FlexPod: The optimal converged infrastructure for SAP HANA

In today’s fast-paced digital world, businesses rely heavily on data to drive decision-making and innovation. SAP HANA, a high-performance in-memory database, has become a cornerstone for enterprises that want to harness real-time analytics and data processing capabilities. To take full advantage of SAP HANA’s potential, it’s crucial to deploy it on a robust and efficient infrastructure. That’s where the FlexPod^® converged infrastructure solution plays an essential role.

In this blog post, we will explore why SAP HANA is vital for customers like you and why it demands superior hardware. We’ll also discuss what FlexPod is, how FlexPod can be fine-tuned to support SAP HANA workloads, and why FlexPod is the preferred choice for deploying SAP HANA.

SAP HANA is designed to handle high volumes of data and to perform complex queries at lightning speed. It combines transactional and analytical data processing in a single in-memory database, enabling businesses like yours to make crucial real-time decisions. Here are some key use cases for SAP HANA:

• Real-time analytics. With SAP HANA, your business can analyze vast amounts of data in real time, providing insights that can facilitate immediate action.
• Faster business processes. By processing data in-memory, SAP HANA significantly reduces the time that data retrieval and processing take, thus speeding up your business processes.
• Predictive analytics. With built-in predictive analytics capabilities, SAP HANA helps your organization forecast trends and behaviors, promoting proactive decision-making.
• Simplified IT landscapes. SAP HANA’s ability to handle both OLAP and OLTP workloads reduces the need for separate databases, simplifying your IT landscapes.

Given its intensive data processing requirements, SAP HANA demands the best underlying hardware to deliver optimal performance. The hardware must provide:

• High memory capacity. SAP HANA stores data in-memory, so large amounts of RAM are essential for storing and for processing your data efficiently.
• Powerful CPUs. High-performance processors are needed to swiftly execute your complex queries and transactions.
• Robust storage solutions. Fast and reliable storage is crucial for maintaining data integrity and for quick data access.
• Scalability and flexibility. The infrastructure must be scalable to accommodate growing data volumes and must be flexible to support various deployment scenarios.

SAP tests infrastructure products for features that are essential for successful integration of the product with the SAP solution. You can review which components of the FlexPod converged infrastructure are certified by SAP for deployment of SAP HANA.

FlexPod is a converged infrastructure solution that was jointly developed by Cisco and NetApp. It integrates computing, networking, and storage components into a single, cohesive architecture. FlexPod is designed to deliver high levels of efficiency, scalability, and performance, making it an optimal platform for a wide range of data center workloads, including SAP HANA. FlexPod reference architectures reduce your risk and help you confidently deploy HANA workloads in your data center.

FlexPod offers several compelling benefits that make it an excellent choice for your SAP HANA deployment, including:

• Validated design. FlexPod configurations are rigorously tested and validated by Cisco and NetApp, confirming compatibility and performance for SAP HANA workloads.
• Simplified deployment. The detailed deployment guide gives you step-by-step instructions, making it easier and faster for you to set up the infrastructure.
• Enhanced performance. With high-performance Cisco UCS servers, Cisco Nexus networking, and NetApp storage, FlexPod delivers the performance that you need to maximize SAP HANA capabilities.
• Scalability and flexibility. The FlexPod modular design enables you to scale your infrastructure as needed to meet your organization’s evolving demands. With features like adaptive quality of service, the resources allocated for SAP HANA are protected from other workloads in a multitenant environment.
• Comprehensive support. The partner-led delivery and deployment model of FlexPod provides comprehensive documentation and one-call support, helping you deploy and manage your infrastructure with confidence.

The FlexPod Datacenter for SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) Design Guide presents a robust infrastructure solution that’s optimized for SAP HANA. The FlexPod for SAP HANA TDI deployment guide provides detailed instructions on how to configure FlexPod to meet the specific needs of SAP HANA workloads. These new publications highlight the ability to use an infrastructure-as-code configuration to support SAP HANA TDI implementations as a tenant in addition to FlexPod Base.

Here are some key differentiators of FlexPod to show why it’s optimal for deploying SAP HANA:

• Resilient design. The FlexPod configuration prevents any single point of failure across all your infrastructure layers, providing high availability and reliability.
• Scalability. The modular design of FlexPod enables you to easily expand compute capacity, storage, and network bandwidth as your business needs grow.
• Integration with automation tools. FlexPod can be integrated and automated with Ansible, simplifying management with policy-driven operations for running SAP HANA.
• Hybrid cloud–ready management. If you use Cisco Intersight, FlexPod can be managed and orchestrated from the cloud, giving you a centralized and efficient management interface.
• Optimized storage configuration. The deployment guide details how to configure NetApp^® ONTAP^® storage for SAP HANA persistence, including the creation of logical interfaces, volumes, and export policies.
• Latest hardware. The validated designs have tested SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 08 systems in single-host and multihost installations on the latest compute and storage products from NetApp and Cisco. Those products include Cisco UCS X9508 chassis with Cisco UCS X210c M7 and Cisco UCS X410c M7 compute nodes and NetApp AFF A90 end-to-end NVMe storage with 100GbE and 64Gbps FC connectivity. These components offer industry-leading compute and storage density for running your SAP HANA workloads.

The Total Economic Impact survey by Forrester that was commissioned by Cisco and NetApp found that FlexPod provided several benefits for participating SAP HANA customers, including:

• The FlexPod reference architecture enabled a 20% time savings in network management and maintenance.
• Interviewed organizations reported a $3 million cost savings in hardware refresh and infrastructure costs after they implemented FlexPod.
• The high-quality FlexPod architecture build reduced the occurrence of downtime by fourfold.
• When downtime did occur, the time taken to identify and to rectify the related network issues decreased from 4 hours to just 15 minutes on average for IT managers.
• Considering the decreased downtime and the faster maintenance that FlexPod delivers, the solution provided an average cost savings of $132,090 over a 3-year horizon.

For just one real-world example of the success of FlexPod for SAP HANA customers, read about the experience of Tasmanian electricity transmission and distribution company TasNetworks.

FlexPod is a powerful and reliable converged infrastructure solution that meets the demanding requirements of SAP HANA. Its validated design, high performance, scalability, and ease of deployment make it the optimal platform for your business to harness the full potential of SAP HANA.

Get started today. For more information about deploying SAP HANA on FlexPod, contact me at Nikhil.Joshi@netapp.com.