The “just right” tool for the job: Applying the Goldilocks Rule to your SAP Data Center

For any workload, SAP included, most of us would agree selecting the right tool depends on the task you’re performing.     Knowing which tool, or how much capacity or resource to apply is usually defined by your objective.

Great motivators understand this.  Humans become bored if tasks are too easy, but demotivated if tasks are impossible.  But something that is “just right” results in optimal performance – we commonly call this “rising to the occasion.”   As much as I hate to admit it, overcoming a 25-point deficit in the third quarter is a good example.

Sociologists label this The Goldilocks Rule.

The Goldilocks Rule postulates that humans achieve peak performance when working right up to the edge of their capacity and ability.  As Goldilocks discovered, not too hard, not too soft, just right.

Can we apply this concept to converged infrastructure?  Does the right tool matter in your SAP data center?  Should you standardize on an architecture designed to support a steady stream of real-time transactional data, or something better suited to crunching out critical analytics.  Should you look to grow out or grow up?

The answer is absolutely, unequivocally, maybe.

Nobody wants to be caught with less capacity than they need (disastrous), and nobody wants to spend for capacity they cannot use (wasteful).  Instead of the Goldilocks Rule, data center professionals refer to “just right” as “Scalability.”

Modern data centers support a dizzying array of transactional and analytical workloads, and one size does not fit all.  That’s why Cisco developed the industry’s broadest family of scalable converged infrastructure solutions optimized for a variety of workloads.

However, for one of our SAP customers, a large North American retailer, even this was not enough.  Our customer was looking for one vendor who could provide “extreme scalability,” including a large single-node solution for SAP ECC (ERP Central Component), that could ultimately increase to over 20TB of memory as their business needs grow!  In this case, they require a very large scale-up solution.

For vertical NUMA-type workloads such as this, Cisco and Bull are pleased to announce the bullion S16 will join our already robust portfolio of SAP solutions.   Cisco now offers one of the largest capacity scale-up platforms currently certified by SAP.

“I’m very excited about our new partnership with Cisco for the Bull bullion S16 enterprise servers.  The addition of the bullion S16 high-end server to Cisco’s portfolio will create new opportunities to jointly address very demanding infrastructure solutions which require exceptional scalability and in-memory features. “
– Arnaud Bertrand, Group SVP, Head of Big Data, Atos.

“Cisco and Bull have a long relationship working together to meet customers’ data center needs.  Reselling the bullion S16 for large memory database applications expands our partnership and compliments the scalability of our Converged Infrastructure and highly flexible and secure network solutions.  Our goal is to provide the industry’s best application-aware programmable infrastructure.”
– Satinder Sethi, VP, Engineering, Cisco Computing Systems Group

The Bull bullion S16 joins the Cisco SAP solution family:

Integrated Cisco Support – Cisco “one-call-for-all” resolution

Extends Cisco’s tradition of x86 performance leadership.

Cisco’s portfolio scales to match all workloads, from 2 CPUs up to 16 CPUs & 24TB of memory

Cisco offers both compute & network performance leadership, including the only 40GB fast fabric certified for SAP HANA

Over 500 deployed customers, including Siemens, one of the largest SAP HANA environments in the world

Common Cisco Management framework (coming)

If you’re planning to modernize your SAP data center with scale-out solutions that provide the flexibility necessary to protect your investment, or you need the maximum scale-up capability of our new bullion S16 platform, click on these links, or go to our web site for additional information.

And please visit us at SAP Sapphire in Orlando, May 16-18.  We’ll help you architect the “just right” solution for your SAP data center.

Tools Photo by Lachlan Donald from Melbourne, Australia – “Sharpest tool in the shed”