Hitachi Solutions and Services to Accelerate Adoption of SAP HAN

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation and Hitachi Consulting Corporation announced enterprise converged solutions and services to help customers accelerate adoption of and achieve faster time to value with the SAP HANA platform.

This announcement builds on a strategic partnership formed between Hitachi and SAP more than two decades ago.

In cooperation with SAP, Hitachi has helped redefine legacy supply chain management, customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning solutions based on traditional database deployments using Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) Select for SAP HANA and Hitachi ‘Live in Five’ services. These offerings – enterprise converged infrastructure and consulting services to rapidly deploy and run SAP HANA – allow customers to take advantage of in-memory transactional and analytic systems, and support future applications built for the SAP HANA platform.

"Hitachi, through its services and Hitachi UCP solutions for SAP HANA, is helping to make widespread adoption possible for enterprises that need the value of ultra-high-speed in-memory analytics and data protection," said Ravi Chalaka, VP, solutions marketing, HDS. "Starting with Hitachi ‘Live in Five,’ enterprises can, in as little as five weeks, rapidly complete a pilot implementation of SAP HANA. In addition, we anticipate enterprises can further ensure an increase in protection for in-memory data in environments such as those running SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on SAP HANA with Hitachi TrueCopy and Symantec NetBackup."

As enterprises look to accelerate adoption of in-memory platforms such as SAP HANA for business analytics, SAP Business Suite and data warehousing, migrations onto these platforms must have demonstrable business value and support 24/7 mission-critical operations.

"We anticipate organizations implementing SAP HANA to benefit from significant ROI in terms of productivity and analysis," said Kevin Chew, global VP, ecosystem innovation and business development, SAP. "The ‘Live in Five’ services from Hitachi Consulting are expected to provide customers added validation of the benefits their organizations can gain by migrating to SAP HANA. Using these new services, we project that customers can further accelerate their journey with SAP HANA, helping to transform their business by streamlining transactions and providing real-time insights."

"Evaluator Group sees burgeoning use of in-memory analytics solutions for real-time decision making," said John Webster, senior partner, Evaluator Group. "The Hitachi approach combines a scalable, in-memory database platform with the system reliability and resilience capabilities required for enterprise production data center environments."

About Hitachi Solutions Integrated With SAP HANA:

Hitachi UCP Select for SAP HANA

• For scale-out applications, this resilient, converged turnkey solution enables customers to accelerate analytics with SAP HANA on a high-performing and scalable platform that can scale to 16 nodes with 8TB of memory. For customers seeking a third-party solution to backup their SAP HANA databases onto supported tape libraries, Hitachi supports Symantec NetBackup Platform for SAP HANA, providing customers with an option to protect the persistent data layer as part of an overall strategy for platform deployments of SAP HANA into production environments.
• It is also offered as an enhanced scale-up version that enables customers to run SAP Business Suite software powered by SAP HANA on a high-performing platform that supports 2TB of memory. In addition, this is a platform for test and development environments, and for organizations that want a smaller platform solution to determine if SAP HANA is the choice for their business.

Hitachi storage adapter for SAP NetWeaver
Landscape Virtualization Management

• This planned offering is expected to integrate core functions of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) with SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management software. By supporting operations for copy and clone functions, the adapter is intended to help improve manageability. Hitachi and SAP customers will be able to streamline management of SAP applications with Hitachi infrastructure to meet their business needs with increased IT agility.

Live in Five is a rapid proof-of-concept approach to demonstrate high-value scenarios and stand-up, production-ready solutions for SAP HANA. For a fixed scope and fixed fee, Hitachi will develop business use cases including metrics for success and associated ROI. With an average deployment timeline of weeks, IT professionals are able to mitigate risk by leveraging the following benefits of the LI5 program:

• Tight scope, rapid project methodology (average is five weeks)
• A Hitachi-hosted instance or a loaner Hitachi appliance for SAP HANA
• Validation of results and assistance for the customer to develop a plan to move the solution into a production environment

Recently, Hitachi Consulting completed an LI5 proof-of-concept project for SAP HANA focused on high-value use cases for a consumer products company. The result was a solution that enabled business analysts to analyze data, create new insights and provide recommendations to their field sales team to impact key business metrics.

HHDS solutions including Hitachi UCP Select for SAP HANA, and services from Hitachi Consulting, will be showcased at the SAPPHIRE NOW conference and the ASUG Annual Conference, being held May 14-16 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL.