Hardware update

In previous years, I've conducted a hardware survey among my guests during my CIO summer barbecue - to generate discussion and to get an idea of my colleagues' preferences.

We never compared the very subjective rankings of the certified hardware suppliers with the actual procurement plans of our respective purchasing organizations. Rather, the aim was to get an up-to-date picture of the mood in the SAP community as to which server supplier is high on the list this year.

Before the big cloud hype, there was almost always a clear winner at my barbecue. Since 2006, we have been confronted with the Hana database and have been searching for an optimal platform:

First there were the numerous Intel appliances, then there were real servers from Intel and IBM for scale-out and scale-up, and today many of my colleagues are fleeing to hyperscalers because the Hana stress has become almost unbearable. The cloud is no better than your own data center - but you can delegate your own responsibility quite wonderfully.

But what would my colleagues put in the data center if they still had one? This time, along with the invitation to my annual summer barbecue, I also sent out a link to a small hardware survey - the result was surprising: there was no clear "favorite" of my CIO friends this time.

In previous years, a certified SAP server supplier has always been able to garner the majority of votes, but this year the favor was fairly evenly distributed - perhaps surprisingly, Dell, Hitachi, and Huawei were completely absent. None of my CIO friends could get excited about these hardware suppliers. The top field was led by IBM, Fujitsu and HP, but without any pronounced preference.

However, the topic of "on-prem versus cloud" is still intensively discussed among my colleagues. While hyperscalers were the answer for a while, the topic of on-prem Hana servers, both with IBM Power and Intel Persistent Memory, has recently been back at the top of the CIO agenda, because IBM is doing a very good TDI job (Tailored Datacenter Integration) with the Power servers for Hana.

Hasso Plattner and his then Chief Technology Officer Vishal Sikka relied on a partnership with Intel for Hana development because the first powerful CPUs with multi-core architecture were available in 2006. Many years later, on April 2 of this year, Intel presented the "Optana" concept, Persistent Memory for Hana. Hasso Plattner mentioned the innovation during his Sapphire keynote.

Slowly but surely, Hana is now getting the hardware foundation that would have been necessary from the start. It was not fair of SAP to enter the market with Hana so early - many existing customers have paid a bitter price here!

The colleagues from Evonik and Siemens have now tested the new Hana hardware with Persistent Memory and finally a crashed Hana server can be restarted in a satisfactory time: Whereas the Siemens Hana test server with two terabytes previously took 15 minutes, with Persistent Memory and six terabytes it now restarts in 1:40 minutes.

Our colleagues at Evonik also confirm a startup time that is more than twelve times faster. But we are only at the beginning of this new development. Hardware labs are still experimenting with the best ratio of expensive and well-known DRAM to the new persistent memory.

Most Hana servers are currently experimenting with a ratio of 1 to 4. Added to this is the higher level of security because persistent memory encrypts the data directly on the chip.

So something is happening again in the hardware sector and Hana is getting another chance to finally become enterprise-ready. But this also provides plenty to talk about at my barbecue and maybe I can present an update of my top ten hardware list in the fall, because Cisco, Lenovo, Dell and others have not yet been completely written off by the SAP community.