SAP HANA in the cloud is now elevated with IBM Power Systems

The partners join forces (again) to bolster outcomes for clients’ business intelligence applications.

On Tuesday, SAP HANA, the enterprise software platform that acts as an agent to help retrieve and organize data, announced that it named IBM Power Systems as a critical infrastructure provider.

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IBM Power Systems will be able to help “simplify the IT infrastructure for the managed, private cloud environment,” according to a press release.

Additionally, the service will be running on IBM POWER9-based IBM Power Systems E980 servers—said to be the “industry’s largest virtualized server scalability of 24TB for the SAP HANA database,” according to the release.

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The SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud can handle software and hardware stacks and “is a scalable and secured service that is designed to accelerate a user’s evolution on the path to cloud readiness,” the release says.

“SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud on IBM Power Systems will help clients unlock the full value of SAP HANA in the cloud, with the possibility of enhancing the scalability and availability of mission critical SAP applications while moving workloads to SAP HANA and lowering TCO,” said Christoph Herman, SVP and head of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud Delivery, in the release.

According to Herman, the joining of forces of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and IBM Power Systems can “help establish a faster path to cloud readiness for our clients while addressing risk and providing closer alignment to the intelligent enterprise.”

SAP HANA said its cloud customers will see faster performance of their business intelligence applications because of IBM Power’s virtualization abilities, which help accommodate capacity changes.

IBM Power Systems was certified for SAP HANA in 2015, and has been increasing scalability for SAP HANA applications since then.

The partnership provides virtualization to SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud services, which helps enterprises shift their focus from maintaining infrastructure to digitally transforming and innovating in the cloud, according to the release.

The release states, “SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud users can take advantage of the firmware-based virtualization in the IBM POWER platform that offers the largest SAP HANA scalability in scale-up systems.”

It adds that this helps enable SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud users to “accommodate capacity changes – this is designed for clients to benefit from faster performance of their SAP HANA-based business intelligence applications by running them in a single node while maximizing the availability of SAP applications with the highly resilient infrastructure.”

The news builds on a June announcement that IBM would offer POWER9 to its cloud offering. “With the addition of IBM Power Systems in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, we’re giving our clients more choices and greater flexibility to run their workloads where they want to across the hybrid cloud and accelerate digital transformation.”

The collaboration between IBM Power Systems and SAP provides virtualization on-demand via hypervisor-defined features in Power Systems, the partners said

This enables clients to take advantage of multiple SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service levels and transform IT operations by shifting the focus from infrastructure maintenance to innovating with SAP HANA in the cloud.

IBM Services and SAP teamed up to create in 2016 a Digital Transformation partnership, which aimed to help enterprises modernize and become digitally savvy.