This news further solidifies IBM as the most-powerful SAP-certified virtual server.
Recently, IBM announced the general availability of IBM Power Systems Virtual Server for SAP HANA and NetWeaver platform (ECC) workloads. SAP’s own performance tooling and published benchmarks show that IBM runs the most-powerful SAP-certified IaaS. The offering is available today in three geographies—Toronto, Frankfurt, and London—with more coming soon.
SAP customers can now take advantage of the flexibility of IBM’s SAP-certified Infrastructure as a Service Power Virtual Server environment to accelerate their migration to SAP S/4HANA®. The underpinnings of these virtual servers are the industry-leading IBM Power Systems E980 servers [1] with each virtual server capable of scaling up to 143 cores and 15TB of RAM for the largest and most demanding SAP HANA workloads.
This announcement further expands the capabilities of the Power Systems Virtual Server offering to deliver a resilient and secure platform for business [2] for enterprise-scale SAP deployments. Furthermore, IBM is announcing certification of the SAP NetWeaver application stack for production use on the IBM Power Systems Virtual Server offering, rounding out the best-in-class SAP offering.
Why this matters
As you plan to deploy SAP HANA-based workloads, you need flexibility and choice to run your landscape. In a recent study of customers running or planning to run SAP S/4HANA, the majority said that leveraging the flexibility of Infrastructure as a Service is essential to remaining competitive in their industry. By deploying your SAP HANA landscape on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server, you have the flexibility of on-demand scalability to get to market faster in a secured and highly available environment [3]. In addition, pay-as-you-go billing allows you to best allocate scarce resources in these challenging times.
As an SAP HANA-certified infrastructure, the SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server offering has been found to meet certain standards from SAP to ensure that the IaaS platform is optimized for SAP HANA workloads, providing quality and stability for clients. During the certification process, experts from SAP joined IBM engineers to run multiple tests and simulations using standardized tools and worked together to create an integrated support process between IBM, SAP, and users to streamline responsiveness and ensure that multiple SAP HANA scenarios would run efficiently on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server.
Sampling of top use cases
- New Test and Development instances to try out SAP workloads with Power Systems Virtual Server
- Run mission-critical production SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver workloads
- Disaster recovery and business resiliency
- Innovate with Watson AI and Blockchain
- Data center evacuation due to a lease expiring
- SAP planning as part of a corporate strategy for acquisitions/divestitures of BUs
- Financial business strategy to move from a CAPEX to OPEX model
Why SAP on Power Virtual Servers
IBM has been a global SAP partner for 48 years and is SAP’s most recognized partner, winning 36 SAP Pinnacle Awards. IBM has experience gained from over 37,000 SAP-certified professionals and 5,500 SAP migrations to cloud and virtual infrastructure offerings. IBM Cloud and IBM Power Systems Virtual Server offer the lowest cloud vendor costs and a wide array of enterprise-grade security services and products to help those in regulated industries.
Furthermore, IBM and SAP recently announced new offerings to help companies’ journey to the Intelligent Enterprise.
Important links
[1] As per the SAP Note 2188482, on POWER9 a maximum of 24TB can be used by single HANA 2.0 (scale-up) must not be exceeded.
[2] Power Systems encryption based on IBM Hyper Protect Crypto Service, the only service in the industry built on FIPS 140-2 Level 4-certified hardware.
[3] Power Systems encryption based on IBM Hyper Protect Crypto Service, the only service in the industry built on FIPS 140-2 Level 4-certified hardware.
Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.