IBM Power System E980 is a high-end enterprise server with up to 192 POWER9 cores, up to 64 TB memory and is the fastest POWER9 processors in the Power Systems portfolio.
IBM Power Systems, a family of IBM servers based on its POWER processors, was named the critical infrastructure provider for the enterprise software platform SAP HANA. The service will be running IBM POWER9-based IBM Power System E980 servers, the “industry’s largest virtualised server scalability of 24TB for the SAP HANA database.”
According to a press release, IBM Power Systems is intended to help “simplify the IT infrastructure for the managed, private cloud environment.”
Christoph Herman, SVP and Head of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) Delivery, said:
“SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud on IBM Power Systems will help clients unlock the full value of SAP HANA in the cloud, with the possibility of enhancing the scalability and availability of mission-critical SAP applications while moving workloads to SAP HANA and lowering TCO.”
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is a fully scalable and the only end-to-end private managed cloud solution that helps organisations’ maximize the full value of SAP HANA in the cloud and accelerate the transition to an intelligent enterprise. It can handle software and hardware stacks and provide visibility, total costs of ownership (TCO), and agility.
According to Herman, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and IBM Power Systems will help bring their customers faster to achieving cloud readiness while addressing risk and provide closer alignment to the intelligent enterprise. Through IBM Power’s virtualisation abilities that accommodate capacity changes, SAP HANA’s cloud customers will experience a faster performance of their business intelligence applications.
Increasing scalability for SAP HANA applications has been realised since the certification of IBM Power Systems for SAP HANA in 2015.
The press release stated that IBM Power Systems and SAP collaborative effort provide virtualisation on-demand via hypervisor-defined features in Power Systems, enabling clients to take advantage of multiple SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service levels. This means that enterprises will be able to focus on maintaining infrastructure to digitally transforming and innovating in the cloud. It further said:
“SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud users can take advantage of the firmware-based virtualization in the IBM POWER platform that offers the largest SAP HANA scalability in scale-up systems.”
The co-innovation allows SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud users to accommodate capacity changes. This facilitates the faster performance of their SAP HANA-based business intelligence applications by running them in a single node while maximising the availability of SAP applications with the highly resilient infrastructure.
Digital Transformation Allies
Back in June 2019, it has been announced that POWER9 will be part of IBM’s cloud offering. IBM Power Systems in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud was anticipated to accelerate clients’ digital transformation by providing more options and greater flexibility to run their workloads where they want to across the hybrid cloud. P9’s optimisation was based on the years of experiences in the cognitive, AI, and SAP area, keeping the entire Power platform still certified for HANA. Last year, the SAP cloud market shifted towards IBM Power, including the companies Syntax, itelligence, CTAC, Seidor, Dedagroup, and D.F.I.
Since 2016’s announcement of SAP and IBM’s mutual investment in co-innovations to drive the modernisation of clients’ systems and processes into the digital economy, the two enterprises have successfully built a vigorous HANA environment. In fact, in 2018, IBM received the SAP Pinnacle Award “SAP Global Partner of the Year – Infrastructure”.
