Support for HANA on Power with RedHat is finally here!!

SAP made a very exciting announcement this past Friday.  While it took a bit longer than expected, support for RHEL 7.3 with HANA on Power was announced by SAP in their usual overwhelming manner, i.e. they updated a SAP note:   SAP HANA 2235581: Supported Operating Systems.  RHEL is only supported on Power in Little Endian mode, i.e. only works with HANA 2.0.  This support is incredibly important for customers that have established RHEL as their standard for Linux and were either reluctant to introduce a different Linux distribution or were outright forbidden to by their corporate standards.  Taken together with the TDI Phase 5 SAPS based sizing announcement, yet another element that was inhibiting the already explosive growth of HANA on Power was removed.  I described that announcement as allowing the use of 5th gear after being limited to only 4.  Taking this metaphor a step further, RHEL support is like disengaging the parking brake.  I should mention that IBM does not develop a Linux variant of their own nor do they endorse any particular variety.  As such, I will not suggest any advantage of running RHEL or SLES for HANA and recommend, if a company has no firm policy either way, that you ask each distro partner to explain why they think theirs is better for HANA than the other.  At this time, both are supported only with PowerVM on Power Systems and with the exact same limits and multi-tenant/multi-VM flexibility.

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