Appliance? Solution? Or Do It Yourself

A customized solution for a specific application is not necessarily an appliance that you plug in and run unchanged until the end of its days. Modern solutions require regular maintenance: security gaps need to be plugged, functional bugs need to be eliminated, and performance enhancements are welcome.

If I have to take care of every component myself and want to optimize the settings, I can keep entire departments busy with it. However, if many users use the same solution, it is a win-win situation for the system provider and the user if the solution is defined in advance and can also be supported as a solution. Sure, I can rely on my system house to provide me with the solution and possibly also operate it.

But how many systems does my system house operate? When it comes to complex mission-critical systems, isn't it better to work with the system provider in a spirit of trust and follow his recommendations?

Example network adapter:

10 GbE is 9.8 Gb/s for provider A, and only 8.5 Gb/s for B under certain circumstances. One distributes interrupts across all processors, the other pins them to one processor. One supports hardware offloading, the other does not, and so on.

Which is the right adapter for "my" system? If my system provider offers an optimized solution for my application, then he has taken this into account, tested it, selected the appropriate adapter and also configured it correctly.

The same applies to controllers, flash memory and hard disks, processors up to the operating system and possibly also the right parameters for the application. And if switches or storage are involved, then he has also taken care of these and their connection.

If now an update of a software component is pending, e.g. new revision of my application or also an operating system update, then I should consider possible dependencies. I.e. I have to update the firmware as well.

If I don't, there may be a failure or malfunction. Then I turn to my system provider with confidence: If he knows what is installed in my system, he may already know the error and can tell me immediately what to do. Or they can request a support log of the system and find the error directly there.

In the rarest of cases, the user finds an as yet unknown error in a component, which then has to be analyzed and eliminated in a time-intensive manner. This is unpleasant (and it is better to have thought about high availability through redundant systems or to have a backup that is as up-to-date as possible), since it may take days until the error is understood and a fix is developed and made available.

In the vast majority of cases, however, the system provider's support team can quickly provide the solution and my application, which is critical to my business, can continue to operate immediately.

An example of such a solution is the Lenovo Solution for Hana. Partly certified for the Hana Appliance, partly as a Hana TDI solution (Tailored Datacenter Integration). But in all cases with solution support from Lenovo integrated into the SAP support flow.

Lenovo Distributed Storage Solution (DSS-c) for Suse Enterprise Storage, which is certified for use with Hana, is also fully supported as a solution. Or the Lenovo Scalable Solution for Hana for S/4 scenarios, providing up to 36 TB under one operating system, or for other applications, independent of an SAP release, with up to 216 TB of memory.

What all these solutions have in common is that they are based on standard components and are not a proprietary solution. All "Software Defined" with the solution support from the vendor using standard servers and components.

No matter which solution I choose, a trustworthy partner is essential for the successful operation of my solution.