SAP HANA is available on IBM-Power8-based servers combined with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications.
This was SUSE’s message in August of last year, when it announced an important enhancement for IBM Power Systems for SAP HANA. The combination with SLES for SAP Applications offers valuable additional functions to SAP customers who rely on IBM Power8 processors when using SAP HANA.
SLES for SAP Applications is the leading Linux distribution for SAP solutions on Linux and the first operating system to support IBM Power Systems for SAP HANA. As part of longstanding cooperation, participating partners were able to realize IBM platform support. Since SAP HANA was previously only available on Intel-x86 computer architectures, this new development gives SAP customers more freedom of choice when designing, building, and operating SAP HANA or SAP HANA applications. In addition, IBM Power8 is specially designed for processing large volumes of data from transactions and analyses. At the same time, there is optimized access to data, which is saved and managed based on in-memory technologies. IBM Power8 for SAP HANA hereby achieves extremely high performance while using fewer cores. Power8 also offers useful functions for high availability, scalability, and providing corresponding resources/capacities for (native and virtualized) SAP HANA deployment.
HA Features Out of the Box
In combination with SUSE, which is the leading SAP HANA operating system platform for the IBM Power platform, the benefits of Power8 are increased further. One example is high availability (HA): with the SLES for SAP Applications operating system platform, IBM-Power-on-SAP HANA users get sophisticated HA features practically free of charge. HA was duly taken into account already in the early development phase of SAP HANA on IBM Power, whereby SUSE – as already with Intel-x86-based SAP HANA systems – provided HA expertise from SAP HANA developments. As a result, IBM-Power-on-SAP HANA users benefit from highly available, business-critical real-time analyses. They get a fast insight into their business situation, combined with a level of availability that they need for their workloads. This also applies to future application deployments such as cloud computing, real-time analytics, big data, Industry 4.0, or the lnternet of Things.
SLES for SAP Applications supports as of Version 11
SUSE supports Power8 for SAP HANA with SLES for SAP Applications as of Version 11, Service Pack 4, including High Availability Extension.