How You Can Benefit from the Values of IBM Power in Your Journey to SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA

Published: 01/March/2017

Reading time: 15 mins

More than 10 vendors offer SAP HANA appliances on common Intel x86 architecture or modified x86 with proprietary chipsets to expand the number of sockets. Since 2015, IBM Power Systems has been certified to run SAP HANA in a tailored datacenter integration (TDI) environment. The SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems solution is the ideal consolidation platform for IBM Power Systems users who are moving to SAP HANA, as well as for existing SAP HANA and SAP Business Warehouse users running on an x86 architecture who are looking to take advantage of the latest POWER8 technologies.

The IBM Power platform gives SAP HANA applications a greater amount of agility and variability than would be possible with an x86 appliance. Additionally, IBM Power offers a mixed workload for SAP HANA, traditional SAP systems, and other workloads with stronger per-core performance to minimize the physical footprint. Up to eight production SAP HANA databases can be supported on a single physical server.

Read the transcript below to learn about specific actions you can take and best practices you can follow to successfully deploy SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA on IBM Power Systems.

Transcript:

Matthew Shea: Today’s topic is deploying SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA on IBM Power Systems, and I’m very pleased to have IBM’s Dietmar Amrein joining us!

Dietmar is responsible for SAP HANA in Asia Pacific. He is a Senior Solution Architect working for IBM in Germany.

Comment From KR: You mentioned that “up to eight production SAP HANA databases can be supported on a single physical server.” Is there any SAP note which mentions that such configuration is supported by SAP?

Dietmar Amrein: Yes sure. See SAP Note 2230704 – SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems with multiple – LPARs per physical host.

Comment From Nick: What is the business case for moving our SAP systems to IBM POWER?

Dietmar Amrein: The business case for existing Power customers is to stay on the well-known platform. For existing x86 customers, it’s to do a consolidation and simplification, and to reduce the number of physical boxes on Power.

Comment From Krishna Kasturi: SAP Vora can speed up data by integrating with Hadoop. How can IBM Power manage better than the big data capabilities of Hadoop?

Dietmar Amrein: The question is a complex one to answer here. If the customer has SAP and uses Hadoop together with SAP software, there is no add-on from IBM here. If you also use other non-SAP components, we can bring additional IBM components. But we would have to look closely at the case.

Comment From Nick: What do we need to know about custom code before deploying our SAP systems on the cloud?

Dietmar Amrein: There are SAP techniques (called conversions) to determine the code and to make a decision if it’s possible to transfer it to the cloud or to do some changes to it.

Comment From James: What are my infrastructure management options, and what are the pros and cons of each?

Dietmar Amrein: The infrastructure options are to use appliances (server, memory, storage, network, SAN) as they are or to use existing components (called SAP HANA TDI) together with server form x86 or IBM Power. SAP only delivers TDI with Power.

Comment From Ramesh Akkala: Currently our traditional SAP ERP system is on HP Unix with Oracle DB. We are planning to establish DR with HANA. Will these two heterogeneous systems work? Is it a feasible solution?

Dietmar Amrein: For your existing SAP system (HP-UX and Oracle DB) you are using traditional DR technology. When you are moving to SAP HANA, you are doing a migration from HP-UX to Linux and from Oracle to SAP HANA DB. Then you can use storage replication or SAP HANA System replication for DR and/or for HA.

Comment From Sean: What would be the migration path for a customer moving from SAP ERP on-premise any DB to S/4HANA on IBM Power?

Dietmar Amrein: The first step will be a migration workshop to find how complex the transition/migration will be from AnyDB to SAP HANA DB. This takes up to 3 days. After this you will see more details about the timeline. On an existing Power system you can now start with setting up an LPAR with SUSE Linux and install SAP HANA here to get the first experience with HANA. There’s no need to buy additional hardware. The minimum requirements are Power 8 for production HANA systems.

Comment From Asa: What considerations are involved in transitioning an existing SAP ERP implementation to SAP HANA in a TDI environment?

Dietmar Amrein: SAP TDI means tailored data center integration. You can read details here and here.

In simple words: you use certified server hardware (Power or x86) and use the network, SAN, and storage from your environment. The storage you are using has also to be TDI certified.

Comment From Jay: Why is TDI better than appliances?

Dietmar Amrein: Better or not better – this depends on the customer. In my opinion SAP HANA will be more open in the future like the other DBs. We see more and more flexibility from SAP and so we see more and more TDI . SAP also made the decision not to do appliances when they started with HANA on Power in 2015. TDI is now there in the fourth version. The main advantage for TDI is the freedom for the customer to reuse existing assets and to fit HANA into a proven environment.

Comment From Alex: What is the main benefit for customers running SAP HANA on IBM Power?

Dietmar Amrein: On Power, the virtualization is included in the hardware. So the main benefit is the flexibility for LPARS/VMs. For example, you need 700 GB for the HANA DB, so you can set up an LPAR/VM inside a Power System with 700 GB and run HANA inside. When you are using x86 you have to buy an extra box, and the next T-Shirt size is 1 TB – so you buy more than you need. If you need 800 GB on Power because you are increasing the HANA DB, you can use Dynamic LPAR and give this LPAR/VM 800 GB without changing the hardware. Now you can also run up to 8 HANA Production DBs on a physical server. The next benefit is the RAS functionality. Power is robust and never fails. And the third benefit is the speed and fast access to memory. We see customer cases where Power has up to 5 times the speed in comparison to x86.

Comment From Guest: Does TDI support virtualization?

Dietmar Amrein: Virtualization is not covered by SAP in the TDI documentation, but SAP supports virtualization together with SAP HANA. Some products are supported only for non-Production HANA DBs like KVM or XEN. Others are also supported for Production HANA DBs like PowerVM or VMware. You can read more about this in this SAP Note:

1788665 – SAP HANA Support for virtualized / partitioned (multi-tenant) environments

Comment From Chris: What about storage for HANA on Power – can I use non-IBM storage?

Dietmar Amrein: You can use non-IBM storage if the storage is TDI certified. See this link for more on HANA storage.

Comment From Shiva Reddy: If the memory & CPU requirements for HANA grow over time, will it be easier to handle on Power Server?

Dietmar Amrein: SAP supports PowerVM on Power. So we can use DLPAR (Dynamic LPAR) to increase or decrease LPARS/VMs. If you need 50GB more memory for SAP HANA, for example, you can add this memory to the LPAR with the hypervisor and also with cores if you need additional performance. Today you have to restart SAP HANA because it does not initially see the new memory. SAP and IBM are working to change this in the future to do this more dynamically.

Comment From Bree: What is the core to memory ratio (CTM)?

Dietmar Amrein: If you are running HANA on Power, you can use a LPAR/VM to run the HANA DB. The sizing rules for the DB are the memory size. You need one Power core to run a certain amount of memory depending on the S/4H (transactional) or BW/4H (analytics) workload. For S/4H this memory size is 96, and for BW this is 50. This means, for example, 1 Power core can run up to 96 GB memory of S/4H. And for an S/4HANA DB with 400 GB, you would need 4 cores to run the DB.

Comment From J.T.: Can you discuss the business benefits of running HANA on Power?

Dietmar Amrein: The main business benefits are flexible LPAR/VM with SAP HANA TDI and the built-in IBM Hypervisor on Power, better RAS for hardware and memory, and much better performance in comparison to the x86 server.

Comment From Santosh: After a DLPAR operation, do we need to run HWCCT again to re-certify the LPAR?

Dietmar Amrein: You have to run HWCCT before you install SAP HANA. In my perspective you do not have to do this again.

Comment From Erik: What considerations are involved in transitioning an existing SAP ERP implementation to SAP HANA in a TDI environment?

Dietmar Amrein: You will have an advantage if you reuse existing assets like network, SAN, and storage, which will make you more flexible and open.

Comment From Guest: Is Live Partition Mobility and Capacity on Demand (COD) on Power supported?

Dietmar Amrein: Yes CoD and LPM are supported. You can read about this in SAP Note 2188482 – SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems: Allowed Hardware.

Comment From Santosh: Do customers require additional resources on Power to move from HANA 1.0 to HANA 2.0?

Dietmar Amrein: SAP HANA 2.0 is like an SPS – you have to read the SAP Notes about the requirements for HANA 2.0.

Matthew Shea: As we come to the end of today’s Q&A, thank you for joining us. Thank you Dietmar for your expertise. I will send you an email as soon as the transcript of this discussion is posted.