HP Readies ConvergedSystems For SAP HANA

Later this month Hewlett-Packard will officially launch the first converged infrastructure system for users of SAP’s HANA in-memory database computing technology.

The company announced 19 March that the first of the HP ConvergedSystem solutions – which offer tightly integrated server, storage, networking, software and services optimised to run the in-memory computing (IMC) capabilities – will roll out 31 March.

Faster Decisions

Later in the year, HP will launch another ConvergedSystem for SAP’s big data product that will include technologies developed jointly with SAP as part of the vendors’ Project Kraken effort, which is aimed at enabling organisations to best use the IMC solution from SAP.

In-memory computing is designed to help companies process and analyze huge amounts of data much more quickly to enable them to make faster and better business decisions.

“Organisations are making long-term, strategic architectural bets for their data centres and data management platforms,” Tom Joyce, senior vice president and general manager of converged systems at HP, said in a statement. “SAP HANA provides a catalyst for business transformation, and HP has the architecture, expertise and vision to meet its infrastructure needs.”

HP officials last year outlined the company’s “Sharks” program, which is aimed at enabling organisations to quickly configure and design a ConvergedSystem solution that best fits their needs. It’s part of a larger effort at HP to offer converged, tightly integrated infrastructure solutions for a wide range of data centre needs.

Most data centre solutions vendors have some sort of converged system offering, such as Cisco Systems’ Unified Computing System (UCS), which in five years has helped the networking giant become a top-tier vendor of x86 servers. IDC analysts have forecast the converged infrastructure market to grow from $4 billion (£2.4bn) this year to more than $17 billion by 2016.

Integrated Solution

HP’s ConvergedSystem “is a pre-integrated, tested system that comes with installation and support services and are incredibly easy to deploy and administer, delivering faster-time-to- value and lower TCO [total cost of ownership] in as little as 20 days,” Joyce wrote in a recent post on the HP blog.

The first of the offerings is the ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA, which can be deployed on premises, in a hosted environment or via the cloud, and can be up and running within 15 days of ordering.

HP also is integrating its Serviceguard technology with HANA to bring greater automated failover and disaster-recovery capabilities to the SAP offering, and with built-in 3PAR thin-provisioning and workload-optimisation technology, multiple SAP HANA workloads can run on the same system without impacting performance.

The vendor is offering configurations of the ConvergedSystem with 256GB- to 2TB-scale-up systems, and 16TB scale-out systems, according to HP. With the upcoming Kraken offering, HP will be able to handle the largest business applications in HANA by offering up to 12TB in a single in-memory pool.

The new converged infrastructure offerings are only the latest efforts by HP around HANA. For example, the company in August 2013 announced it was offering the in-memory database technology as a cloud service powered by HP’s AppSystem for SAP HANA, and that it was offering a migration service for organisations looking to adopt SAP HANA.

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Originally published on eWeek.