By Freya Purnell
IBM has expanded its global partnership with SAP to deliver the SAP HANA platform, the SAP HANA ONE service and other SAP applications on the SoftLayer cloud platform.
The SoftLayer platform has been verified by SAP to run SAP applications, including SAP Business Suite software and SAP BusinessObjects solutions.
The expanded partnership complements the existing capabilities provided by IBM to run SAP solutions on IBM Cloud Managed Services. The combined offering will provide customers with access to 40 data centres across five continents to run SAP applications for their enterprises. This will enable them to more quickly expand their businesses into new geographies with more consistent global deployments, which are expected to improve security and boost compliance with local laws.
According to IBM, customers running SAP applications on SoftLayer will be able to reduce support costs, speed up development and test instantly with no capital outlay required, deploy hybrid cloud solutions on SoftLayer and Cloud Managed Services, and develop and test SAP HANA using SAP HANA One with click through license capabilities.
“Businesses today are looking for ways to lower the cost of deployment and greater efficiency in addressing new market opportunity,” said IBM general manager of cloud services, James Comfort.
“By delivering SAP applications via IBM cloud technologies, companies will have consistent access to a global infrastructure that will assist them in tackling business needs with the speed and efficiency needed in today’s business climate.”
IBM is also working with Virtustream to bring an additional option for managing environments running SAP solutions on the SoftLayer platform, using its xStream cloud management platform software for both fully managed and customer managed environments.
Virtustream will be using SoftLayer infrastructure to expand its service beyond current locations and capacity, to enable companies to easily move existing mission-critical SAP applications to the cloud with confidence.
Meanwhile Hitachi Data Systems has announced that its Hitachi logical partitioning (LPAR) technology on Hitachi x86 servers has been verified to run SAP Business Suite software.
This platform enables secure, scalable production environments for on-premise and cloud deployments of SAP solutions. The benefits of Hitachi logical partitioning on x86 for SAP Business Suite include improved efficiencies and simplified deployments and management of SAP solutions.
According to Hitachi, customers using the system have realised benefits including:
- Total costs reduced by as much as 70 per cent;
- Improved application density by as much as 33:1;
- Reduction in the number of servers required by up to 80 per cent;and
- Space, power and maintenance reduction up to 40 per cent.
“Hitachi servers with LPAR for SAP Business Suite add tremendous value in supporting our clients’ big-data needs and further enhances our CSC Cloud IU (Infrastructure Utility) for SAP solutions and hybrid cloud service offerings,” said John Catalano, director, solution development, cloud solutions, CSC.
“Hitachi together with CSC’s experience with SAP solutions and track record of cloud success will further enable us to support SAP solutions in the cloud, thus meeting our customers’ performance and scalability requirements.”
Hitachi also announced is it delivering three new solutions for the SAP HANA platform, including Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) for SAP HANA Platform – with Hitachi Compute Blade 520X B1 – for SAP HANA in scale-up configurations based on the Intel Xeon E7 v2 (Ivy Bridge) technology. Hitachi Unified Storage VM and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000 have also been certified by SAP as shared storage solutions for SAP HANA.
These solutions provide flexibility and investment protection, particularly for customers who plan to migrate to SAP HANA, with compute and storage designed to scale along with customers’ needs, offering efficiencies, enterprise-class scalability and performance.
Hitachi UCP for SAP HANA using Intel Ivy Bridge technology and CSP G1000 build on the announcement in January of an OEM agreement between Hitachi and SAP, which enables Hitachi to deliver an end-to-end enterprise data warehouse appliance that consists of the SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) application on SAP HANA, UCP for SAP HANA, services and support.
