Brazil Group Companhia Siderurgica Nacional Chooses IBM Power Systems E880 and Storwize V5000

IBM Corporation announced that Companhia Siderurgica Nacional (CSN), one of the largest industrial groups in Brazil, has selected IBM Power Systems and Storage to run its SAP HANA in-memory analytics applications.

In addition to being one of the largest exporters of iron ore in South America, CSN develops and offers high value steel, mining, cement, logistics and energy products for the automotive and construction industries and manufacturers of household appliances and packaging.

“With the amount of data companies like ours are producing daily, it is critical that we have an IT infrastructure that enables us to run our analytics workloads efficiently,” said Fabio Faria, CIO, CSN. “The stability and flexibility of IBM Power Systems and storage does just that by providing a reliable system for running SAP HANA and our SAP applications.“

The combination of IBM Power Systems E880 servers running SAP HANA and IBM Storwize V5000 storage systems will enable CSN to adapt its IT infrastructure to support the company’s anticipated growth. The Power Systems E880s being implemented at CSN provide memory spaces of up to 16TB on a platform designed for data analytics. The POWER8 processors in the Power Systems E880 boast four times the multi-threading capability per core along with four times the memory bandwidth and cache per chip compared to x86 Haswell chips.

Greater Choice and Performance for Using SAP HANA with Virtualization
IBM and SAP will also increase support for SAP HANA running on IBM Power Systems via the latest support package stack 11 (SPS11) for the SAP HANA platform. The enhancements ensure that Power Systems can bring its capabilities in flexibility, resiliency, and performance to the broad community using SAP HANA.

New enhancements include:

• Virtualization of SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems: Clients can consolidate multiple production instances of SAP HANA onto smaller footprints virtualized with IBM PowerVM exclusively available on IBM Power Systems.¹ Power Systems is the first platform available for deploying multiple production instances of SAP HANA on individual VMs, which can reduce the number of servers that are needed. Virtualization can help organizations avoid the management complexity found on bare metal infrastructures and enhance the efficiency of production deployments of SAP HANA.
• SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA on Power Systems: IBM customers will be able to select from a wider range of application choices with the availability of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA on Power Systems on which to run their SAP HANA-based ERP and analytics applications.
• Business warehouse scaling with SAP HANA: Clients can also take advantage of scale-out architectures when deploying SAP HANA on Power Systems. This expands deployment options for clients, enabling them to choose the infrastructure path that is most appropriate for their environments running SAP HANA.
  

“IBM’s Power Systems are uniquely suited to provide rapid access to critical business data stored with in-memory database technologies like SAP HANA,” said Vicente Moranta, director and business line executive, IBM, responsible for IBM Power Systems running SAP HANA. “With the addition of virtualization through PowerVM, SAP Business Suite and scale-out architectures, IBM and SAP are providing a choice of different performance levels to meet today’s big data demands.“

“SAP and IBM have long history of close collaboration, bringing innovation to the enterprise for our customers,” said Anil Saboo, senior director, strategic partnerships and business development, SAP. “With the latest availability of SAP HANA SPS 11 on IBM Power Systems, our customers now have expanded infrastructure choices for the deployment of SAP HANA.“

Since SAP HANA first became available on Power Systems earlier this year, Power Systems has provided performance for the most critical business applications running on SAP HANA. Power Systems increase performance in the SAP business warehouse enhanced mixed workload standard application benchmark for two billion records using SAP HANA on a POWER8-based Power System server.²

Providing Insights for Fast-Moving Markets
There are already clients experiencing the benefits of running SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems. For example, Reno Footwear, a division of German footwear retailer HR Group GmbH & Co. KG, is using SAP HANA on Power Systems with PowerVM to glean near-instant insights into market trends. For Reno, it is critical to have actionable insights into customer behavior in order to stay competitive. Using SAP HANA on Systems with PowerVM enables Reno to respond quickly to shifting demands in the fast-changing fashion industry, staying fresh and competitive. By implementing the POWER8-based solution, Reno has sped its business processes by 60% with only half the processor cores of their previous x86-based environment.

“Fashion retailers are under a lot of pressure right now to be faster in terms of customer response, distribution and the whims of fashion,” said Matthias Schaefer, head of application development, HR Group. “By deploying SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems, we have access to up-to-the-second customer insights and sales figures, and can effectively plan campaigns and adapt product offerings based on changing customer tastes.“

¹ POWERVM is available at additional charge on all IBM Power Systems running SAP HANA.

² IBM Power Enterprise System E870 on the SAP BW Extended mixed load standard application benchmark running SAP Netweaver 7.31 application; 4 processors / 40 cores / 320 threads, POWER8; 4.19GHz, 1024GB memory, 192,750 adhoc navigation steps per hours for 2 billion records on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 and SAP HANA 1.0, Certification #: 2015024. Results certified on December 10, 2015. Source here.