HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage: Leading the way for SAP HANA environments

[StorageExperts]

HPE offers more proven choices when it comes to storage and servers for your SAP HANA environments. Case in point: the many good reasons for selecting HPE 3PAR StoreServ flash storage for SAP HANA. 

If yours is like many organizations, SAP® applications are at the heart of business operations. Moving to SAP HANA can carry with it many concerns, including financial risk, business process change, and lack of HANA-knowledgeable IT resources. Infrastructure concerns also come into play, as you focus on performance, growth, business continuity, and cost.

HPE can help. We have been working with SAP for about 30 years to create perfect integration points into SAP products, and we continue to innovate together.  I’m proud to say that in the latest 2018 Gartner report, “What You Need to Know When Selecting a SAP HANA Server Vendor”, we are by far the market leader for SAP HANA deployments. 

Dedicated to providing the best infrastructure and services for SAP HANA TDI environments

Let’s call it what it is…I am a storage guy. That said, of course I have to mention that HPE has the best servers in the world! We provide an entire stack of SAP HANA TDI-certified servers that have the power and reliability to run your workload. Just take a look here.
For your storage needs, as you can see here, we have four options to meet your specific requirements. With our well-rounded portfolio, you can start as few as 2 nodes—and readily scale to 128 nodes.Focusing on HPE 3PAR StoreServ flash storage

OK, now it's time to delve into the main topic for this blog: Let me highlight our world-class HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage—and why these all-flash storage systems make a great solution for the demanding needs of SAP HANA.  HPE 3PAR has the architecture to deliver exceptional performance, availability, and data services for mission-critical consolidated HANA environments. And the good news is that we just recertified our 3PAR product line with the latest SAP HANA TDI certification. So let me answer the next big question. . .

Why run your HANA environment on 3PAR?

• Mission-critical availability and storage consolidation—Most HANA environments today are mission critical. HPE 3PAR is designed for 99.9999% availability. Additionally, most SAP HANA TDI storage is shared storage, consolidating the needs of HANA production and nonproduction environments as well as other applications. While this consolidation reduces complexity and increases efficiency, it can introduce the risk of resource contention, exacerbated when workloads are dissimilar such as HANA and a traditional database. To insure mission-critical HANA gets the resources needed for maximum performance, HPE 3PAR offers QoS controls for key attributes such as bandwidth, latency, and IOPS. These capabilities deliver verified QoS levels without having to physically partition resources or maintain discrete storage silos
• All-active design—3PAR is the only all-active design which means each volume is active on all controllers in the system. No device-driver-specific modules are required on the hosts and no master-standby relationships. Everything participates, allowing applications such as HANA to get the full performance benefits of all the hardware in the system.
• Efficiently handle large I/O sizes—Most all-flash arrays focus on small block IOPS performance, but the typical I/O size to HANA data volumes is 1MiB, much larger than I/Os for traditional applications. HPE 3PAR can not only readily handle high IOPS per low latency environments but also has the bandwidth to tackle large I/Os.
• Data protection—3PAR has flash-integrated data protection with HPE Recovery Manager Central Software (RMC) for SAP HANA. RMC for SAP HANA has the ability to take application-consistent storage snapshots and move them rapidly to HPE StoreOnce.  From there you are able to copy the backup stores to the cloud, quickly and affordably, using HPE Cloud Bank Storage.
• HPE InfoSight—Every second, HPE InfoSight analyzes and correlates millions of sensors from all of our globally deployed systems. HPE InfoSight continuously learns as it analyzes this data, making every system smarter and more reliable to run your SAP HANA workloads.

Finally, we test all new flash arrays with HANA extensively in our labs. This allows us to not only certify new arrays for HANA at launch but also give you the confidence that HPE 3PAR is ready to tackle your most demanding HANA storage infrastructure needs.  But don’t just take my word for it.  If you want proof that 3PAR is the best all-flash array to run SAP HANA, check out this report from the Teneja Group: The Best All-Flash Array for SAP HANA.

Services are also a great reason to choose HPE. We have proven experience in the SAP HANA space, delivering solutions and services to thousands of customers across the globe and across all industries. In fact, we have deployed more than 20,000 SAP HANA systems worldwide. What’s more, our HPE SAP HANA experts are available to help you with your needs—from design to implementation. 

So I think it’s fair to ask: Why wouldn’t you choose HPE to run your SAP HANA workload?

To continue this discussion, and if you are heading to HPE Discover in Madrid, please visit me at SAP booth. You can also learn more right now about storage for SAP. You’ll see that we offer comprehensive portfolio of primary storage and data protection solutions for SAP, an integral part of your complete SAP HANA infrastructure. You might also want to check out our complete SAP solutions story.

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Meet Around the Storage Block blogger Chris Kinzler, WW Technical Marketing Solutions Go-To-Market Manager. Chris has been in the storage industry for around 15 years and has worked at HPE for two years. He manages bringing enablement programs to market-based on workloads.