SAP Solution: HoP

Whether S/4, C/4 or BW/4: In the future, there will be only one platform for all SAP software offerings. Hana is more than a database. Hana is the platform for the future SAP universe. This makes the choice of the right infrastructure particularly important, because Hana is very demanding. Whether in the cloud or on-premises, IBM's Power Server architecture...

Change dominates everyday professional life. Workflows and roadmaps have an ever shorter half-life. This makes the requirement for a sustainable architecture model increasingly relevant. SAP with Hana and IBM with Power have created sustainable platforms for this.

Every company wants three things from their IT landscape: guaranteed continuity, increasing performance, and investment protection. Meeting all these requirements, P9 is certainly the most stable and efficient platform on the market.

Andreas Klaus Span is Director and Business Unit Executive for SAP Hana on Power and Cognitive Sales, IBM Power Systems EMEA, IBM Sales & Distribution, STG Sales, IBM Global Markets. He explains the options and benefits of the Power architecture for SAP Hana and S/4 in this E-3 interview.

With SAP Hana 1.0 SPS 08, the first Hana version on the IBM Power platform appeared in August 2015. From the very beginning, IBM and SAP refrained from taking the appliance approach. Configuration flexibility, seamless integration and simple operation were the focus.

With the availability of Hana 2.0 and Suse Linux SLES for SAP 12 on Hana-on-Power (HoP) systems, byte order processing has been changed from Big to Little Endian. What this means.

SAP has finally seen sense and is changing the maintenance period for Hana 1.0 and 2.0. The software manufacturer is thus meeting the demands of customers and adapting somewhat to its market competitors in the database environment.

IBM entered the Hana server market with Hana on Power (HoP) after a considerable delay, because SAP relied exclusively on x86 in-memory hardware for a long time. The first HoP reference customers exist, and more are to follow by the end of the year. An E3 exclusive interview with Jochen Ziegler, SAP infrastructure expert and Lead Solution Architect at IBM.

The company is taking giant steps and moving very purposefully in the direction of Hana and S/4. This impression was confirmed once again at Sapphire, which took place in Orlando in mid-May 2016. Hasso Plattner personally emphasized that SAP Business Suite will of course be further developed.

SAP users don't have it easy. For years, they could choose between different databases and did so. Now, with the S/4 software generation, all roads lead to a single database, namely Hana - at least if the Walldorf-based company has its way.

This is not a new chemical formula from Walldorf, but an abbreviation I created for Suite on Hana (SoH) and Hana on Power (HoP). Naturally, there is no such thing officially. But our interns got it up and running this summer. But it's not just Intel that's getting squeezed, VMware is also under pressure.

The SAP community had to wait a long time. Now there is an alternative to the little-loved Intel Xeon processor. The combination of IBM Power and Suse Linux promises to be a real sensation.