10 reasons to choose a solution for SAP HANA from HPE. Part 2
In the previous article, we started talking about 10 reasons to choose a solution from Hewlett Packard Enterprise for SAP HANA and focused on technical reasons.
I propose to take a look at the decision making process under SAP HANA “through the eyes of a vendor”.
But everything is somewhat simpler and more prosaic.
When helping to choose a solution, we always discuss with the customer that it is not enough just to choose a reliable and fast server, storage system or complex, it is necessary to work out the entire solution entirely. After all, a high availability solution model is always a stack of components. And if we lose sight of a separate link, the whole system may be vulnerable.
Speaking about the solution model, we mean the following links: reliable hardware components capable of catching uncorrectable errors and continuing service operation, reliable diagnostics and prediction systems capable of analyzing the current state of systems, building models of predictions of hardware resource consumption and predicting further behavior using known patterns systems, high-availability operating systems and hypervisors that can give the customer the flexibility to choose a system deployment and scaling model, cf. clustering units that can protect the service from the failure of individual components. Only the study of all these links is able to provide 100% availability of the solution.
ServiceGuard was born in HP labs as the first SAP R / 3 clustering solution, then on * NIX systems. Time passed, Linux developed slowly, Intel translated Itanium functionality to x86, and when SAP announced its new product SAP HANA, then there was a need for a means of high availability on Linux and x86. ServiceGuard has been ported and is now a software for organizing a cluster of high availability, designed to protect applications and services from unplanned and planned downtime. HPE ServiceGuard for Linux (SGLX) helps ensure availability of 24x7 for your SAP HANA environment by automatedtransition of the application to the backup equipment or site during scheduled maintenance or in case of failure. Unique features, such as Smart Quorum , SafeSync, data integrity and control mechanisms, development and full support from HPE, make it the most popular cluster solution in its segment to protect the most critical HANA instances.
There are significant differences from SUSE HA solutions, as in the clustering approach, quorum mechanisms, polled resources, switching mechanisms, response speeds, the logic of the move, and the load on the rest of the infrastructure during the incident. I will not dwell on them, but we always discuss such things with the customer.
Demonstration of the ServiceGuard cluster for SAP HANA and its integration with SAP System Replication:
Sometimes SAP HANA projects resemble an action-packed film: within six months, it is necessary to migrate several HANA database systems of one customer with several TB volumes from abroad from a non-x86 platform (there are few options) to Russia and to the x86 platform. Fortunately, our company has a well-coordinated team that helped the customer to properly prepare, weigh all the risks, avoid getting out of the allowed technological windows, propose a mechanism, test it and ensure that HANA moves to Russia painlessly.
Behind our HPE Pointnext team in the world is the installation, deployment, migration, and maintenance of more than 20,000 systems for SAP HANA.
Moreover, some of the functions and tasks of the migration or deployment can be delegated to the partner or the IT service of the customer, and during the project we can pass the expertise to our colleagues.
Here are examples of several implemented projects.
To sell the solution under SAP HANA is still half the trouble. It is important then to ensure its support and performance. In the ideal picture of the world, the customer always has one vendor of installed equipment and one entry point for all technical issues. But the reality makes its own adjustments, especially if we are talking about Tailored Datacenter Integration for SAP HANA , where, for example, one vendor is responsible for the servers, another is responsible for the storage, the third is still the network, and the hypervisor is also installed. It becomes especially "fun" when there are issues of interaction at the intersection of areas of responsibility of individual vendors.
In this approach, it is very important to have not a strong contender, but a strong ally, capable of helping to sort out the situation and solve it.
HPE provides not just hardware support, but also extended remote support with highly qualified technical experts and an integrated approach to problem solving that helps improve the accessibility of the SAP HANA environment. The HPE Center of Excellence (CoE) Expertise Center in SAP HANA solutions provides support at the solution level, i.e. closes issues with equipment (servers, storage, network, LAN, and we can include in support not only HPE equipment), provide prediction of problems based on predictive analytics, personalized analysis of the situation with the issuance of recommendations. One of the most important benefits of this support is a joint process for responding to a problem that is specifically agreed between HPE and SAP.
Who works with SAP HANA firsthand, probably knows how difficult it is to find among the whole somna notes of SAP all the recommendations on setting up the operating system and security patches for the SAP HANA application. For this purpose we grouped all the recommendations in one place - WASL .
HPE Workload Aware Security for Linux (WASL) is a one-click security tool designed to protect your operating system and applications. HPE WASL provides security control for SAP HANA workloads and the base Linux operating system instance. WASL can be used to adjust the required level of security before the system is introduced into production and then to control it during productive operation. The operating system is tested with C4S for Linux OS from the Internet Security Center ( CIS ) for compliance with international standards and security requirements. WASL can protect HPE solution for SAP HANA in accordance with the SAP HANA security guide, providing up to 90% of settings in automatic mode with one click of the mouse.
Demonstration of the service, or how to increase the availability of the SAP HANA application, following the recommendations of WASL, from 67.9% to 90.1%.
Often, communicating with customers, you can hear that the need for the implementation of SAP HANA came "yesterday," and there is currently no money for infrastructure. We do not urge to go and rob a bank; perhaps the answer in this case will be the IaaS offer, or its special case HPE Greenlake for SAP HANA:
I am not a financier, but I will try to explain the essence of the sentence “on the fingers”:
Of course, this proposal has a number of features: the customer must have “white” accounting, the financial model converges, when there is a gradual increase in the need of equipment, there must be a need to reduce CAPEX, with the possibility of using OPEX. But nevertheless, there are already several customers in Russia who have been using the Greenlake offer for SAP HANA for several years and for any “standard” SAP HANA project we are ready to make an alternative offer in the form of an HPE Greenlake calculation.
Learn more about the HPE GreenLake for SAP HANA solution:
As you can see, the choice of solutions for SAP HANA is not trivial and requires the study of many components. Our company has solid experience and is ready to offer its best practices in solutions for SAP HANA, and will also help you choose the right mix of technologies that meets your needs and expectations for the best result.
Literature:
Happy New Year! Let him bring only good!
I propose to take a look at the decision making process under SAP HANA “through the eyes of a vendor”.
We would like it to look like this:
But everything is somewhat simpler and more prosaic.
When helping to choose a solution, we always discuss with the customer that it is not enough just to choose a reliable and fast server, storage system or complex, it is necessary to work out the entire solution entirely. After all, a high availability solution model is always a stack of components. And if we lose sight of a separate link, the whole system may be vulnerable.
Speaking about the solution model, we mean the following links: reliable hardware components capable of catching uncorrectable errors and continuing service operation, reliable diagnostics and prediction systems capable of analyzing the current state of systems, building models of predictions of hardware resource consumption and predicting further behavior using known patterns systems, high-availability operating systems and hypervisors that can give the customer the flexibility to choose a system deployment and scaling model, cf. clustering units that can protect the service from the failure of individual components. Only the study of all these links is able to provide 100% availability of the solution.
6. HPE Serviceguard High Availability and Resilience Solution
ServiceGuard was born in HP labs as the first SAP R / 3 clustering solution, then on * NIX systems. Time passed, Linux developed slowly, Intel translated Itanium functionality to x86, and when SAP announced its new product SAP HANA, then there was a need for a means of high availability on Linux and x86. ServiceGuard has been ported and is now a software for organizing a cluster of high availability, designed to protect applications and services from unplanned and planned downtime. HPE ServiceGuard for Linux (SGLX) helps ensure availability of 24x7 for your SAP HANA environment by automatedtransition of the application to the backup equipment or site during scheduled maintenance or in case of failure. Unique features, such as Smart Quorum , SafeSync, data integrity and control mechanisms, development and full support from HPE, make it the most popular cluster solution in its segment to protect the most critical HANA instances.
There are significant differences from SUSE HA solutions, as in the clustering approach, quorum mechanisms, polled resources, switching mechanisms, response speeds, the logic of the move, and the load on the rest of the infrastructure during the incident. I will not dwell on them, but we always discuss such things with the customer.
Demonstration of the ServiceGuard cluster for SAP HANA and its integration with SAP System Replication:
7. Implementation Services / HANA Expertise
Sometimes SAP HANA projects resemble an action-packed film: within six months, it is necessary to migrate several HANA database systems of one customer with several TB volumes from abroad from a non-x86 platform (there are few options) to Russia and to the x86 platform. Fortunately, our company has a well-coordinated team that helped the customer to properly prepare, weigh all the risks, avoid getting out of the allowed technological windows, propose a mechanism, test it and ensure that HANA moves to Russia painlessly.
Behind our HPE Pointnext team in the world is the installation, deployment, migration, and maintenance of more than 20,000 systems for SAP HANA.
Moreover, some of the functions and tasks of the migration or deployment can be delegated to the partner or the IT service of the customer, and during the project we can pass the expertise to our colleagues.
Here are examples of several implemented projects.
8. Support in the center of expertise: SAP HANA CoE
To sell the solution under SAP HANA is still half the trouble. It is important then to ensure its support and performance. In the ideal picture of the world, the customer always has one vendor of installed equipment and one entry point for all technical issues. But the reality makes its own adjustments, especially if we are talking about Tailored Datacenter Integration for SAP HANA , where, for example, one vendor is responsible for the servers, another is responsible for the storage, the third is still the network, and the hypervisor is also installed. It becomes especially "fun" when there are issues of interaction at the intersection of areas of responsibility of individual vendors.
In this case, this situation is as follows:
В интернете есть менее цензурная картинка этого взаимодействия.
В интернете есть менее цензурная картинка этого взаимодействия.
In this approach, it is very important to have not a strong contender, but a strong ally, capable of helping to sort out the situation and solve it.
HPE provides not just hardware support, but also extended remote support with highly qualified technical experts and an integrated approach to problem solving that helps improve the accessibility of the SAP HANA environment. The HPE Center of Excellence (CoE) Expertise Center in SAP HANA solutions provides support at the solution level, i.e. closes issues with equipment (servers, storage, network, LAN, and we can include in support not only HPE equipment), provide prediction of problems based on predictive analytics, personalized analysis of the situation with the issuance of recommendations. One of the most important benefits of this support is a joint process for responding to a problem that is specifically agreed between HPE and SAP.
9. WASL - A Unique Solution for SAP HANA Application Security on Linux.
Who works with SAP HANA firsthand, probably knows how difficult it is to find among the whole somna notes of SAP all the recommendations on setting up the operating system and security patches for the SAP HANA application. For this purpose we grouped all the recommendations in one place - WASL .
HPE Workload Aware Security for Linux (WASL) is a one-click security tool designed to protect your operating system and applications. HPE WASL provides security control for SAP HANA workloads and the base Linux operating system instance. WASL can be used to adjust the required level of security before the system is introduced into production and then to control it during productive operation. The operating system is tested with C4S for Linux OS from the Internet Security Center ( CIS ) for compliance with international standards and security requirements. WASL can protect HPE solution for SAP HANA in accordance with the SAP HANA security guide, providing up to 90% of settings in automatic mode with one click of the mouse.
Demonstration of the service, or how to increase the availability of the SAP HANA application, following the recommendations of WASL, from 67.9% to 90.1%.
10. HPE Greenlake - unique models of "Infrastructure as a service for SAP HANA"
Often, communicating with customers, you can hear that the need for the implementation of SAP HANA came "yesterday," and there is currently no money for infrastructure. We do not urge to go and rob a bank; perhaps the answer in this case will be the IaaS offer, or its special case HPE Greenlake for SAP HANA:
I am not a financier, but I will try to explain the essence of the sentence “on the fingers”:
- Together with the customer, we are working on the requirements for launching a project in the form of infrastructure.
- We are building an indicative forecast for the development of infrastructure for 2-3-4 years.
- We get a financial model that we defend to the customer and, if everything suits, we sign an agreement agreed by lawyers from both sides.
- We supply equipment to the customer site, carry out the work on the configuration described in the contract. Under the terms of the contract, this equipment is on the balance sheet of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
- We install a program to collect statistics on the consumed hardware resources for SAP HANA (utilization of processor capacity, memory, disk resources). Based on the real equipment readings - we bill for the use of resources every month. In practice, this means, but we can get a situation where the utilization of resources can go both up and down, respectively, either increasing or decreasing the monthly payment.
- The result of this contract is the final transfer of equipment to the balance of the customer after the fulfillment of financial obligations. Understanding that by the time these obligations are fulfilled, the new generation of equipment will most likely come out - we can lay the Technology Refresh option and replace the equipment with the current generation after 4 years.
Of course, this proposal has a number of features: the customer must have “white” accounting, the financial model converges, when there is a gradual increase in the need of equipment, there must be a need to reduce CAPEX, with the possibility of using OPEX. But nevertheless, there are already several customers in Russia who have been using the Greenlake offer for SAP HANA for several years and for any “standard” SAP HANA project we are ready to make an alternative offer in the form of an HPE Greenlake calculation.
Learn more about the HPE GreenLake for SAP HANA solution:
As you can see, the choice of solutions for SAP HANA is not trivial and requires the study of many components. Our company has solid experience and is ready to offer its best practices in solutions for SAP HANA, and will also help you choose the right mix of technologies that meets your needs and expectations for the best result.
Literature:
- HPE Solutions for SAP HANA
- HPE Greenlake
- HPE Greenlake Comparison Guide
- HPE Greenlake for SAP HANA
- DataCenter Care Services
- IT financing and investment solutions
Happy New Year! Let him bring only good!