Reimagining Enterprise Infrastructure for SAP HANA

⇨ Organizations need infrastructure that can scale and optimize across the edge, core, and multi-cloud with service-level requirement compliance for complex cloud environments and new applications.

⇨ A modernized infrastructure is essential to enable agility, efficiency, and resiliency and is about removing the limitations of legacy infrastructure.

⇨ Hitachi Vantara infrastructure, combined with Red Hat OpenShift®, offers a robust and dependable infrastructure solution for containerized applications, providing high availability and superior performance.

Performance, scalability, and availability with Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat

Pressure on organizations to keep up with rapid technological advancements has increased the demand for digital transformation. As technology continues to advance at an unprecedented pace, organizations need to innovate and keep up with the latest developments to remain competitive and meet the ever-changing demands of their customers. A robust foundation is essential to support such innovation.

Increasingly, organizations are considering migrating their SAP ECC and SAP BW applications to the latest SAP HANA-based applications (SAP S/4HANA and SAP BW/4HANA). While organizational motivations for moving to the cloud or SAP S/4HANA fall into multiple categories, the most common revolve around datacenter exit, end of support for mission-critical technologies (SAP’s end of mainstream maintenance deadline), response to regulatory compliance changes, data sovereignty requirements, and reduction of disruptions and improvement of IT stability among other critical business outcomes.

However, the fundamental motivation for organizations is maximizing the benefits of migration in terms of better efficiency and performance of SAP applications and increased return on investment. This, coupled with the ability to handle an increased workload, adaptability to changing requirements, and efficient execution of vital SAP HANA applications, are the core requirements for most organizations.

Infrastructure Modernization

It is essential to consider infrastructure modernization, an often-overlooked but critical element for any successful transformation when organizations plan and implement a migration strategy ahead of SAP’s deadline for end-of-support for non-SAP HANA-based SAP applications.

Today, many organizations acknowledge the need for a new approach to IT infrastructure, which has made it apparent that their existing infrastructures are incapable of meeting their future-state requirements. Organizations need infrastructure that can scale and optimize across the edge, core, and multi-cloud with service-level requirement compliance for complex cloud environments and new applications. Additionally, the infrastructure should achieve cost and resource targets, automate IT operations, and adapt to new IT approaches.

The need to replace legacy systems with modern, cloud-native solutions that can support today’s data-intensive and dynamic workloads is at the heart of infrastructure modernization. A modernized infrastructure is essential to enable agility, efficiency, and resiliency. This requires a comprehensive approach that goes beyond simply replacing hardware or software components.

“Infrastructure modernization is about removing the limitations of legacy infrastructure. These limitations can be the inability to scale the new workload or provide the recovery point objective (RPO) or recovery time objective (RTO) for mission-critical applications, or it could be a part of the different disparate infrastructure, and that leads to complexities, mismanagement, and unproductive IT.

“Infrastructure modernization implies newer form factor, newer appliances that make it simpler to manage that scale for today and tomorrow, and that help improve productivity by requiring fewer team members, less software, and fewer clicks,” says Dinesh Singh, Director, Product Solutions Marketing, Cloud Infrastructure and Business Applications, Hitachi Vantara.

By implementing a modernized infrastructure that can support hybrid cloud environments, accommodating new workloads and innovation in utilizing data and applications is possible.

Scalability, Flexibility, and Performance

By 2027, organizations using SAP’s enterprise resource planning (SAP ERP) software must transition to SAP S/4HANA. SAP customers require an operating system that harnesses the flexibility and reliability of open source to execute their business strategies. The availability of these systems is critical, and they must be stable and secure to support the intricate compliance needs of today’s enterprises.

The existing memory limitations of SAP   HANA constrain continuous application and data proliferation withexpanding system consolidation requirements. However, Hitachi Vantara’s solutions for SAP eliminate such constraints and make it easier for organizations to migrate to SAP S/4HANA, as they are compatible with Red Hat®Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) for SAP solutions. Hitachi SAP solutions provide high availability and auto-failover features supported by RHEL High Availability Add-on. The RHEL High Availability Add-on features enhancereliability, scalability, and availability of crucial production services. Hitachi also offers an installation and upgrade option for SAP HANA 2.0 SPS  05 and SPS 06 on RHEL, providing an efficient and optimized installation and upgrade path for customer success.

 

Hitachi Vantara is the sole SAP hardware vendor utilizing GFS2 for scale-out SAP HANA shared File System using RHEL for production deployment. Hitachi’s Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions are certified by SAP and provides scaling and management flexibility to customers. While large SAP instances are more suited to HitachiUCP (Unified Compute Platform) converged infrastructure solutions, smaller production and/or test environments align with the benefits inherent in HCI.

Combining enterprise-class storage, compute, and networking components simplifies deployment and deliverspredictable results. Hitachi storage systems are known for their functionality and performance, emphasizing high availability, resilience, and management features required to meet the needs of demanding enterprise applications. As Singh continues,

“Hitachi brings high performance and a flexible configuration which means that a customer can start small and scale in the same footprint without the need to rip and replace. Hitachi UCP delivers high performance for SAP instances, even at peak capacity. Hitachi’s Virtual Storage Platform is the gold standard in the industry, and we are the only storage provider which delivers 100 percent data availability guarantee. It also happens to be the most powerful storage system across the industry. Hitachi is one of a handful of SAP solutions and services providers capable of delivering infrastructure, consulting services, and professional services—everything fully managed as-a-service. That means customers do not have to manage their infrastructure or maintain a dedicated team. Hitachi represents a single point of accountability for support, thereby eliminating the need to maintain multiple support agreements with multiple vendors.”

The Hitachi platform offers the following:

• High-performance and flexible compute options, including the Hitachi Advanced rack servers DS220 and DS240 or the scalable DS7000 with large memory capacity based on the Intel Xeon
• Memory scalability up to 24TB and scale out to 96TB for exceptional performance for large SAP HANA workloads.
• Support for up to 12TB memory for a VMware virtualized environment and up to 6TB memory for a hyperconverged SAP HANA environment.
• Hitachi’s VSP high-end family (VSP G1500/F1500 and 5000 series) and midrange family (VSP G350/F350, G370/F370, E590, E790, G700/F700, G900/F900, and E990) offer granular scalability to 222 HANA nodes.

Foundational Excellence: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for SAP Solutions allows organizations who depend on SAP to manage their businesses to comply with the quickly approaching SAP requirement to migrate their SAP ERP applications to SAP S/4HANA. RHEL integrates the reliability, scalability, and performance of a modern OS with additional content specific to SAP landscapes and automates SAP S/4HANA adoption, irrespective of where organizations want to deploy and generate value for SAP.

RHEL supports all major SAP products on Intel and IBM Power architectures, and recently, SAP strengthened its internal IT infrastructure by utilizing the RHEL platfor  m as one of its standard operating systems for software-as-a-service applications. Also, SAP and Red Hat have extended their support for the RISE with SAP solution on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is now the preferred operating system for all net new business when deploying RISE with SAP solutions.

Red Hat OpenShift® is a unified platform to build, modernize, and deploy applications at scale. It brings together tested and trusted services to reduce the friction of developing, modernizing, deploying, running, and managing applications. Built on Kubernetes, it delivers a consistent experience across public cloud, on-prem, hybrid cloud, or edge architectures. As customers move to SAP S/4HANA, a top priority of their modernization effort should be keeping the core clean. Customized apps will still be needed, but with a clean core, customers can save a lot of effort with future upgrades or migrations. Red Hat OpenShift allows SAP customers to benefit from shorter innovation cycles, faster time to market, and removes dependencies to access to newer SAP features.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been the foundation in data centers for the last 20-plus years. As we look to build, what we affectionately call the open hybrid cloud, that is where Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform becomes the foundational element. It enables customers to run their applications on-prem, in a public or hybrid cloud, or at the edge. OpenShift gives customers the flexibility to migrate workloads between these deployment options. This flexibility becomes key for customers as they look to modernize applications because it no longer locks them into a single deployment scenario for their SAP landscapes. They can choose when and where it makes the most sense to run their SAP applications. And, by deploying their SAP applications using RHEL and OpenShift as their foundation, customers are best positioned to take advantage of a modern architecture that delivers performance at scale,” says Jason Delaune, SAP Associate Principal Solution Architect, Red Hat.

Sustainable Data Centers

Hitachi Vantara is the only storage vendor certified by Carbon Footprint. Hitachi infrastructure solutions consume less energy and leverage patented technology to reduce CO2 emissions up to 96 percent. Hitachi’s Storage Virtualization Operating System  (SVOS) can decrease carbon emissions through advanced data reductiontechnology, which allows more user data to be stored on the same raw capacity, resulting in a 65 percent decrease in electricity consumption and CO2 emissions.

These innovations can be applied to existing storage systems with the same benefits. SVOS also supports non-disruptive storage controller upgrades. Controller upgrades that require an outage can require data migration, be time-consuming, consume excessive power, and take months to complete.

For agility, a modernized infrastructure needs to offer the same benefits as the cloud, even when it is located on-prem. Infrastructure should be agile and flexible, capable of responding to changes and providing services across the edge, core, and cloud at any scale and at any time. Furthermore, infrastructure must exceed expectations related to scaling and acceleration, managing workloads both on-prem and in the cloud, moving and accessing data, and optimizing resources across multiple clouds. By supporting “everything as a service,” Hitachi’s modernized infrastructure model addresses budgetary constraints, reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO), and increases the return on investment (ROI).

There is now a greater urgency for infrastructure that facilitates innovation and the strategic use of data, analytics, and applications to drive new business processes. A modernized infrastructure offers resilience by providing data security and protection for all data types across the distributed cloud. Solutions must provide agility, which reduces obsolescence and maximizes adaptability for new applications, workloads, and changing requirements.

In summary, infrastructure modernization is a critical step for businesses looking to remain competitive in today’s digital landscape. Hitachi Vantara with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift can enable organizations to develop a comprehensive modernization strategy that addresses their unique needs and priorities, from data management and application modernization, to cybersecurity and beyond. With the combined power of Hitachi and Red Hat solutions, businesses can unlock new opportunities for growth and innovation, while improving efficiency and reducing costs.

For more information visit:

Hitachi

Red Hat