GenAI Showdown: SAP Edition

In this corner, wearing the cloud-colored trunks, we have RISE with SAP S/4HANA, the heavyweight champion of enterprise resource planning. And in the opposite corner, sporting the any-premises jersey, it’s GenAI, the neural network ninja. Let the battle begin!

Round 1: The RISE of S/4HANA

S/4HANA RISE struts into the ring, flexing its cloud muscles. It promises seamless migration, simplified landscapes and a subscription model that makes CFOs do the cha-cha. But wait, what’s this? A challenger approaches—any-premises deployment! Why would anyone choose it when the cloud is throwing a party?

Round 2: The Any-premises Underdog Strikes Back

Listen up, SAP aficionados! Any-premises isn’t just a relic; it’s the secret sauce. Here’s why:

1. Customization galore. S/4HANA RISE bundles services like a gourmet meal deal. But what if you’re a picky eater? Any-premises lets you mix and match—like a build-your-own pizza. Extra cheese? Sure! Hold the hyperscalers? Absolutely. Need industry-specific tweaks? Any-premises whispers, “I got you.” Finance, manufacturing, retail—customize ‘til your heart’s content.
2. Data security tango. Imagine S/4HANA RISE as a masked ball. Your data waltzes in, wearing a tuxedo of compliance. GDPR, CCPA and friends nod approvingly. But any-premises? It’s the VIP section—strict access control, encrypted handshakes and no uninvited guests. Finance folks, listen up! Regulated sectors need data security like a Swiss bank vault. Any-premises ensures your secrets stay safe.
3. Latency Paso Doble. GenAI twirls onto the dance floor. Chatbots, recommendation engines—they crave real-time moves. But the cloud? It’s doing the cha-cha across continents. Latency, darling, latency! Any-premises steps in. No long-distance relationships here. Data pirouettes within your walls, whispering sweet nothings to your servers. Faster response times, fewer dropped calls.

Round 3: Cost Control Tango

Ah, the budget—a tango partner with mood swings. S/4HANA RISE winks, “Pay as you go!” But GenAI raises an eyebrow. “And when usage spikes? Surprise bills?”

1. Any-premises budget foxtrot. You’re the conductor. Control the orchestra. Any-premises lets you fine-tune resources. No cloud sticker shock. No “unicorn tears” line items. CFOs nod appreciatively. Predictable costs, no mythical creatures involved.
2. Hybrid waltz. Picture this: S/4HANA RISE starts any-premises, like a cautious debutante. It trains, learns and pirouettes. Then—ta-da!—it waltzes into the cloud for a grand finale. Hybrid magic! Best of both worlds. Like a tech-savvy Cinderella with glass slippers and a backup pair of sneakers.

Final Round: The SAP Symphony

As the crowd roars, SAP leaders take notes. S/4HANA RISE isn’t just a cloud fling—it’s a symphony. Any-premises adds depth, like a cello solo in a Mozart concerto. Together, they harmonize. Compliance, agility, cost control—they dance in perfect rhythm.

So, SAP enthusiasts, choose your partner wisely. Cloud or any-premises? The winner? Innovation. And maybe, just maybe, a sprinkle of ABAP magic.

Source: dell.com

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Leading SAP HANA Performance by Dell PowerEdge R760 Servers

To respond effectively to dynamic market conditions, enterprises need to be able to quickly generate and act on intelligence. This has led many to shift to in-memory databases that help enable high-performance computing, faster application response times, and real-time analytics. And the responsiveness of these memory-centric workloads is tied directly to the underlying server infrastructure.

As organizations become more data-centric, the underlying infrastructure used to collect, synthesize, transform, and analyze this data grows in importance. The most effective server platforms for memory-centric workloads can house large amounts of data in close physical proximity to compute. An architecture that can balance cores to large memory footprints, closely connected to high-performing local storage, is ideal for these business-critical workloads.

For these advanced workloads that power the business, Dell employs a rich portfolio of 2- to 16-socket design servers that align with the needs of these applications – richer compute, more memory, high-performance, and localized storage. The Dell PowerEdge R760 server represents a 2-socket platform that balances superior performance, with robust security and availability, while simultaneously reduces costs. Let’s explore how the Dell PowerEdge R760, powered by the latest 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, performs in simulations with a variety of users and different analytical requirements.

SAP HANA is an in-memory database platform used to manage large amounts of data in real-time for a variety of purposes, including point-of-sale data, real-time analytics for inventory management, supply-chain optimization and customer behavior analysis. As the amount of data to process grows, it can be challenging for servers to deliver information and analysis quickly enough to meet the increasingly demanding business requirements for fast data access. That’s why SAP HANA users are always on the lookout for better-performing servers.

SAP publishes the results of standardized benchmark tests to assist customers in comparing the performance of different servers when running SAP HANA. SAP recently published performance results for the Dell PowerEdge R760 server, and we’re excited to share some highlights about just how well this server stacks up against other servers.

Fifteen different data points are available for comparing the PowerEdge R760 server to other servers. The standard benchmarks measure three key performance data points for each of the five different database sizes on which SAP tested the PowerEdge R760 server.

The following table shows the rank of the PowerEdge R760 server for each of the 15 points of comparison among all the different servers tested using SAP’s benchmark version. The source of the data is the publicly available SAP Standard Application Benchmarks directory, accessed on April 19, 2023.

The PowerEdge R760 server outperformed all the other servers in 13 of the 15 benchmark points of comparison, and it ranked second in the remaining two.

The PowerEdge R760 two-socket server, with the latest 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and Micron DDR5 memory, outperforms all other servers in SAP HANA benchmarking – even 4 and 8-socket servers –in every database size up to 6.5 billion initial records. It provides the performance and versatility you need to address your most demanding applications, including SAP HANA with massive databases and mission-critical requirements for real-time performance.

Source: dell.com

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Taming Big SAP Data Landscapes

Extending Dell’s comprehensive portfolio of SAP HANA TDI certified systems, the new Dell S5000 Series server, from six to 16-sockets and up to 24TB of memory, delivers performance and scale to organizations with large landscapes that want to deploy on-premises using shared infrastructure.

For many large organizations, SAP HANA offers the capabilities that are critical for operating in a modern, digital economy, including real-time processing, advanced analytics and insights gleaned from big data and the Internet of Things. Processing large data volumes, expected to increase by more than 21% CAGR over the next five years, organizations need an infrastructure solution that can scale with the demands of the business and enable them to grow for years in the future.

To keep up with this increasing amount of data, many organizations are making the transition to the cloud. However, some organizations needing to respond to data sovereignty and data residency constraints, or address application latency and data entanglement concerns, want to retain complete control over their systems and data. There are also organizations that want to continue to protect current investments in on-premises SAP infrastructure, tools and operational processes.

SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) solutions offer flexibility when integrating SAP HANA systems into existing data centers. This deployment approach enables organizations to choose their preferred hardware vendors and infrastructure from a list of supported SAP HANA hardware. Organizations can also leverage existing hardware and operation processes in their data centers.

Optimize for Big SAP HANA TDI Landscapes

To address these challenges, we have released the Dell S5000 Series server, exclusively for SAP HANA TDI. Powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable (Cascade Lake) processors, the up-to-eight-socket Dell S5408 8U rack and the up-to-16-socket Dell S5416 21U rack are delivered as integrated, pre-configured systems for quicker deployment and faster time to value.

Delivering exceptional real-time performance and enabling flexible, cost-effective and reliable response, the Dell S5000 Series server:

◉ Boosts real-time applications with industry leading performance. Delivers all the benefits of modern, in-memory database and applications with up to 24TB of memory and industry-leading two-tier SAP SD application benchmark performance for eight-socket Intel® Cascade Lake, SAPS of 674,080.

◉ Optimizes total-cost-of-ownership with granular scalability. Reduces overprovisioning, expensive and disruptive upgrades, and re-platforming with easy expansion from six to 16-socket with a unique architecture that allows growth in increments with a two-socket base unit.

◉ Keeps operations running with mission-critical reliability. Anticipates potential failures and simplifies preventive maintenance with thousands of control points, early warning features, an Intel® RAI feature that includes Run Sure® technology and several innovative memory protection features.

Broad Portfolio of Offerings

Dell Technologies offers one of the industry’s broadest and most innovative server portfolios certified for SAP HANA TDI. Organizations can choose two and four-socket Dell PowerEdge servers for up to 6TB of memory – and now six to 16-socket Dell S5000 Series servers for up to 24TB of memory. All servers are available with a choice of processors for the best fit in terms of frequency and number of cores or power consumption. They can be combined with SAP-certified Dell networking, storage and data protection solutions – with all the infrastructure backed by the Dell services ecosystem to keep your business running. 

Source: dell.com

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Streamlining SAP S/4HANA Cloud Transformation with APEX

Successful transformation requires strategy and planning for seamless migration with minimal disruption. In a mission critical implementation, performance, predictability and cost transparency are crucial. To accelerate SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) customers’ migration and digital transformation, SAP and Dell Technologies have partnered to deliver RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, customer data center option with Dell Technologies APEX. This offering draws synergies from the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software, SAP, and No.1 cloud IT infrastructure platform vendor, Dell Technologies, to achieve highest outcome results.

RISE for SAP, powered by APEX provides a turnkey, fully managed SAP subscription service that allows customers to keep their landscape software and data within their own data center environment, or colocation (co-lo) facility, while reaping the benefits of a cloud operating model. With this solution customers get a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model that provides the capability to employ digitization and simplify complex IT landscapes with better insights into data, on the journey to become intelligent enterprises.

SAP will be the single point of contact for the full platform and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) operation. To SAP’s specification and architecture, Dell Technologies will supply, install, monitor and manage infrastructure needs for SAP. The APEX offering will reduce complexities and risks arising from managing multiple variables with an integrated portfolio of servers, storage, networking and data protection infrastructure. APEX will help accelerate time to value and simplify the business transformation as the focus shifts from managing infrastructure to accelerating innovation.

With APEX as the SAP S/4HANA infrastructure foundation, customers will gain operational, technical and resourcing readiness. The data center will be agile and flexible to ease the migration from traditional SAP ECC (on third-party database) to intelligent ERP with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition (using SAP’s HANA real-time in-memory database). 

Scalability

APEX is highly flexible and customizable. Customers can better respond and adapt to change. Scaling workloads can be achieved by extending infrastructure scalability to the database and applications with potential acceleration in provisioning speed. The size of SAP instances can correlate with workload peaks and project needs. APEX provides the agility and efficiency needed to respond to changing market conditions and business needs.

Risk Mitigation

With APEX, customers implementing the customer data center option of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition will have the confidence they can rely on the best of breed infrastructure that powers their landscape. The SaaS model alleviates the burden of customer IT teams from having to keep up with the pressures of changing demands. There is peace of mind knowing their data and workloads are housed in their own datacenter or a colocation provider of choice. APEX helps reduces risk with end-to-end processes security and integrated controls to protect customer data and operations. 

Workforce Productivity

Customers can leverage all the benefits of a cloud operating model while freeing up resources and increasing in agility to expand with change. They do not need to manage the infrastructure themselves. Resources can therefore engage on strategic initiatives thus achieving an increase in productivity and performance.

Best in Class Support

Dell Technologies has deployed hundreds of solutions across more than 30 countries with thousands of support personnel. Skilled personnel work closely with SAP to deliver service and support to customers.

Dell Technologies is an industry leader in hardware infrastructure. Customers can be confident they are getting premier support from a company that is the No.1 vendor in cloud infrastructure plaform, No.1 in servers, No.1 in external enterprise storage and the No.1 HCI provider. Dell Technologies is a leading provider and has one of the broadest portfolios of IaaS offers from a single vendor. RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, customer data center option with Dell Technologies APEX is optimized to integrate with VMware’s Cloud Foundation.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Introducing RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, powered by APEX

Dell Technologies and SAP are expanding our longtime partnership to help organizations running SAP workloads and applications use innovative, on-premises cloud solutions in their data center.

The introduction of RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, customer data center option with Dell Technologies APEX combines SAP’s private managed cloud with Dell’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service. The new offering allows organizations to maintain a secure SAP environment in their own data center and reap the benefits of Dell infrastructure and a cloud operating model.

With this approach, customers can have the agility and control to manage their most performance-sensitive workloads at the location of their choice. The solution also helps offload day-to-day IT maintenance combining the technology and expertise of Dell Technologies, the industry’s leading cloud IT infrastructure vendor and SAP, the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software.

While organizations are increasingly adopting cloud services, recent research by the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG) and the German-speaking SAP User Group (DSAG) shows the majority of users are choosing to put SAP mission-critical deployments on-premises or in a private cloud. Both user groups cited the biggest challenges experienced in using public cloud services were licensing models/costs, data privacy/information security, a lack of integration and a lack of in-house knowledge.

“We heard directly from customers that they needed an on-premises data center choice because of stringent regulatory/compliance, security or data sovereignty concerns,” Peter Pluim, President, SAP Enterprise Cloud Services, SAP commented. “Through this new deployment choice with Dell Technologies, customers can consume their mission-critical SAP landscapes based on cloud economics and characteristics in their own secure and reliable environment and thus simplify their journey to become intelligent enterprises.”

Available through SAP, the customer data center option of S/4HANA Cloud, private edition helps facilitate a seamless move to SAP S/4HANA and accelerates organizations’ journey to become intelligent enterprises. This subscription-based solution is fully compliant with the SAP Private Cloud concierge standard of service, architecture and security while being delivered on-premises with Dell Technologies APEX in the customer’s data center or colocation environment. This model, where you pay-per-use, is backed by an end-to-end SLA for the full solution stack assured by SAP.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition with APEX delivers the solution on SAP-certified, Dell Technologies servers, storage and networking resources that are supplied, installed, monitored and managed in the customer’s own data center or colocation environment by Dell, simplifying lifecycle management. With APEX, technology can be deployed faster, and capacity can be scaled up or down on demand based on changing business requirements – customers pay only for what is consumed. Using APEX, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition delivers this flexibility while allowing customers to maintain control of their data security.

APEX builds upon our decades-long history of on-demand technology that offers customers the freedom to scale resources so they can quickly react to changes in their businesses. With our global digital footprint and unmatched worldwide supply chain, no other as-a-Service portfolio comes close to Dell Technologies’ capabilities.

Free your operations team to work on new and exciting initiatives, let Dell and SAP help you securely manage the rest. To learn more about SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, customer data center option with Dell Technologies APEX, sign up for this free virtual event to join the live session at our Showcase at SAP TechEd 2021.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Accelerate Innovation with Near-Instant Database Cloning

The demand for database cloning is growing exponentially as more and more companies invest in DevOps to bring new products and features to market faster. As a result, software developers, database admins, quality assurance, data scientists, analysts and operations teams all need fast access to production data copies of critical enterprise databases.

Size and speed

The challenge is that today’s databases are huge, ranging in size from 10 to 100 terabytes. Apart from obvious storage constraints, delay is also a factor. Moving such huge files, regardless of network speed, can take hours, sometimes even days. The data also needs to be refreshed regularly to make sure the copy is as close to the production version as possible.

Barriers to innovation

It will come as no surprise, then, that according to customers, it takes too long to provision copies of multi-terabyte production databases to test environments. Those who want to leverage the Cloud for test sandbox environments often struggle to execute on their vision.

Customers say that the current process is burdened by long development cycles, poor quality releases, and a general lack of self-service. Apart from slowing down development and testing, the financial impact to business is significant. The big question is – how can we remove these obstacles and accelerate the pace of innovation?

Software-defined, scalable and powerful

This is exactly why I’m excited to offer the Actifio Database Cloning Appliance (DCA), powered by Dell Technologies – an integrated appliance combining the power of Actifio’s copy data management software with our hyper-converged and software-defined platforms such as VxRail and VxFlex with Intel Xeon scalable processors.

Together, we’ve blended our IP to create an easy-to-run yet powerful platform, which allows you to transform database test cycles, increase application quality and compress database provisioning, particularly in large environments.

Customer reaction says it all

Sometimes, you can spot a winning solution straight off the bat. For me, the acid test is customer reaction. Their faces said it all when we explained how, using native database tools, they could easily spin up databases that were near-real time on Dell Storage and even use PowerProtect DD appliances when retention lock was needed for regulatory requirements like Financial Services.

I listened as Database Administrators responded to the demo, inundating us with questions and scenarios unique to their environments. I heard their excitement when they realized how they could leverage DCA in multiple creative ways to reduce development time, increase QA standards and drive more performance from mission-critical applications.

One-stop solution

If you’re in operations, software development, testing, data analysis or QA, this solution will be music to your ears. It delivers instant database clones of even the largest databases in minutes either locally or in your Cloud of choice with the solution entirely API-driven to enable automation and self-service data access.

Accelerate the pace of innovation in your business. Transform the speed and cost of managing complex database environments, while simplifying management and security.

Source: dellemc.com

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Top 5 Reasons to Adopt PowerOne for SAP S/4HANA

As the head of our Business Applications Solutions engineering team for Dell EMC, I make it a point to talk with our customers about moving to SAP S/4HANA.

Many of our customers have migrated at least one of their SAP systems to SAP S/4HANA, but it’s usually limited to the set of system roles like sandbox, test, or dev. So, what’s keeping them from tackling mission-critical workloads that help run the business, like Finance, HR and Manufacturing?

Two things: complexity and risk. Every one of our customers has plans for modernizing their IT infrastructure, but they don’t always know how to get there. When it comes to mission-critical apps, most of our customers are also evaluating hybrid cloud options.

We recently announced Dell EMC PowerOne, a new autonomous infrastructure system designed to simplify and automate IT operations across Dell EMC compute, storage, and networking. This all-in-one system has a built-in automation engine designed to be the automation control plane that delivers VMware infrastructure and removes the burden of building, maintaining, and supporting the infrastructure. This will allow our customers to focus on their business.

In simple terms, PowerOne gets customers up and running faster, automating thousands of tasks (like deploying, expanding and repurposing resources) and doing it all through an integrated GUI or a single API. As I considered this level of infrastructure automation and its ability to truly manage the entire system as Infrastructure as Code, I realized that PowerOne provides an SAP-certified best-of-breed performance platform for SAP landscape consolidation. This platform helps you prepare and chart a clear migration path for SAP applications to HANA and to S4/HANA.

Here’s five examples of what you can achieve and why with PowerOne:

• Modernize the core. Move from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA while upgrading to the PowerOne all-in-one system with automation to easily configure and deploy your infrastructure.
• PowerOne delivers compute, networking, and storage in a converged infrastructure solution to reduce the time it takes to adopt a modern SAP infrastructure for both physical and virtual environments.
• Businesses running SAP on industry-standard VMware vSphere can spin up VMware clusters in just a few clicks. Consider cloning a system and migrating it into a new cluster without taxing a specialist or going through your ticketing system.
• With this in place, SAP Admins can more easily manage and expand the SAP infrastructure by using standardized API integration at the PowerOne system level.
• Fast track your implementation with SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI). All PowerOne components are SAP HANA certified, including Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, PowerSwitch networking, and PowerMax storage.
• Dell EMC PowerEdge servers use the latest Intel processors to maximize application performance and SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS) values, which are proven by the many “best-of” published SAP sales and distribution (SD) two-tier benchmark results.
• The highly intelligent PowerMax array is designed to meet the storage capacity and performance requirements of an all-flash enterprise data center. It delivers advanced storage technologies, featuring many data services and provides mission critical availability with SRDF for your SAP productions systems. PowerMax offers great scalability and can support up to 162 HANA productions nodes. PowerMax service levels can protect production performance from other workloads, allowing SAP customers to separate applications and databases based on performance requirements and business criticality.
• Lower TCO for SAP landscapes. PowerOne provides massive SAP landscape consolidation opportunities for all your SAP instances, both production and non-production, as well as other workloads. It delivers consistent performance at scale for highly virtualized SAP landscapes and effortlessly handles high random reads and writes. You can take advantage of the new flexible consumption options available with Dell Technologies On Demand.
• Get a jump start with hybrid-cloud. PowerOne is available as a validated design for the Dell Technologies Cloud, so you can begin to simplify your cloud experience. In the future, it will be integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation.
• Simplify and protect SAP landscapes. Make SAP maintenance easier by automating the management of SAP systems and their copies and refreshes using Dell EMC’s integration software, Enterprise Storage Integrator, with SAP’s Management GUI, SAP Landscape Management, ESI for SAP LaMa. You can automate the copy and refresh process and create backups faster with smaller data footprints for large SAP landscapes.

When managing the move to SAP S/4HANA, IT organizations want the best time to value available on the market. Adopting PowerOne modernizes the core and sets you up for a future transition to the cloud.

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Hitting the Accelerator with GPUs

As organizations work to meet the performance demands of new data-intensive workloads, accelerated computing is gaining momentum in mainstream data centers.

As data center operators struggle to stay ahead of a growing deluge of data while supporting new data-intensive applications, there’s a growing demand for systems that incorporate graphics processing units (GPUs). These accelerators, which complement the capabilities of CPUs at the heart of the system, use parallel processing to churn through large volumes of data at blazingly fast speeds.

For years, organizations have used accelerators to rev up graphically intensive applications, such as those for visualization, modeling and simulation. But today, the use cases for accelerators are growing far beyond the typical acceleration targets to more mainstream applications. In particular, accelerators can now be one of the keys to speeding up artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning applications, including both training and inferencing workloads, along with applications for predictive analytics, real-time analysis of data streaming in from the Internet of Things (IoT), and more. In fact, NVIDIA® GPUs can accelerate ~600 applications.

So what’s the big advantage of an accelerator? Here’s a quick look at how GPUs rev up performance by working with the CPU to take a divide-and-conquer approach to get results faster: A GPU typically has thousands of cores designed for efficient execution of mathematical functions. Portions of a workload are offloaded from the CPU to the GPU, while the remainder of the code runs on the CPU, improving overall application performance.

Accelerated servers from Dell EMC

If you’re just getting started with AI, machine or deep learning, or if you just want a screaming fast 2-CPU Tower server, check out the PowerEdge T640. You can put up to 4 GPUs inside this powerhouse, and it fits right under your desk! It has plenty of internal storage capacity with up to 32x 2.5” hard drives, and you can connect all your tech with those 8 PCIe slots. (I’m thinking that something like this could improve team online gaming performance.)

Beyond my personal wish-list, the PowerEdge T640 is rackable, and you can virtualize and share those GPUs with VMware vSphere, or with Bitfusion software to provide boosted virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), artificial intelligence and/or other testing and development workspaces.

For those serious about databases and data analytics, check out the PowerEdge R940xa. The PowerEdge R940xa server combines 4 CPUs with 4 GPUs for a 1:1 ration to drive database acceleration. With up to 6TB of memory, this server is a beast that can grow with your data.

If you’re not sure what to pick, you can’t go wrong with the popular PowerEdge R740 (Intel) or PowerEdge R7425 (AMD) with 2 CPUs and up to 3 heavy-weight NVIDIA® V100 GPUs or 6 lightweight NVIDIA® T4 GPUs. In the PowerEdge R7425, you can make great use of all those x16 lanes. Why look at lanes? The vast majority of GPUs plug into a PCIe slot inside a server. PCIe communication/information is carried over the lanes in packets. More lanes means more data packets can travel at the same time, and the result can be faster.

Dive into the good-better-best options by workload in this new Dell EMC and NVIDIA ebook.

In addition to PowerEdge servers, Dell EMC has a growing portfolio of accelerated solutions. At a glance, Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC and AI make it faster and simpler for your organization to adopt high-performance computing. They offer a choice of flexible and scalable high performance computing solutions, with servers, networking, storage, solutions and services optimized together for use cases in a variety of industries.

The big point here is that your organization now has ready access to the accelerated-optimized and pre-integrated solutions you need to power your most data-intensive and performance-hungry workloads. So let’s get started!

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Leadership: A Commitment to Our Customers

Depending on who you ask, leadership means a number of different things. For many (including Merriam Webster), the defining attribute of a leader is simply holding an office or position of leadership. And sure, Dell EMC—#1 in global hyper-converged systems revenue1—is by all accounts a leader. But the true impact of leadership cannot be measured in the absolutes of a chart or balance sheet, rather in the degree to which they empower the people—and businesses—they work with. In this spirit, I am thrilled to share the results of Gartner’s November 2018 Magic Quadrant and companion Critical Capabilities report for Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI).

We believe Gartner has recognized Dell EMC for continued HCI leadership, reflecting both our Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. To evaluate Dell EMC Critical Capabilities for HCI, Gartner again selected VxRail, our flagship HCI offering. Our overall Critical Capabilities rating for HCI increased over last year’s report. In particular, this year Dell EMC scored higher than any other HCI vendor in the VDI use case, and for the 2nd year in a row, highest in Business-Critical and Cloud use cases.

A recent IDG survey shows that 50% of IT leaders are already running or planning to run business-critical applications on hyper-converged infrastructure, with another 20% considering it2. VxRail is the only fully integrated, pre-configured, and pre-tested HCI appliance on the market powered by VMware vSAN, the industry leading software defined storage solution designed for virtualized business-critical workloads and applications. Powered by the latest generation of Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, VxRail is fully loaded with enterprise data services and configurable to meet any business critical use case—even floating active-active data centers aboard hospital ships (just ask Mercy Ships, a non-profit VxRail customer that provides free lifesaving surgeries to people where medical care is nearly non-existent). VxRail speeds time to value in the core data center (powering applications such as SAP HANA), at the edge, and importantly in the cloud as well.

According to Gartner’s own research, “In 2019, hybrid IT will be the standard. Technical professionals focused on cloud must continue to advance cloud-first strategies, embrace multicloud and maintain on-premises environments”3. As an integrated cloud platform, VxRail offers multiple options to simplify the path to a VMware hybrid cloud environment, including VMware Validated Design (VVD) and, coming soon, VMware Cloud Foundation, with a focus on integration and brokering, which will deliver a seamless customer experience with automated deployment of a VMware SDDC architecture and LCM of the full end-to-end hardware/software stack along with choice of networking.

As the leader of HCI Product Marketing, on behalf of the entire Dell EMC HCI team, I am proud that Gartner has recognized Dell EMC in a continued HCI Leaders position. But more importantly, I am excited about what lies ahead for our customers. Dell EMC and VMware are continuing to increase our level of collaboration on VxRail—and it is our customers that will benefit from these ongoing joint investments. The less time IT spends on administration, routine maintenance, and support, the more time they can dedicate to innovation that drives business value—and ultimately leadership within their industry. Which brings me back to the theme of this blog: leadership. My definition of a leader is someone—or some business—that empowers and creates new leaders. When I speak with VxRail customers, I am consistently inspired by the creative, impactful ways they are leveraging hyper-converged infrastructure to make a difference for their businesses, and the world—from powering the next disruptive innovation to providing free lifesaving surgeries. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

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It’s Here! Running SAP HANA in Production on HCI

Our infrastructure portfolio for SAP HANA just got stronger.

Today we have great news! Our SAP HANA certified infrastructure portfolio has grown to include running SAP HANA in production on Dell EMC hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI).

And the timing could not be better, especially if you are already running SAP Business Suite applications on Dell EMC. Just consider the momentum of SAP HANA1;

◈ Since the 2011 release of SAP’s market-leading SAP HANA platform for real-time computing, adoption has grown to 25,000 customers.

◈ With the pending end of maintenance and support for SAP Business Suite 7 applications in 2025, customers are looking to move to S/4HANA. Since its launch in 2015, licensed customers for S/4HANA has grown to 8,900 in Q2/18.

Dell EMC has partnered with SAP since the release of SAP HANA in 2011, when they announced the HANA Appliance model for targeted workloads. Since then, our portfolio has expanded for SAP’s Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) deployment model for SAP HANA. The SAP TDI model enables customers to lower the TCO by deploying SAP HANA as part of your shared IT model.

As HCI adoption has rapidly increased over the last few years—with 75% of deployments in the core data center2—it is no surprise that we have been increasingly asked by our customers, “What about running SAP HANA in production on Dell EMC HCI?”

Similar to our investments for Dell EMC servers, storage and converged systems, Dell EMC solutions and engineering teams worked closely with SAP to test, validate and document our configurations meeting SAP HANA performance KPIs for our HCI infrastructure.

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-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 and VMware vSphere.

Our ultimate goal is to deliver the most seamless package of HCI software and infrastructure on VxRail, powered by VMware. Specifically, SAP has certified Dell EMC VxRail P-Series all-flash (P570F), powered by VMware’s HCI software platform (VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN) to run SAP HANA on HCI for production.

VxRail P-Series All Flash (P570F) Performance Optimized System

In addition to VxRail for SAP HANA running on HCI, we have even more news!

We understand that SAP provides customers choice for HCI software platforms including Nutanix. For SAP customers choosing Nutanix, Dell EMC XC Family also has achieved certification.

Dell EMC XC940xd-24 and XC740xd-24 All Flash HCI Appliances

With both VxRail and XC Family, Dell EMC delivers a fully engineered, hyper-converged infrastructure solution that enables businesses to innovate faster and accelerate IT operations.

Customers implementing the solution can expect the following benefits:

◈ Agility―A modern SAP landscape management experience that delivers automated provisioning capabilities for SAP applications including SAP HANA and provides a faster time-to-value.

◈ Engineering―Compute, networking, and storage components that are integrated with the specified prerequisites, and dependencies that have been tested to deliver a seamless solution experience.

◈ Optimization―Design and deployment guides that highlight proven performance, automation, and resiliency best practices for SAP landscapes including SAP HANA.

If this topic is top of mind for you, I encourage you to visit the Dell EMC Booths and meet our experts at SAP TechEd 2018 in Barcelona or talk to your Dell EMC account rep today. We’d be happy to discuss the benefits of SAP HANA on Dell EMC HCI, as well as our broad Dell EMC portfolio of solutions and services that are ideal for any customers’ infrastructure needs in SAP environments.

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