HANA solution securing up to 90% automatically on a single click as per the SAP HANA security guide.
10. Infrastructure widely used by cloud/hosting providers - By the reasons listed before, itโs not hard to guess why many of the SAP hosting providers have chosen HPE infrastructure as their preferred platform to host SAP HANA. Many of the SAP HEC partners and SAP themselves, as well as some of the largest Public Cloud vendors, use HPE technology to serve their clientโs most demanding HANA needs, as shown on latest Gartner report โSAP HANA Physical Deployments by Hardware Vendor, Including HANA Enterprise Cloudโ
SAP Tech Ed which will be held from October 2 โ 5 in Ls Vegas, NV provides a great opportunity for you learn more about these 10 impressive reasons and see many of them in action. Stop by HPE Booth 555 and let us show you what appositive difference it can make to your IT environment and your business when you choose HPE for SAP HANA.
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