SAP has changed the game for enterprise applications by providing SAP HANA as the preferred platform for both analytic and SAP Business Suite applications. This move is in line with a general trend toward the implementation of key IT assets using integrated systems that IDC has identified through end-user survey research. The nature of SAP HANA, with its in-memory data management and clustered scalability, presents interesting challenges to the hardware partners building its system platforms.
Cisco has stepped up to the plate to meet these challenges with the Cisco UCS server platform, a product that leverages a highly flexible and efficient memory management model combined with the sophisticated network management capability of Cisco Nexus. Although SAP’s specifications for the SAP HANA platform are the same for all server platform providers, these platforms should not be considered alike. Customers considering integrated systems for SAP HANA deployments should think about the following:
- The memory-intensive nature of SAP HANA calls for efficient and flexible memory management capability such as that provided by Cisco UCS.
- The use of clustering and cooperative processing across nodes to achieve scalability by SAP HANA suggests a need for the kind of flexible and scalable network infrastructure offered by Cisco Nexus as a part of Cisco UCS.
- The Cisco UCS Service Profiles reduce time to deployment from days to minutes.
- Customers concerned with maintaining a uniform storage management strategy should consider that, of the SAP HANA integrated systems available, only Cisco UCS offers a choice of storage platforms.
A valuable new 17 page IDC white paper sponsored by Cisco is now available that presents IDC’s analysis of the business value organizations are achieving by using Cisco UCS as a platform for SAP HANA and other SAP Business Suite applications. This analysis is based on IDC’s interviews with 12 Cisco UCS customers. These organizations are all relatively large organizations (1,500–85,000 employees), with an average of 25,383 employees. – “The Business Value of Cisco UCS as a Platform for SAP HANA and Other SAP Mission-Critical Applications.”
Find out why IDC is observing that real-time data analytics functionality (the immediate availability of analytics that includes current operational data) is increasingly becoming one of the top IT priorities for major enterprise organizations. The following topics are considered in the paper:
- Executive summary
- Situation overview
- Cisco unified computing system
- Business value of Cisco UCS
- Financial benefits analysis
- ROI analysis
- Challenges/opportunities
- Conclusion
- Appendix: research methodolgy
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