SAP HANA® “Class L” solution delivers BIG performance, scale and TCO savings. Here’s how.

[ComputeExperts]

HPE Superdome Flex 280 is now an SAP-certified "Class L” SAP HANA solution. Now your business can scale HANA workloads up to 12 TB in a single system, with benchmark-leading performance and ultra-low total cost of ownership.

We always listen to what our enterprise customers need from their SAP HANA^® solutions. What we hear is that your databases and businesses are constantly evolving and growing in size and complexity. So, what you often need to keep up with your growth trend is more room to grow, high performance at scale, and improved cost efficiencies, across the board.

Well, here's good news on all three fronts: SAP has officially categorized HPE Superdome Flex 280 as a Class L solution for SAP HANA. It's now the only 8P server – with up to 12 TB shared memory and results on 20.8 billion records – to receive this categorization. (Please see SAP® Standard Application Benchmarks Certification #2020158.)

That means HPE Superdome Flex 280 is the only platform that enables you to:

• Expand all the way to 12 TB of shared memory and 8 sockets in an SAP-certified Class L system. You can start small with just 768 GB of memory and 2 sockets – and grow from there.
• Scale up – instead of scaling out – to get the performance, management simplicity, and small footprint of a single system. Listen to our podcast Why scale-up your SAP HANA deployment? that discusses the benefits of scale-up vs. scale-out solutions.
• Achieve ultra-low total cost of ownership with savings in management, space, power and software, by replacing a scale-out solution with a single, scale-up system.

Now, let's talk about how this classification and benchmark result translates to business value, and how HPE Superdome Flex 280 delivers the three benefits listed above.

Proven performance at scale

The SAP sizing classifications (Class S, Class M and Class L) provide official guidance on the hardware you need to meet your business requirements.

HPE Superdome Flex 280 received its Class L designation based on a recent test using the SAP^® Business Warehouse, edition for SAP HANA standard application benchmark. A system with 12 TB of shared memory delivered more than 5,000 query executions per hour (Qs/H) and 20.8 billion records.

Previously, if you wanted to deploy an SAP BW landscape with sizing up to 12 TB, the most commercially viable choice using all DRAM was limited to scale-out systems, such as a 4- processor scale-out node. This would require a total of 4 nodes with 3 TB of memory each, or perhaps two 8 processor scale-out nodes, each with 6 TB of memory. Now, with the HPE Superdome Flex 280, you can scale up to 12 TB on a single, 8-socket system. There is no need to buy additional servers to build a complex scale-out cluster, as you would have to do with other vendors.

But HPE Superdome Flex 280 doesn't merely cope at that scale. Featuring the latest 3^rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8380HL processors, it provides industry-leading performance including:

• The best core/memory ratio, delivering more than 5,000 Qs/H
• 2X more processing power than any other x86 offering, with SAP certification up to 8 processors on a scale-up system built with the latest 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® architecture

With HPE Superdome Flex 280 you can also avoid overprovisioning by scaling in 2-socket increments, instead of 4. A new HPE performance brief details the full benchmark results.

Advantages of scale-up over scale-out

But why is scaling up - adding processors and memory to a single system as you grow - strongly recommended for SAP HANA over scaling out across multiple servers? A recent episode of the HPE Mission Critical Insights podcast, also referenced above, lays it all out.

When you're using SAP HANA in-memory database features for transactional and analytical workloads, a scale-up solution has natural performance advantages. Queries and records are served faster when you have one large memory pool, with no network latency to slow things down.

Meanwhile, a scale-out solution requires more servers, more connections between those servers, and more instances of the operating system and other software. All of this leads to slower performance, a larger footprint, plus higher costs and management complexity.

Total cost of ownership savings with consolidation

A great way to understand the difference between scale-up and scale-out is to compare the two visually.

 Above on the left is how a non-HPE x86 vendor will address your requirements for an infrastructure solution that can run up to 12 TB of Business Warehousing on SAP HANA (BW/4HANA) on the latest 3^rd Gen Intel Xeon architecture.  This environment consists of four server nodes, each with 3 TB of all-DRAM memory.

On the right is a more efficient solution based on HPE Superdome Flex 280, which features a single server with up to 8 processors. With fewer compute nodes, it's not difficult to see how this can reduce your hardware costs, IT footprint, energy consumption, and management burden while greatly accelerating your workloads.

What’s even better is that you can start small—as small as 2 processors and 768 GB of memory—and be able to scale compute by a factor of 4, and memory by a factor of 16. You can upgrade to an 8-processor system with 12 TB of memory without any expensive and disruptive upgrades or re-platforming.

Learn more

If you are migrating to SAP HANA, modernizing your infrastructure, or looking for a new SAP HANA solution, HPE Superdome Flex 280 is recognized by SAP to deliver the performance and scalability that today’s enterprises need. And, as the only 8P 12 TB scale-up solution to receive SAP’s Class L designation, you can be assured that HPE Superdome Flex 280 delivers unmatched performance and efficiency.

Click below to learn more:

• Read the performance brief: SAP qualifies HPE Superdome Flex 280 as Class L sizing
• Read the HPE Superdome Flex 280 for SAP HANA technical white paper
• Contact an HPE representative or visit our website.

Meet HPE Blogger, Diana Cortes.

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 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. She is based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Connect with Diana on LinkedIn!

Compute Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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