Cisco UCS With EMC VNX 5300 Certified for SAP HANA

Cisco Systems, Inc. and EMC Corporation announced certification of Cisco UCS blades with EMC VNX5300 unified storage systems to run the SAP HANA platform.

Their technologies can reduce business risk and ensure that customers receive the scalability, HA, disaster tolerance and continuous access required for their mission-critical SAP HANA information.

Validated through testing and analysis conducted by SAP AG, EMC, and Cisco, the certified solution enables customers to transform their business by harnessing the power of information to make real-time business decisions. By helping organizations act on information as it happens, SAP HANA helps customers increase the speed of their existing processes and allows for access to large amounts of data in shorter periods of time.

Cisco and EMC are working to address strong customer demand for SAP HANA infrastructure. Their joint go-to-market activities include sales collaboration, channel partner enablement, collaborative technical services and support, integrated professional services, and marketing. The integrated solution is in limited availability globally.

Designed from the ground up with a ‘clean slate’ approach, Cisco UCS is an integrated system, designed to optimize compute, networking, storage access, virtualization and management. UCS tapped into a market demand for a new approach to computing, enabling IT organizations to unleash new business models with its integrated architecture. Customers are able to reduce the time to deploy new applications, improve business agility and reduce costs. UCS is a fabric computing platform that combines x86-architecture servers with networking and storage access into an integrated system.

In a survey of end users conducted by industry analyst firm IDC (Storage Users Demand Study 2011 – Spring Edition: Unlocking the Minds of Storage Users, September 2011, Doc # 230148), EMC was named the #1 storage choice for SAP solutions and other mission critical environments. The survey ranks storage vendors based on how end users are deploying their technology with enterprise applications. Results of the survey show that more customers choose EMC storage than other storage for their SAP environments. EMC, an information infrastructure provider for SAP solutions, provides customers running SAP HANA with the availability, protection, and automation needed to enable real-time analytics.

Designed to deliver five-9’s availability, VNX storage delivers end-to-end data integrity, multiple RAID options, and proactive global sparing and diagnostics. Software suites provide local and remote data protection, application protection, security and compliance. The VNX series delivers performance, efficiency, and simplicity for demanding virtual application environments. It optimizes application performance that span the set of enterprise applications, as well as the SAP HANA platform. EMC’s Unisphere software provides an interface for provisioning, monitoring and managing the VNX family.

Prasad Rampalli, SVP, EMC Global Solutions Group, said: "EMC, SAP and Cisco are continuing their close collaboration by integrating best-of-breed technologies and delivering an industry-leading solution in scalability, availability and performance for SAP HANA customers. Today we are launching an "application-aware" SAP HANA infrastructure which addresses mission critical requirements for IT to accelerate their adoption of SAP HANA in Enterprise. We are excited to be a key part of this inflection point in the industry with in-memory computing on EMC Cisco infrastructure establishing a new normal for time-to-information and making real-time business decisions."

David Yen, SVP and GM, Data Center Business Group, Cisco, said: "As data volumes in the enterprise continue to grow exponentially, the need for businesses to react to business events more quickly through real-time analysis and reporting of operational data is becoming a strategic imperative. SAP’s HANA solution combined with EMC unified storage and Cisco’s easy to manage, highly-scalable UCS architecture delivers a highly innovative and agile infrastructure to meet the demanding performance needs of real-time analytics."

Stefan Sigg, SVP, In-Memory Platform, SAP, said: "Through this latest announcement, we are entering the next phase in our strategic collaborations with EMC and Cisco. By teaming with key partners in our ecosystem, we can deliver the power of our disruptive innovations to customers, providing access to the best-of-breed technologies needed to harness the power of their information to create business value for their end users."