Guest Blogger: 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) - HPE’s track record engineering, 
2. Most scalable solution on latest generation Intel Cascade Lake processors - To date, HPE is the only hardware vendor with a certified 32-socket solution for SAP HANA using latest Intel Cascade lake architecture on HPE Superdome Flex. HPE Superdome Flex offers a unique modular design that allows you to scale from 4 to 32-sockets and 1.5 to 48TB of memory. Other vendors have certified their 8-socket servers with Cascade Lake and Skylake processors and 12TB of memory. There are some public cloud providers that offer scalability beyond 12TB but without increasing CPU capacity past 8-sockets. No other vendor offers an x86 platform scalable to 32-sockets. This is particularly important with S/4 HANA implementations. Many of our customers are finding out that compute requirements significantly increase after migrating to S4, primarily those taking advantage of the embedded analytical capabilities included in S4. Memory capacity is not the only concern anymore. Having a platform fully certified for SAP HANA with up to 32-sockets and 24TB of RAM provides the memory and compute capacity required to handle these workloads.
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. Intel® processors and the SAP HANA platform evolved together—Intel 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 (+90%)
5. Leading HANA performance – Not only HPE has the most scalable and reliable systems to run SAP HANA, but we offer you the best performance at scale and have the benchmarks to prove it. HPE Superdome Flex Achieved 16-Processor World Record Results with 20.8 Billion Initial Records on SAP Business Warehouse (BW) Edition for SAP HANA Standard Application Benchmark, showing almost linear scalability from 4 to 8 processors and to 16 processors at 5.2B, 11.7B, and 20.8B initial records. If that wasn’t enough, we recently published a new benchmark result with 41.6 Billion Initial Records on a 16-processor/24TB Superdome Flex leveraging a combination of DRAM and HPE Persistent Memory in 128GB DIMMs featuring Intel® Optane™ persistent memory technology. Please check out this blog to learn more about the unique value of Intel® Optane™ persistent memory in combination with the Superdome Flex platform.
6. 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, our hyperconverged infrastructure based on SimpliVity 380, or our mission critical product line with HPE Superdome Flex the truly breakthrough modular system for powering critical applications and enabling real-time analytics using in-memory computing that equips HANA 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, our Primera disk array with its unique 100% availability guarantee, and XP product lines.
7. 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, support for systems with Persistent memory, data integrity mechanisms, full HPE engineering and support, make it the best-in-class clustering solution to protect your most critical HANA instances.
8. 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 34,000 HANA systems worldwide, majority of them implemented by HPE Pointnext Services HANA consulting organization, give HPE a breadth of experience you won’t find anywhere else.
9. 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 customers who choose to deploy any of our HANA predefined configurations, 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.
10. Infrastructure widely used by cloud/hosting providers - By the reasons listed before, it’s 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 service providers, as well as some of the largest Public Cloud vendors, use HPE technology to serve their client’s most demanding HANA needs.
Fanny Osorio is a Master SAP Solutions Architect at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. A member of the Americas SAP 
UrsRenggli
Urs Renggli is the Global Marketing Lead for the Microsoft and SAP Alliances, directing all aspects of HPE's global alliance marketing strategy and partner marketing. He is responsible for developing and implementing end-to-end sales and marketing Initiatives and programs. Urs has spent a number of years at both HPE and Microsoft and understands both the power and importance of this strategic alliance in terms of the solutions it delivers to customers.
