IBM presents solutions to support Hana on Power Systems

At Sapphire last year, SAP Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert presented the Hana project on IBM Power. The associated ramp-up started at the beginning of April this year.

In May, IBM announced that the BW Hana solutions had been successfully tested by customers and that it would be possible to run Hana on systems of the current Power8 generation.

SAP customers still have to wait for a general Power release for S/4 Hana. Power8 was specially developed to process large volumes of data from transactions and analyses:

"The commodity servers that many organizations use today are increasingly being pushed to their limits by new workloads in the cloud or on-premise"

explains Doug Balog, General Manager Power Systems at IBM.

"The architecture of the Power Systems has been specifically tailored to provide faster access to important data stored using in-memory database technologies.

The new Power Systems solutions for Hana meet customers' growing demands for system reliability."

Power Systems for Hana will initially be available in two configurations. The first configuration is based on the S824 system with 24 Power8 processor cores and up to 1 TB of memory and is tailored to the business warehouse application with Hana databases with a (compressed) size of up to 512 GB.

Configuration two is based on the E870 with 40 Power8 cores and up to 2 TB of memory and is ideal for databases of up to 1 TB (compressed) size.

While Hana is supported by all IBM Power8 servers, the new IBM solutions combine a flexible infrastructure with a fast payback period for the special support of SAP Business Warehouse version 7.31 and higher.

"More and more companies want to gain important insights from complex information sources. Hana offers a powerful and efficient platform for important business decisions"

says Bhala Bhosale, Senior Vice President Enterprise Services at NTT Data.

"We have established long-standing partnerships with both SAP and IBM and offer services for applications, cloud computing and infrastructure systems across the entire life cycle.

We are delighted to have solutions like this to support Hana, enabling our joint customers to get up and running quickly and save costs.

Internal tests have shown that SAP reports are executed significantly faster with Hana on Power - search queries that previously took an hour can now be completed in just a few minutes."

It is a first step: direct performance comparisons between Intel and Power-based SAP BW systems are still missing. However, the Intel monopoly will only be broken when Power8 systems are also certified for S/4 Hana.

It is currently completely uncertain whether Intel will be able to take the butter off its bread or whether SAP will hold a protective hand over Intel. The table shows, at least theoretically, that Power8 servers have the upper hand. For the sake of the SAP community, we can only hope that this positive development continues: competition stimulates business!