April 25, 2016 6 Comments
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Data Center

New Cisco SAP Appliance makes Big Data Faster…And Simpler

In the era of digital transformation, the ability to rapidly access and analyze data from inside and outside your company’s walls is a competitive imperative.   Because much of the so-called “hot data” is already within SAP environments, it’s no surprise that many Cisco UCS customers are adopting SAP analytics, running in either a validated SAP appliance or a Tailored Data Center Integration (TDI) environment.

Cisco customers have industry-leading choices in both areas.  Our SAP appliances support scale up or scale out options and are simple to deploy, speed time to market, and reduce operational expenses.  We’re also the leading proponents of TDI landscapes for SAP HANA.  TDI allows SAP customers to leverage existing investments in compute, network, and storage infrastructure.  We support TDI with our renowned Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs), providing foolproof, pre-tested foundational designs that simplify deployments.

SAP HANA is a popular platform for transactional workloads and analytic analysis because its in-memory architecture addresses the performance demands of analytics applications.  But such demands require high-speed infrastructure to compliment the real-time capabilities of SAP HANA.  That’s why Cisco has launched UCS Integrated Infrastructure for SAP HANA, a new solution designed to optimize the performance of SAP HANA environments by taking advantage of our upgraded 40G 3rd generation Fabric Interconnect (UCS 6332) to eliminate network bottlenecks within the system – the first 40G FI certified by SAP.

  • For SAP HANA applications such as Business Warehouse, Cisco has created a new SAP-certified appliance with a cluster of C240 systems and the MapR Converged Data Platform.  MapR is a leader in big data solutions, and the appliance includes the NFS-attached persistent storage, as supported by SAP.  Some customers prefer the design of server-based storage because of the reduced expense and added flexibility – it delivers linear performance, cost scalability, and the servers themselves can be repurposed as needed, as MapR Hadoop servers running Spark and SAP HANA Vora for example.
  • Our 40G Fabric Interconnect also enhances our customers’ Enterprise Shared Storage TDI environments, allowing them to better integrate SAP HANA with big data feeds and analytics apps. It complements our TDI shared storage solutions with partners such as EMC and NetApp.

idcWhy are we fixated on “fast fabric?”  Think about the advantages it creates for SAP workloads:  You can load data faster into the HANA nodes at startup or recovery.  You can ingest data faster when pulling from the customer network.  And node-to-node communication is considerably faster resulting in quicker responses to queries.

In addition to our new UCS 6332 FI for blazing fast 40Gbps end-to-end speed, both architectures leverage our popular B460 scale-out servers, and as with other UCS solutions, customers benefit from UCS Manager and UCS Director for integrated management and scalable storage for better resource utilization and lower OpEx.
Now let’s revisit that competitive imperative I mentioned earlier; with our steady stream of co-innovations with SAP, it’s no surprise that a just-released IDC survey finds on average, SAP customers running Cisco UCS integrated infrastructure achieved a 528% ROI over five years, a 48% reduction in infrastructure costs, and a 67% reduction in needed staff time.  These companies now have more money and resources available for new projects to drive incremental revenue and differentiation in the market.

Sound like something worth exploring for your company?  Talk to Cisco about the industry’s most sophisticated integrated infrastructure solutions for SAP HANA.