Here's my question: Did cloud kill the SAP HANA appliance? The answer to this question, like most other shifts in technology, is yes – and no. Many factors have changed the SAP HANA infrastructure market since it was introduced in 2010. Cloud is only the most recent change, but it could be the most significant. Learn why. – By Craig Sullivan, Master Technical Marketing Engineer, HPE
When SAP HANA was launched, it presented a departure from the status quo of how SAP applications worked at the time. SAP supported several databases for their suite of business applications. But growth in data volume over the years, along with the need to use only common features across all the supported databases
As a result, SAP decided that the best way for them and their customers to be confident in the performance of this new technology would be to create appliances that hardware vendors would have to certify to demonstrate their support for the SAP HANA workload. These appliances – with server, storage, and networking components – were then sold as a complete package to customers. The appliance vendor would be responsible for supporting the solution and validating changes with SAP before going to the customer.
These appliances came in two configurations: scale-up and scale-out. Scale-out solutions were important, especially for SAP Business Warehouse, because at the time, SAP had memory to core ratios that allowed a maximum of 512GB per server. As a result, what we think is a small system today with 2TB of memory required, would need four active and one standby server, plus shared storage to support host auto-failover scenarios.
As HANA become more mainstream and both customers and SAP themselves got more familiar with their performance and scalability, SAP started to introduce some flexibility in the architectures. The first step in this direction was the introduction of Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) solutions for SAP HANA. This allowed customers to choose the components necessary to run SAP HANA ala carte from a set of certified building blocks, to build and maintain their own tailored HANA environments.
The second and change was the evolution of the memory to core ratios. As new processors and servers were developed, SAP continued to release support for larger memory configurations for SAP HANA. This included both scale-up and scale-out servers. However, the impact was greater for scale-out because now, customer can choose a larger scale up implementation instead of a scale out system made up of multiple smaller servers and shared storage to support a larger HANA instance. Today there are SAP HANA systems with 32TB of memory in a single server, running a single SAP instance. As a result, scale-out HANA systems are less common nowadays.
As these changes were happening, along came another important shift – the support for virtualized SAP HANA instances in production.
Virtualization has been a core part of SAP infrastructure since it was introduced, and customers were eager to use it for SAP HANA. When SAP announced support for virtualized SAP HANA, it was quickly adopted. With larger server memory size, it was more efficient and cost effective to deploy these systems virtually.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) vendors also noticed these changes happening and with the market growing, they also entered the SAP HANA market to give customers yet another choice for how to deploy SAP HANA.
With all of these advancements in technology and solutions, why did cloud have such an impact?
I think the answer lies in one key part of any IT landscape: support. When SAP HANA was launched, it was new and, in some ways unknown. Customers liked the appliance concept, even though it was a little restrictive, because they knew exactly who to call if something broke. A lot of the guess work and research necessary to find compatible versions of software and hardware were gone. They could focus on learning how to manage the application and transform their business. Vendors created centers of excellence to certify and support their SAP HANA solutions.
Everyone has a cloud strategy to some extent, so soon SAP introduced a new certification and model to run SAP HANA: Infrastructure as a Service on a hyperscaler. The IaaS model for HANA is relatively similar to TDI since customers pick from a list of compute instances certified for IaaS HANA and storage building blocks and build their tailored solution. It has also some similarities with the appliance in the sense that the full IaaS solution is supported by the hyperscaler.
Enter HPE and HPE GreenLake.
At HPE, we the SAP HANA environment changed. We have a long and successful partnership with SAP that spans more than 30 years. We have embraced the changes and have solutions that allow our customers to choose the right deployment for their needs. We have some of the largest SAP HANA scale-up systems available, TDI solutions for every size of customer, virtual and HCI solutions, even RISE with SAP solutions. We are also ready for the next generation of cloud solutions for SAP HANA.
HPE GreenLake cloud solutions also give the customer a cloud-like experience, while remaining in full control of their environment as this is deployed as a private cloud. We offer solutions like HPE GreenLake for SAP
For customers who have decided to adopt RISE with SAP to align with SAP strategic direction HPE offers RISE with SAP Private Edition, Customer Datacenter Option, powered by HPE GreenLake. This solution is offered through SAP and is a fully managed solution with joint support from HPE and SAP. From a customer perspective, the RISE with SAP experience will be similar. However, HPE’s solution offers the advantage of dedicated hardware deployed in the customer DC or a colocation, whereas typically RISE public cloud options will run on shared hardware in a hyperscaler or SAP datecenter.
Technology changes drive market changes.
As we look at how technology has changed, we see that it has caused a change in the market as well. I don’t think cloud alone killed the SAP HANA appliance. I think there were many small technological changes that have allowed for different architectures to meet customers’ needs.
To be clear, HPE will offer scale-up appliances. In SAP, there are no right or wrong answers, only different customer scenarios. customers want choices to support their specific scenario. We’re all about providing our customers with choice.
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