Competitive advantage: Holistic thinking and integrated systems

The leading platform designed specifically for big data processing delivers the results the industry expects from power systems: Flexibility, resilience and performance.

This is extremely important, as we are talking about a market that was originally limited to just one platform (Intel x86) and very strict configuration options.

On IBM Power systems, on the other hand, a very flexible and scalable environment has been developed to help enterprise customers with their business-critical in-memory analytics to gain real-time insights into their business and reduce costs.

High flexibility and low TCO

This combination, which utilizes the proven Power advantages with Linux as the operating system, offers maximum flexibility, reliability and performance. For Hana customers who are currently using or testing other hardware platforms, Power systems offer a real alternative to x86 systems - in fact, the only alternative.

Everything is available on one system, with lower operating costs at the same time. Thousands of global organizations that use IBM Power systems for classic SAP and non-SAP applications can continue to use their existing processes and procedures in areas such as high availability, disaster recovery and backup scenarios.

This means that in most cases there is little need to establish new processes or introduce employees to completely new subject areas. This means that customers can implement the benefits of Hana on Power (HoP) systems with little effort and time.

The increasing acceptance of power technology is largely based on three pillars: greater flexibility coupled with lower TCO, better performance and enterprise-grade resilience.

The excellent virtualization allows up to eight production VMs on a single power server (even more in shared pools) and thus a very efficient workload consolidation, which drastically reduces the need for servers and the associated costs - ergo lower TCO.

In addition, Hana instances can be mixed with conventional workloads on one and the same server. In terms of memory, Power can boast generous capacities that do not cause a memory bottleneck, as is so often the case with Intel.

For example, you can set up one VM to run traditional ECC or CRM, another to cover BW, yet another to run testing and development in the S/4 Hana area, and a few more to run virtualized VM services. This would be impossible on an appliance architecture, it would violate all SAP rules.

Higher performance

The per-core performance of the Power processor is significantly higher than anything Intel has to offer. This is due to the different, purpose-built design of the processor. Power is optimized for data-intensive workloads and can run up to eight simultaneous computing processes in parallel thanks to multithreading - four times as much as the competition, which can run a maximum of two simultaneous computing processes.

This means fewer cores, lower licensing costs and a significantly reduced space requirement in the data center: likewise lower power consumption, management costs, etc.

Very important in a real-time computing environment:

Latency times, which are getting longer and longer thanks to the physical proliferation of instances in the Intel area, can be drastically reduced. In addition, speed is increased thanks to large memory caches and SIMD (single instruction, multiple data vector processing) provides the final kick.

Higher load capacity and reliability

In 2016, the reliability of Power Servers reached a new high when IDC placed them in the highest category of fault tolerance (Availability Level 4). This corresponds to 99.9999 percent uptime.

This is an area that traditionally belongs to mainframes. Consequently, we have not had a single infrastructure-generated problem or downtime in over 2000 Hana installations on Power, for example.

Power servers also permanently run heuristic processes in the background that provide the administrator with proactive error warnings. In addition, a fail-over from one VM to another can be carried out in scale-up mode (recommended by SAP itself in the Hana environment), even if one VM is running test or development scenarios.

Redundant components and the hot-plug architecture enable maintenance during operation in many areas. This also ultimately leads to fewer servers and therefore a lower TCO. Something like this is also not available in the appliance sector.

Support Services

Support services are the bracket that completes the package. SAP Hana is a complex structure that requires a wide range of support: for configuration, implementation, installation of the infrastructure and applications.

IBM provides an all-encompassing solution for this (end-to-end), ranging from planning, installation to migration, operation and continuous user support. The IBM experts from Global Business Services and Lab Service experts offer comprehensive support around the clock.

If you consider all of this together, as a responsible business leader you can hardly avoid considering the power platform.

Power9 and roadmap

IBM has set a new milestone with the announcement and availability of the Power9 server. Development costs of three billion dollars guarantee maximum quality and a unique customer focus. We want to take a closer look at this unique claim and the special suitability for SAP Hana.

Power processors serve as the basis for the design of systems for traditional transaction processing as well as for compute- and data-intensive workloads such as web, analytics, modeling (up to atomic workflows), mobile and social business applications.

To achieve maximum performance, these systems are equipped with optimization and virtualization technology that allows the system to automatically adapt to specific workloads.

For example, the aforementioned "Intelligent Threads" threading technology dynamically controls the threading mode - parallel data processing - of the processor from one to eight simultaneous threads per core in order to achieve the optimum performance for the different workloads.

PowerVM

The often-mentioned PowerVM virtualization was developed and optimized specifically for the Power processor as a so-called "built-in feature" and enables proven and seamlessly scalable virtualization of workloads running on AIX, IBMi and, of course, Linux.

With this virtualization software, companies can achieve enormously high efficiency: Continuous utilization rates of between 80 and 90 percent are not uncommon. IBM even guarantees a processor utilization of up to 70 percent in writing. In comparison, Intel-based applications only exceed 20 to 30 percent with careful tuning and monitoring.

At the same time, organizations can benefit from dynamic, flexible deployment and management of hundreds of virtual machines (VMs) with minimal effort. PowerVM offers micro-partitioning combined with the ability to run up to 20 partitions per core and dynamically move processor, memory and I/O resources between partitions to meet changing workload requirements.

Another essential factor is the future-proofing of IBM Power systems - the development process is fluid and seamless. Power10 is in preparation and Power11 is already on the drawing board. This guarantees investment security for at least a decade.

Each new release not only continues the standard of the old one (compatibility), but also tries to incorporate the status quo of research and development.

LPARs and VIOS

One of the peculiarities of Hana is its constantly changing requirements. The customer and system should be able to react to this individually and immediately. These were all design criteria for Power.

In contrast to the x86 appliances, a Power implementation enables freely selectable partitions for SAP Hana in terms of cores and memory. This also makes it easier to react to the frequently changing project specifications in the life cycle of a Hana project.

Hana on Power is fully virtualized with PowerVM, each LPAR can be configured hardware-independently, so it is freely selectable in terms of core capacities to be used, dedicated donating or shared as well as memory, while with x86 VMware productive instances can be assigned on a half-socket or full-socket basis at most.

This avoids "waste" at Power, i.e. the flexibility and full utilization of hardware resources are given here. Service provider and SAP partner FIT refers to this as "memory Tetris games".

Likewise, memory or core resources can be added online to each LPAR, which is supported or reduced by PowerVM as well as Linux OS, but it is currently still necessary to stop and start the Hana database in order to make the LPAR changes known to the database.

SAP and IBM are working intensively on being able to carry out this capacity change online in future without stopping and starting the Hana database.

The free mix of Hana and non-Hana environments also enables a simple migration path from a classic SAP environment to Hana while retaining and utilizing existing memory and processor capacities. This is very important for investment security and the self-determination of companies.

A long life cycle of the Power Technology enables customers to purchase the same processors, memory modules, adapters etc. for years to come. This avoids increased management costs for testing and migration when adapters are changed, as is often the case in the Intel environment, and also avoids unplanned investments.

Dynamic relocation of logical partitions and applications is also possible. Functionalities such as Live Partition Mobility (LPM) and Geographically Dispersed Resiliency (GDR) are of course also available for Hana databases in order to move Hana databases online (LPM) or "cold" (GDR) from one server to another during operation.

LAN and SAN components are fully virtualized and flexibly connected to the Power LPARs via so-called VIOS LPARs and are a prerequisite for the above-mentioned relocation of the LPARs to a second server.

Cores, memory and MDC

Power Enterprise Pools, available in the enterprise servers of the E870/E880 and E980 series, allow flexibility and cost-effective efficiency at the same time. Such a pool consists of a group of power systems that can share mobile capacity (Mobile Capacity on Demand - CoD) in terms of processor and memory resources.

The resources can be moved within the pool using HMC commands (Hardware Management Console). In the event of maintenance work or unavailability of systems, their resources can be activated on other available servers in the pool, provided they have sufficient non-activated resources installed.

This enables the re-balancing of resources, the shifting of workloads and facilitates HA/DR planning and implementation during operation. And all this at no additional cost.

As things stand today, all productive Hana databases should be operated on the basis of SAP's "dedicated donating" (cores) policy. The unused processor capacity is transferred to the shared pool using the "donating" mechanism. This shared pool capacity can be used by associated SAP application servers as well as by the non-production Hana instances and any other type of workload assigned to the shared pool.

SAP Hana supports multiple isolated database instances in a (physical) SAP Hana system. These are known as tenant databases. The principle itself is referred to as MDC (Multi-Tenant Database Containers).

As of Hana 2.0 SPS01+, Hana systems are installed as MDC systems by default. An SAP Hana system can contain one or more tenant databases (t), but always has exactly one Hana system database (s) for central system administration.

Accordingly, a Hana system consists of 1*s (system database) + n*t (tenant) instances. With the help of PowerVM's flexibility to operate many and even large Hana LPARs and to consolidate one or more tenants within the respective LPAR in a Hana database, this results in enormous flexibility for Hana-on-Power customers that is unique in the market.

Availability

In summary, we offer the highest availability on the market. There are countless more technical details, but for the hardliners there is one more treat: Power servers use industry-leading chipkill memory with Custom Dual Inline Memory Module (CDIMMSs), which has additional Dynamic Random Access Memory and allows the dynamic deallocation of memory DIMMs for predictable errors or even substitution with memory that has not yet been activated via CoD.

We'll leave it at that - one final comment on the new Power9 servers. These bring further improvements in core capacity, which is important for SAP Hana, and even larger - up to four times - physical main memory compared to the respective comparable Power8 server. The Linux operating system for IBM Power will also support significantly larger virtual - up to four times - main memory.