Hana on Power with SLES

At the beginning of August, it was officially announced that Suse is the first Linux distribution to support IBM Power Systems for Hana, especially the Power8 expansion stage, with immediate effect.

Attentive observers of the Hana or Hana infrastructure scene have certainly expected this step. After the "Power for Hana Announcement" by SAP and IBM in May of last year - and after the information that has been making the rounds from time to time in the past that Hana was running on servers based on IBM's Power computer architecture for test purposes at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI).

What is the significance of the fact that in connection with Hana, in addition to the Intel x86 computer/processor architecture, another one, Power8 from IBM, is being made available on the market?

And: To what extent do customers benefit from relying on the Hana-IBM Power8-Suse SLES for SAP Applications combination for their Hana deployment?

First of all, this means greater freedom of choice for SAP customers in designing, building as well as operating Hana or Hana applications. This kind of "openness" or diversity is, incidentally, a tradition at SAP, as it is at Suse.

SAP and IBM also have a long partnership. R/2 was already running on IBM computers, R/3 was also ported to the then "midmarket system" AS/400 (today: System i), or IBM was one of two partners that supported the BW Accelerator as the first SAP hardware partner.

Likewise, IBM and Suse have been working together for many years on important innovations, in the SAP environment as well as in the non-SAP environment. All major innovations in IBM's Linux strategy in recent years have been developed and launched on the market in close cooperation with Suse.

Hana on Power8 is experiencing broad market penetration in the IBM ecosystem - i.e., not only among the classic SAP clientele - especially since IBM launched an agile consortium with the Open Power Foundation in 2013.

The key point here: This alliance promotes the use of open server architectures in data centers and now has 110 members from 22 countries.

No question: IBM set a milestone in the IT industry with the Power processors. Of course, the developments continued or are still continuing (keyword: Moore's Law).

However, the fact that Power8 processors in particular (and not Power6 or 7) were used for Hana is no coincidence.

This is because the current power generation was developed specifically to process large amounts of data effectively and efficiently from transactions and analyses.

Furthermore, the architecture of IBM Power Systems based on Power8 has been trimmed to provide optimized access to data stored using in-memory database technologies.

As a consequence, extremely high performance is achieved when using fewer cores. Furthermore, there are also beneficial additional features in Power8 in terms of availability (HA), scalability or provision of appropriate resources/capacities for (native and virtualized) Hana deployment.

IBM thus provides both extremely high performance for Hana and enhanced features for business-critical SAP use. In combination with the additional functions from Suse, this results in a beneficial additional benefit or added value, for example in application deployments such as cloud computing, real-time analytics/Big Data or Industry 4.0.

Suse supports Power8 for Hana with SLES for SAP Applications from version 11, Service Pack 4 (including HA extension). Incidentally, the SAP Linux Lab has played a significant role in the availability of Power8 for Hana under Suse Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.

In cooperation between SAP, IBM and Suse, numerous adjustments and optimizations or tuning work were carried out - in a similar way to the provision of Hana and Suse Linux for the Intel x86 computer architecture.