Dell’s Suite of Server, Storage and Networking Certified for Running SAP HANA

To help customers run and deploy business-critical applications and workloads they depend on, Dell Inc. announced workload-optimised solutions for the SAP AG’s HANA platform that enable customers to deploy Dell server, storage and networking systems running SAP AG’s HANA.

Dell also announced Active System Manager 7.0, the management layer for Active System, Dell’s converged infrastructure offering, that integrates IP from recently acquired Gale Technologies to help customers rapidly deploy business applications and IT services. These products and certifications advance Dell’s Enterprise strategy of creating scalable, flexible data centre solutions bringing together hardware, software and services.
 
Workload-Centric IT Infrastructure is the Future
Forrester Research recently concluded that a workload-centric IT infrastructure is the future for technology deployment models [Optimize IT Infrastructure Around Key Workloads, Forrester Research, Inc., September 2012]. According to its research, "the inside-out, technology siloed approach to IT infrastructure needs to stop. Instead, IT infrastructure needs to become workload-centric. In other words, design the server, storage, and networks in your data center on what matters most (your workloads), and not the other way around."
 
"Customers should focus on their business and the applications and workloads that will help them compete in today’s dynamic marketplace. This means using integrated infrastructure and solutions that are optimised for applications," said Dario Zamarian, VP and GM, enterprise systems and solutions, Dell. "Today, Dell is giving customers the confidence and agility they need to implement the workloads that matter most to their business, not to mention lifting the financial burden with better TCO and lower operating expenses."
 
Dell Solutions for SAP HANA Turn Data Into Insights
Designed for SAP solution-based workloads, Dell’s scale out solutions represent the first time Dell servers, Dell storage and Dell networking technologies achieved SAP certification for running SAP HANA as a pre-integrated system. With HA configurations that scale from 1TB to more than 4TB, these pre-integrated systems are based on the same architecture employed in Dell’s single-server appliances. By leveraging these enterprise-class solutions, customers can:

• Further optimise SAP solution workloads and explore and analyse operational information from virtually any data source with pre-integrated systems and services certified by SAP for running SAP HANA.
• Simplify ordering and speed deployment with pre-integrated systems that are preconfigured, pre-built, and pretested.
• Provide enterprise operation and performance by leveraging the systems management, automated tiering, energy efficiency and scalability capabilities built into Dell servers and Dell storage technologies.
• Reduce time to value with a comprehensive suite of services including assessment, installation, training, analytic solution design and development.
• Further ensure a simplified, cost-effective upgrade path without being subjected to a ‘rip and replace’ scenario required by a multiple platform design strategy.

In addition, SAP chose Dell Services as one of its technology partners for its ability to deliver solutions on a global scale. For customers adopting SAP HANA, it provides support in the form of assessment, analytic solution design and development, deployment, training, support and managed services.
 
SAP HANA is a completely re-imagined, real-time database platform. It streamlines analytics, planning, predictive and sentiment analysis to allow business to operate in real time.
 
Dell Active System Manager 7.0
Takes the Worry Out of Workloads
With organic innovation and expertise gained through Dell’s recent acquisition of Gale Technologies, Active System Manager 7.0 extends the management capabilities of Active System beyond the physical infrastructure to the virtualized infrastructure and workloads. Active System Manager 7.0 will be embedded into an Active System 800 and its associated reference architecture.

Some of the new solution’s features that will help customers accelerate time-to-market for applications include:

• Provisioning and de-provisioning mixed physical and virtual infrastructure and workloads.
• Reducing time and steps to provision new workloads with a simple set-up.
• Allocating and managing physical and virtual network, server and storage resources by creating resource pools across multiple systems with extensible ability to add new resources.
• Scheduling, allocating and ensuring virtual and physical resource capacity for complex workloads at current or future times.
• Eliminating concern as new workloads are added by enabling continued high extensibility, quality IT service delivery and management flexibility.

"We chose Dell’s appliance for SAP HANA because our customers wanted faster access to supply chain data to help them increase efficiency and make better decisions," said Nikolaj Schmitz, IT manager, Gesellschaft für Information und Bildung (G.I.B). "We now get access to data in seconds and, like Dell’s new scale-out solutions, it delivers the power and stability to maximise the performance of business-critical SAP software environments."
 
Availability
Dell’s scale-out solutions configured for SAP HANA are available in EMEA and the United States. Active System Manager 7.0 will be available with Active System 800 and its associated reference architecture in the United States in February and in Europe by late Spring.