What are you thinking? Are you formulating an IT plan for getting there?

We already understand that digital transformation is putting tremendous pressure on IT organizations with traditional enterprise systems and applications struggling to keep up. Many businesses already recognize that traditional infrastructure and processes are no longer sustainable in today’s digital economy.

This resulted in the emergence of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) which enables compute, storage and networking functions to be decoupled from the underlying infrastructure and run on a common set of physical resources that are based on industry-standard x86 components.

As HCI adoption has rapidly increased over the last few years—with 75 percent of deployments in the core data center—it is no surprise that we are increasingly being asked by our customers, “What about running SAP HANA on Dell EMC HCI?”

While as of today, SAP HANA is not certified to run production on HCI, I am confident it is only a matter of time. Just consider how SAP’s certification program has evolved with the maturing of the game-changing in-memory database announce in 2010. SAP has evolved from bare metal to appliance model, to shared storage with SAP HANA TDI and Virtual HANA with leading hypervisors such as VMware.

What about running SAP HANA on Dell EMC HCI? And more specifically when and how do I get there?

Dell EMC HCI—in particular, VxRail— is architected to support in-memory database applications such as SAP HANA, with features such as Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors including high capacity memory options, Dell EMC PowerEdge servers designed for software-defined storage, next-generation future-proofing technologies such as NVMe cache drives, and powered by the leading HCI software, VMware vSAN.

So back to our question, “What about running SAP HANA on Dell EMC HCI? And more specifically when and how do I get there?” Our position at Dell EMC is that you should start in non-production environments now, and we are committed to helping you get there!

Consider the benefits of running SAP HANA non-production systems for test, dev and training on HCI.

• First, you can lower the cost and simplify IT for the for these sprawling system landscapes, which consume more IT resources than the production system.
• Second, your IT teams can begin developing experience, skills and best practice for running SAP HANA on HCI.

In terms of what HCI platform you choose, there are some practical considerations starting with hypervisor of choice. Pro tip: remember to make sure you work with someone committed to achieving certification to run SAP HANA in production on HCI.

Dell EMC is collaborating with VMware, together with SAP, to test the required HCI certification scenarios with the ultimate goal of delivering the most seamless package of HCI software and infrastructure on VxRail, powered by VMware vSAN.

Other Dell EMC HCI platforms aligned to alternative hypervisor choices for SAP HANA production workloads are also joining the effort.

If this topic is top of mind for you, I encourage you to visit the Dell Technologies booth #343 at SAPPHIRE NOW and meet our experts.