By Freya Purnell
HP has expanded its ConvergedSystem portfolio to include the new HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA, which can deliver up to 12 TB of in-memory computing.
The result of Project Kraken, a co-innovation initiative announced by HP and SAP at SAPPHIRE NOW last year, the ConvergedSystem 900 has been launched globally ahead of this year’s event.
The new platform is designed to be a highly scalable infrastructure to support both analytics across very large and diverse data sets and mission-critical business applications, such as SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA. By consolidating on a centralised platform, customers can reduce their costs, simplify their IT environment and speed up response times.
Raj Thakur, director and general manager – HP Servers and Converged Systems, HP Enterprise Group, South Pacific, said HP and SAP developed the system in response to the growing “sprawl of SAP environments”.
“Those environments are getting more complex to manage – lots of different instances, running test, dev and sandboxes, but more importantly, they have started using HANA for real-time analytics and integration with the apps, to take their business to the next level,” Thakur said.
“It takes customers right through the HANA journey – it’s purpose built, it has built-in high availability and enterprise level protection, and it has a scalable architecture.
“Previously, the ability for SAP customers who have these big, sprawled environments to run their environments on a single, well-managed highly scalable and secure system did not exist, so there is a fundamental shift in capability from a convergent infrastructure perspective.”
To provide a rapid return on investment, the system comes completely pre-integrated, including software, so it can be deployed in less than 30 days. In response to customer demand to invest via a capex model via an opex model, the ConvergedSystem 900 can be delivered as an on-premise solution or via the cloud – the latter either by HP or its channel partners.
HP is also offering rapid deployment services via HP Consulting Services for SAP HANA, as well as HP Proactive Care Advanced, to provide customers with a single support option for all system components.
This new addition to the portfolio is aimed at SAP customers who are running multiple instances of SAP, or multiple applications or components of SAP Business Suite, as well as those with an enterprise data warehouse that is not producing the performance they require, or those who have large or disparate amounts of data coming from different applications.
“It really is designed for customers who are looking for scale, speed or simplification,” Thakur said. “It’s also for customers who are embarking on a new project and need to get something up and running quickly. We think it is a good starting point for customers who are looking to deploy.”
According to HP, consolidating analytics and mission-critical applications on the platform is expected to generate savings primarily through reduced management costs.
Thakur said that HP is seeing the ConvergedSystem 900 and its associated services as complementary to SAP’s own HANA Enterprise Cloud service, rather than in competition with it.
“It gives our customers a choice,” he said.
HP quietly released the ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA back in March. With a 2TB in-memory capacity and the ability to scale out to 12TB, this product is aimed at the SMB market. By contrast, the ConvergedSystem 900 can be scaled out to 80TB.
The ConvergedSystem 900 is scheduled for availability in Australia from September this year, with pricing expected to be available in August.
