Chipping Away at S/4 HANA Migration challenges

Please join me in welcoming guest blogger Erik Lillestolen elillest@cisco.com  Senior Manager for SAP solutions at Cisco to learn how Cisco can eliminate many risks in an SAP HANA migration project.

Gaining competitive advantage with digital transformation is a balancing act of value and cost.  Delivering incremental value at a high cost is not advantageous, and S/4 HANA business process migration can be expensive.

Cisco, Intel and SAP have partnered to deliver a solution that increases the value of the S/4 HANA migration while decreasing the cost, and potentially reducing the migration challenges.  We achieved by incorporating the Intel Optane Datacenter Persistent Memory into Cisco UCS solutions for SAP HANA.

Intel Optane Datacenter Persistent Memory and the SAP Value

The Intel Optane DC PMEM is a persistent memory device that sits directly on the memory bus of the server system board sharing the memory space with the existing dynamic memory.  This new device retains the data stored when the server power is turned off and is immediately available for usage when the server power is restored, and the SAP HANA database restarted.  The new persistent memory is available in three memory sizes; 128G DIMMs, 256G DIMMs and 512G DIMMs.

This new combination of dynamic memory and persistent memory provides three interrelated benefits which result in reduced total cost of ownership without impacting the in-memory performance.

Value #1: Realizing Real Cost Savings

First, the Intel Optane DC PMEM has a lower price per TB than industry standard dynamic memory.  A direct comparison of the 128G DRAM DIMM and the 128G PMEM DIMM results in an estimated 50% cost reduction when replacing DRAM with PMEM.  The value- a direct 25% reduction in the SAP HANA server acquisition cost.  This is a very real savings when you consider almost all S/4 HANA migrations have at least 3 SAP HANA servers.  This price comparison will vary as the volatile price of memory changes.

Value #2: Increased memory capacity without excessive costs

The Optane DC PMEM are available in larger capacity sizes ranging from 128G to 512G resulting in larger capacity without significantly increasing cost.  It is now possible to build a 4-socket UCS B480 server with 6T of Optane PMEM SAP HANA data tables space.  Before Optane PMEM this size of data table space required an expensive 8-socket server fully loaded with 96 128G DRAM DIMMs.  And the interesting fact is this increased capacity 4-socket server is almost the same price as a traditional 4-socket DRAM-only server with only 3T of SAP HANA data table capacity.  12T of SAP HANA data tables can also be supported on a 4S system for customers with deep pockets.

Value #3: Reduce planned downtime

A traditional 6T SAP HANA database can take over 65 minutes or more to reload into memory significantly increasing the time needed for planned downtimes.  The Optane PMEM saves the data in the memory devices and presents the data immediately when SAP HANA is restarted.  This decreases the restart time to well below the 65 minutes, many times decreasing the restart time by a factor of 12 or more.  System recovery for planned downtime can be significantly reduced resulting in less time needed for productive system maintenance.

Special S/4 HANA and BW/4 HANA Server Opportunity

Deciding when to migrate your workload to SAP HANA or to refresh your existing landscape is a difficult decision.  Cisco and Intel are announcing a short-term program to make that decision a little easier.  Cisco has created four unique SAP HANA server products that provide even more price value than just the Optane pricing.  These 4 servers enjoy not only the 25% cost savings associated with Optane PMEM pricing, but a nearly additional 20% special saving to help reduce the cost of SAP HANA migration and refresh programs.  Combine this SAP HANA server with the newly enabled S/4 HANA and BW/HANA Landscape bundles to create an end to end landscape solution for your S/4 HANA or BW/4 HANA migration program.

Migrating to SAP S/4 HANA presents challenges and risks.  Confidently accelerate SAP modernization and migration efforts with these new Cisco® SAP solution packages. Fast-track your SAP HANA andS/4 HANA projects by applying your realized CapEx infrastructure savings toward SAP migration services.

Now you can easily test drive Intel Optane DC persistent memory and discover Optane’s SAP HANA value.

To learn more about Cisco’s special migration offer for  SAP S/4 HANA and BW/4, please visit Cisco SAP HANA and S/4 HANA Migration Acceleration Program

To learn more about Cisco’s partnership with SAP, please visit our partnership webpage at www.cisco.com/go/SAP.