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In just a little over two years nearly 1000 clients have chosen the IBM Power Systems  platform for their SAP HANA workloads. Why are they choosing the Power Systems platform? We believe it’s due to flexibility and choice.  The flexibility to virtualize up to 8 production SAP HANA LPARs (logical partitions), to run mixed workloads, and to grow with their SAP HANA environments using Capacity on Demand makes high utilization of IBM Power Systems possible.

Continuing to build on Power System’s flexibility, SAP’s recent announcement of support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions on Power  Systems increases the choice in operating systems that our clients will have. Clients can now choose between Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions and SUSE Linux Enterprise Servers for SAP.

IBM and Red Hat have a long-standing history of innovation. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions on IBM Power Systems, SAP customers using a variety of SAP offerings, including SAP HANA, can combine the performance, stability, and flexibility of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform with the advanced server capabilities of IBM Power Systems. For SAP HANA, IBM Power Systems and Red Hat provide:

• Flexibility: IBM Power Systems offers the market outstanding flexibility for SAP HANA, with the ability to run up to 8 SAP HANA production instances on a single server and virtualization that can scale and adapt to your capacity needs. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, clients are better positioned to improve consolidation to help maximize the benefits of virtualization.
• Resiliency: IBM Power Systems provides up to 99.999 percent uptime and systems that have reliability features built into critical components, starting at the chip level. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has built-in resiliency to complement these hardware features.
• Performance: IBM Power Systems are built for big data workloads like SAP HANA, with simultaneous multi-threading, and are designed to execute more threads per core than x86-based servers. ^[1]

Both Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions and IBM Power Systems are designed to be deployed as part of SAP’s Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) and deliver a lower TCO. The TDI approach supports reuse of existing IT resources such as server, storage, and networking assets, giving organizations greater flexibility and choice for their technology.  Clients have the flexibility to use storage and networking of choice, change configurations and receive support from SAP. This means that clients can use any SAP-supported Power System for SAP HANA and reuse storage and networking already on hand. And with the announcement of SAP HANA TDI Phase 5 by SAP SE (SAP Tech Note #2188482), clients no longer have to conform to rigid core-to-memory ratios. TDI5 brings a shift in SAP HANA CPU capacity sizing from fixed core-to-memory ratios to a more flexible SAP-based sizing for the HANA database tier.

Running SAP HANA on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions on IBM Power Systems offers customers a single platform for their applications, with greater performance, resilience for mission-critical workloads and flexibility to help make more of their infrastructure investment. IBM and Red Hat continue to work closely together in support of this new offering. For any questions, please contact us at hop@us.ibm.com.

^[1]Up to 4X depending on x86 based Haswell EX and Broadwell EP and POWER8 servers (All POWER8 2 and 4 socket systems except the LC models) being compared (up to 1536 threads per system).

The post IBM Power Systems offers choice for SAP HANA with RedHat appeared first on IBM Systems Blog: In the Making.