HyperFlex at SAP TechEd

Guest Blogger: Mr. HyperFlex All Flash

Mr. HyperFlex All Flash is a HyperFlex System with 4 HyperFlex All Flash nodes and 2 UCS Fabric Interconnects. He also has a NVIDIA GPU inside of him. Mr. HyperFlex All Flash lives in San Jose where he tests all sorts of application workloads. He prides himself on processing more IOPs (inputs/outputs per second) and running with lower latency than other hyperconverged infrastructure products.

A first-hand account from the Cisco HyperFlex System at SAP TechEd

I just got back from my first trip to an SAP TechEd conference and what an experience. I meet so many people and saw so much innovation happening. It was great to be a part of the SAP Innovation Showcase, where I was responsible for running the SAP Data Intelligence Hub on Cisco Container Platform(CCP) live on the show floor. CCP is Cisco’s advanced on-premise multi-cluster management Kubernetes platform which is certified for the SAP Data Hub (SAP Data Intelligence). We worked together, with some assistance from a GPU I have inside me, to manage a retail store’s inventory and power their supply chain, handling customer data and driving AI and machine learning. And I love retailers, just ask Orvis where I have some friends running their ecommerce, warehouse systems, and other mission critical apps. I really enjoyed stepping out of the data center for a few days to show the attendees how hyperconverged infrastructure, me, works and how together with SAP we can do almost anything.

How I (the HyperFlex System) and Cisco Container Platform worked with SAP at the show

In this showcase demo, we focused on how modern retail companies who need intelligent systems can automatically detect and correct product shelf positioning, manage inventory based on customer buying behavior, shape impulse purchases via smart recommendations and via the cloud (SAP Analytics Cloud) compare, and contrast product sales across different sites (In parallel to SAP TechEd in Vegas, the same demo was run at the Strata conference in New York).

We combined the capabilities of SAP Data Intelligence with S/4 HANA, and SAP Analytics Cloud to provide an intelligent shopping experience. I provided the containerized environment using the Cisco Container Platform, to host the SAP Data Intelligence components, GPUs from NVIDIA and advanced web-cameras, image recognition and modeling software from SAP. Visitors to the showcase got to play with the demo by removing products from the shelf, at which point we automatically analyzed the customer basket, queried S/4 HANA to get SKU information and added the purchase to SAP Analytics Cloud to give the retailer daily customer purchase and inventory reports. We detected restocking items via the live streaming video and updated the monitors to reflect the same real time data. By comparing live store sales across 2 different regions (conferences), valuable insights could be gathered (e.g. more teddy bears were sold in Vegas vs. ninjas that were more popular in NYC).

It was wonderful to see when customers in the booth realized that all this was running on the show floor on me (HyperFlex)! I could see the wheels of opportunity turning as they realized they now had an easy “appliance” way of getting hardware plus software (Cisco Container Platform on HyperFlex) with GPUs integrated and with the SAP Data Hub bits pre-installed to run SAP Data Intelligence all supported by a single vendor (Cisco).

I had so much fun at SAP TechEd in Las Vegas, that my twin brother who lives in Germany will be going to the SAP TechEd conference in Barcelona next week. Stop by SAP’s Innovation Showcase there if you are attending to see him work, performing the very same demo! Don’t forget, I am also certified to run SAP HANA and can run your traditional SAP apps too. Find out more about that at www.cisco.com/go/hxsap

Sincerely,

Mr. HyperFlex All Flash

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