Running a business in real time is about eliminating the delay between when analytic data is captured and what’s taking place now. Imagine seeing what customers are buying, when they are buying. Or viewing pipelines, inventory, supply chains, and balance sheets with up-to-the-second accuracy. Through greater insight, you can make faster, smarter decisions and gain competitive advantage. In a database environment, this means eliminating extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes and running transactional and analytic workloads concurrently. This is the promise behind SAP HANA, which combines database, data processing, and application platform capabilities in memory. SAP HANA has been most often thought to accelerate analytics via the data warehouse. The rapid innovation behind SAP’s next-generation business suite, SAP S/4HANA, dramatically elevates this view and reaffirms SAP HANA as a database built for real-time business.

Scaling Up with Data Growth

A clustered, multi-node system is conducive to running and scaling out a data warehouse. To become a real-time business, however, requires removing the inherent latency of a clustered architecture so that transactional workloads don’t slow down. To run SAP S/4HANA applications, you need a single-node system, and as data volumes grow, a system that scales up versus out. SGI accomplishes this goal with the SGI UV 300H. Currently certified by SAP for general availability in four- or eight-socket configurations with up to six terabytes (TB) of shared memory, and under controlled availability in 12-, 16-, or 20-socket configurations with up to 15TB of shared memory, the future-ready system provides unparalleled scale-up capacity. In a short time since its release, global deployments of the SGI UV 300H provide in total more than 500TB of in-memory capacity to organizations running the SAP HANA platform. Collectively, these systems have performed with 99.99% uptime and in multi-tier configurations to provide 99.999% application availability.

An Eye to the Cloud

This evolution to real-time business, and thus the need for a single-node system, also extends to the cloud. IT organizations with limited capacity and staffing resources can leverage the infrastructure and managed service capabilities of service providers, while still enjoying the scale-up capacity and mission-critical reliability of the SGI UV 300H, accelerating time to value. And whether you utilize the system in an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) consumption model, or coupled with SAP HANA in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) consumption model, the lower cost of entry and shift from capital expenditure (CAPEX) to operational expense (OPEX) provide added value. Furthermore, a hybrid cloud solution could leverage an SGI UV 300H within a service provider for disaster recovery, while keeping primary and secondary high availability (HA) systems on premise.

Become a Real-Time Business

Whether via native growth, mergers and acquisitions, or new data sources, there is no escaping the fact that big data is here. Companies that can harness this influx of data and gain insight through analytics in real time will be poised to outpace competitors, from capturing more customers to fueling entirely new business models. SAP HANA is the next-generation, in-memory platform that, running on a single-node system, is designed to deliver real-time benefits. On premise or in the cloud, SGI UV300H delivers on the vision of SAP HANA by helping make real-time business a reality. For more information, visit www.sgi.com/products/servers/uv.