HyperFlex Certified Infrastructure for SAP HANA

    We continue to acquaint you with the Cisco HyperFlex hyper-convergent system and in this article we will talk about HyperFlex-certified infrastructure for SAP HANA.

    In October 2018, SAP certified HyperFlex to launch SAP HANA.

    The SAP HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance) is a high-performance data storage and processing platform based on in-memory computing. The main task of HANA is to provide analytical data with minimal response time, as well as support for SAP transactional applications.

    SAP Landscape consists of application servers and HANA-based database servers. Application servers have been running as virtual machines for quite some time, and HANA DBMS, as a rule, are launched either on hardware, which makes the infrastructure expensive and inflexible, or in a virtualized environment, but with a large number of restrictions and on the basis of very expensive disk arrays. Cisco HyperFlex was one of the first hyperconvergent systems certified to run HANA production environments in a fully virtualized environment (i.e., application servers and databases). At the same time, HyperFlex is a cost-effective platform that is easy to deploy, use and scale.

    To launch HANA, an All-Flash certified Cisco HyperFlex system based on HX240c M5 All Flash nodes is used, which comes with two central Cisco UCS 6300 Fabric Interconnects switching devices with an integrated management system for server nodes based on policies and patterns.


    HyperFlex is an integrated solution that allows you to implement a virtualization platform based on standard standard building blocks - server nodes with a hypervisor, local disks and specialized software that allows you to build distributed shared fault-tolerant data storage. The main architectural feature of HyperFlex is the distribution of blocks of each logical disk of each virtual machine across all nodes in the cluster, which allows to evenly distribute the load, completely eliminate bottlenecks and bottlenecks, ensure high performance for the most demanding virtual machines by using to perform operations input-output of this virtual machine of all nodes, all SSD devices, all caching devices in all nodes.

    HyperFlex performance tests are given in a previous article on Habré , as well as in the report of the independent ESG Lab .



    Another important point for SAP HANA systems is the availability of data and virtual machines. HyperFlex allows you to implement data protection at different levels. First, HyperFlex provides data protection within the complex by storing each data block in either two or three copies on two or three different nodes within the cluster. Secondly, HyperFlex can perform asynchronous replication of critical virtual machines to another complex on another site. Thirdly, there is the possibility of building a single cluster separated between two sites with synchronous data replication, which allows minimizing the recovery time and reduces data loss to zero. Of course, customers can use accessibility tools at the level of the SAP system and cluster software,

    An additional advantage of running SAP HANA on HyperFlex is the ability to combine both productive and unproductive HANA workloads with classic SAP landscapes based on traditional DBMSs within a single HyperFlex cluster, which greatly simplifies the migration process from classic SAP to SAP HANA or allows you to work with different versions SAP in one cluster without the need for additional financial investments.

    Currently, HyperFlex is available for demonstration in different regions of the Russian Federation at the sites of our partners. Sign up for a test drive through the feedback form by clicking on the link. Join now!


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