SAP HANA tailored data center integration Frequently Asked Questions

Transcription

1 SAP HANA tailored data center integration Frequently Asked Questions Version 1.0 Last update: 13 May, 2013

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS GENERAL INFORMATION What is SAP HANA tailored data center integration? And what is the difference in comparison to the existing appliance model What does SAP HANA server mean in the context of SAP HANA tailored data center integration? What is the motivation to introduce SAP HANA tailored data center integration? Is SAP HANA tailored data center integration available today? How can I participate in the pilot customer program? What does the pilot program entail? How will SAP support customers with SAP HANA tailored data center integration? Which storage solutions are approved for SAP HANA tailored data center integration?... 4 TECHNICAL QUESTIONS What is SAP s required concept of storage connection? Which KPI s have to be fulfilled to run SAP HANA on the preferred enterprise storage? What happens if, in addition to the SAP HANA system, other applications or systems access the same Enterprise Storage system concurrently? How much storage space does HANA require for the data area if Enterprise Storage is used?

3 GENERAL INFORMATION 1. What is SAP HANA tailored data center integration? And what is the difference in comparison to the existing appliance model. In addition to SAP HANA as standardized and highly optimized appliance SAP now offers the opportunity to run SAP HANA server with customer s preferred storage in order to reduce hardware and operations cost at installed base customers by reusing existing hardware components and operation processes. This approach helps to mitigate risk and optimize time-tovalue by enabling existing IT Management processes for SAP HANA implementation as well as gain additional flexibility in hardware vendor selection by leveraging existing ecosystem. IT departments will benefit from staying on IT budgets, shorter implementation cycles and better consumption of hardware innovations to drive the SAP HANA adoption. 2. What does SAP HANA server mean in the context of SAP HANA tailored data center integration? SAP HANA server means the exact same bill of material as the certified SAP HANA appliance without storage. The availability depends on the support of the SAP HANA hardware partners. 3. What is the motivation to introduce SAP HANA tailored data center integration? Due to strict definition of the SAP HANA appliance bill of material high administrative and hardware costs may incur due to limited flexibility in server/storage combinations, no usage of established IT operations processes and fixed sizes of storage capacities. To help customers with these challenges SAP decided to offer an alternative to the SAP HANA appliance. 4. When will SAP HANA tailored data center integration be available? SAP is currently carrying out several pilot customers projects for SAP HANA tailored data center integration and is planning to provide it to all interested customers by the end of Q3/ How can I participate in the pilot customer program? Customers should be nominated by their respective SAP account executive. For further information please use the following contact. 6. What does the pilot program entail? After a pilot project kick-off meeting where the boundary conditions and dedicated project team setup will be discussed, customer will proceed with the hardware vendor evaluation and ordering. After the targeted SAP HANA infrastructure (server, network, storage) is set up, customer needs to provide SAP with detailed information on the system landscape by filling out the Technical Prerequisites Questionnaire. This questionnaire has been developed by SAP to verify whether the customer will be able to run SAP HANA on Enterprise Storage of his choice under consideration of his technical setup. Aside from this all existing requirements for SAP HANA servers will still remain, i.e. allowed processors, the OS, the size of the storage, the network requirements etc. Afterwards, SAP will provide the hardware partners with the Hardware Verification Tool to perform the required test scenarios. By using this tool, SAP HANA customers together with their hardware partner and Enterprise Storage vendor, will be able to assess whether their combination of SAP HANA server and storage system fulfills SAP s data throughput KPIs. Test results will be 3

4 analyzed by SAP and discussed jointly with the customer. If KPI s are fulfilled, the release decision will be prepared. 7. How will SAP support customers with SAP HANA tailored data center integration? SAP will provide a SAP HANA certification training which has to be successfully completed by the customer in order to do the installation and validation. Customer aligns with the hardware partner on individual support model. SAP HANA software will be supported as described in the SAP Release Strategy Brochure. 8. Which storage solutions are approved for SAP HANA tailored data center integration? To be approved for SAP HANA tailored data center integration storage vendors have to undergo a new certification. To complete the certification successfully following two requirements must be met: - Fulfillment of KPI s as defined by SAP - Implementation/configuration of storage connector TECHNICAL QUESTIONS 9. What is SAP s required concept of storage connection? Enterprise Storage system can connect to the HANA server either as NAS using shared file systems (like NFS) or using a SAN (e.g. by Fibre Channel). Please note, that in shared file systems you might face issues with file-locking situations in failover scenarios. To enable host auto-failover for scale-out systems, SAP HANA comes with a Storage Connector implementation for Fibre Channel. Should you prefer connecting your storage over a shared file system like NFS, you would have to ask your storage vendor to provide its own implementation of the Storage Connector API for host auto-failover. For details on that, see our Storage Connector whitepaper. SAP will introduce a Storage Connector certification for storage vendors. Furthermore, SAP recommends to keep the number of switches between SAP HANA server and storage to a minimum and ensure 10 Gbit bandwidth connection between them. For highly available SAP HANA systems the entire infrastructure must be made redundant. 10. Which KPI s have to be fulfilled to run SAP HANA on the preferred enterprise storage? The detailed information regarding KPI s will be provided to the customer upon joining the pilot program. 11. What happens if, in addition to the SAP HANA system, other applications or systems access the same Enterprise Storage system concurrently? SAP will introduce a hardware verification tool set, which gives the hardware partner and storage vendor the possibility to ensure that SAP s KPIs are being met. Whenever a customer decides to change his/her SAP HANA Infrastructure (e.g. by connecting additional systems to the same Enterprise Storage system), the data throughput measures will have to be repeated. SAP will not 4

5 provide support if the storage system does not fulfill the required KPIs for the connected SAP HANA system(s) anymore. 12. How much storage space does HANA require for the data area if Enterprise Storage is used? If the HANA system uses Enterprise Storage, a storage space of 2*RAM for the data area can be used (although 4*RAM is recommended). This is possible because the disk space required for data can easily be extended in the Enterprise Storage case. 5

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