SAP HANA on Power support expands dramatically
SAP’s release of HANA SPS11 marks a critical milestone for SAP/IBM customers. About a year ago, I wrote that there was Hope for HoP, HANA on Power. Some considered this wishful thinking, little more than a match struck in the Windy City. In August, that hope became a pilot light with SAP’s announcement of General Availability of Scale-up BW HANA running on the Power Systems platform. Still, the doubters questioned whether Power could make a dent in a field already populated by dozens of x86 vendors with hundreds of supported appliances and thousands of installed customers. With almost 1 new customer per business day deciding to implement HANA on Power since that time, the pilot light has quickly evolved into a nice strong flame on a stove.
In November, 2015, SAP unleashed a large assortment of support for HoP. First, they released a first of a kind support for running more than 1 production instance using virtualization on a system.[1] For those that don’t recall, SAP limits systems running HANA in production on VMware to one[2], count that as 1, total VMs on the entire system. Yes, non-prod can utilize VMware to its heart’s content, but is it wise to mess with best practices and utilize different stacks for prod and non-prod, much less deal with restrictions that limit the number of vps to 64, i.e. 32 real processors not counting VMware overhead and 1TB of memory? Power now supports up to 4 resource pools on E870 and E880 systems and 3 on systems below this level. One of those resource pools can be a “shared pool” supporting many VMs of any kind and any supported OS as long as none of them run production HANA instances. Any production HANA instance must run in a dedicated or dedicated-donating partition in which when production HANA needs CPU resources, it gets it without any negotiation or delay, but when it does not require all of the resources, it allows partitions in the shared pool to utilize unused resources. This is ideal for HANA as it is often characterized by wide variations in loads, often low utilization and very low utilization on non-prod, HA and DR systems, resulting in the much better flexibility and resource utilization (read that as reduced cost).
But SAP did not stop there. Right before the US Thanksgiving holiday, SAP released support for running HANA on Power with Business Suite, specifically ERP 6.0 EHP7, CRM 7.0 EHP3 and SRM 7.0 EHP3, SAP Landscape Transformation Replication Server 2.0, HANA dynamic tiering, BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform 4.1 SP 03, HANA smart data integration 1.0 SP02, HANA spatial SPS 11 and controlled availability of BPC[3], scale-out BW[4] using the TDI model with up to 16-nodes. SAP plans to update the application support note as each additional application passes customer and/or internal tests, with support rolling out rapidly in the next few months.
Not enough? Well, SAP took the next step and increased the memory per core ratio on high end systems, i.e. the E870 and E880, to 50GB/core for BW workloads thereby increasing the total memory supported in a scale-up configuration to 4.8TB.[5]
What does this mean for SAP customers? It means that the long wait is over. Finally, a robust, reliable, scalable and flexible platform is available to support a wide variety of HANA environments, especially those considered to be mission critical. Those customers that were waiting for a bet-your-business solution need wait no more. In short order, the match jumped to a pilot light, then a flame to a full cooktop. Just wait until S/4HANA, SCM and LiveCache are supported on HoP, likely not a long wait at this rate, and the flame will have jumped to one of those jet burners used for crawfish boiling from my old home town of New Orleans! Sorry, did I push the metaphor to far? 🙂
[1] 2230704 – SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems with multiple – LPARs per physical host
[2] 1995460 – Single SAP HANA VM on VMware vSphere in production
[3] 2218464 – Supported products when running SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems and http://news.sap.com/customers-choose-sap-hana-to-run-their-business/
[4] BW Scale-out support restriction that was previously present has been removed from 2133369 – SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems: Central Release Note for SPS 09 and SPS 10
[5] 2188482 – SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems: Allowed Hardware
SAPonPower 