Dell EMC VxRail HCI Appliances Certified by SAP for SE and HANA Production Environments

Dell Technologies, Inc. announces the VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure appliances, powered by vSphere and VMware vSAN software, are certified by SAP SE for SAP HANA production environments.

The certifications, for both VxRail and VMware, Inc. software, reflect VMware and the company’s continued leadership in the rapidly growing HCI industry.

According to the latest research from IDC ⁽¹⁾, Dell Inc. is once again number one in the hyper-converged systems segment with 28.8% share, for the second quarter of 2018, based on year-to-year growth of 95.2%.

Led by VxRail, the company’s growth outpaces the industry, which grew 78.1% to $1.5 billion in system sales for the quarter. For the same period, VMware was tied for number one in hyper-converged systems based on owner of HCI software with 34.1% revenue share, demonstrating the largest year-to-year growth of any named vendor at 96.7%.

The VxRail is an industry’s jointly engineered, turnkey, integrated HCI appliance with VMware, powered by vSphere and vSAN and pre-tested and pre-configured with the PowerEdge servers. These appliances are the easiest and fastest way to simplify a VMware environment for HCI with integration with existing VMware tools. VxRail offers simplicity of lifecycle management and scalability with a cost-effective HCI solution that delivers multiple compute, memory, storage, network and graphics options to match any use case and cover a variety of applications and workloads.

“Customers can now get the operational benefits of a fully integrated stack from leading vendors of hyper-converged infrastructure, Dell EMC and VMware, to support their mission-critical, performance-sensitive SAP HANA environments,” said Sanjay Poonen, COO, customer operations, VMware. “VMware is proud to be working with the leading applications company in the world, SAP, to provide a more secure and flexible digital foundation, to help customers drive a sustainable competitive advantage.“

“Dell EMC VxRail makes IT transformation with HCI as simple as possible for customers to adopt and grow,” said Gil Shneorson, SVP and GM, VxRail, Dell EMC. “As customers increasingly use VxRail for core data center workloads, this certification makes VxRail, already architected for in-memory database applications, an excellent HCI solution for SAP HANA customers.“

“SAP has shared a longtime partnership with VMware and Dell EMC, and together, we’ve enabled customers to transform their businesses,” said Martin Heisig, technology innovation network, SAP HANA. “Today’s news highlights the depth and breadth of technologies Dell Technologies and SAP are offering to enable companies to optimize their SAP solutions with greater agility, HA, lower costs and easy provisioning.“

VMware HCI powers broadest range of mission-critical apps
VMware’s software forms an integrated digital foundation that powers the applications and services transforming businesses and industries.

For customers looking to combine the vSphere HA and fault tolerance features of the hypervisor with the resilience and performance of the vSAN HCI software, the certification opens a path to the operational simplicity and capital expense savings of HCI for workloads spanning AI, machine learning, big data, cloud-native, in-memory, mission-critical and 3D graphics.

Today, more than 60% of vSAN customers report running business-critical applications such as SAP NetWeaver solutions, SQL Server, Oracle, and, increasingly, containerized and big data workloads, on their HCI environment.

The SAP certification process validates vSphere and vSAN software in production environments for both scale up and multi-VM deployment modes deploying the Intel Corp.‘ Scalable Xeon processor family. As a result of collaboration between VMware and Virtustream, vSphere supports SAP HANA environments with up to 6TB VMs on four-socket server hardware.

“For 40 years, Mercy Ships has used hospital ships to bring free, life-changing surgeries to people suffering from diseases of poverty in Africa,” explained Chris Gregg, CIO, Mercy Ships. “With a core data center in the United States, offices in sixteen countries and a hospital ship in Africa, our needs are complex and constantly evolving. Dell EMC VxRail brings innovation that has helped us move toward our goal of central management. With its ease of use and ability to scale, this platform has become a critical part of our technology roadmap, in partnership with Dell EMC and technology partner Technologent, as we plan to expand our work and serve more people in Africa.“

“Today’s digital business broadly expands the scope of applications that are ‘mission-critical’ because systems of engagement are now the currency of modern business,” said Mike Leone, senior analyst, ESG. “HCI architectures allow customers to expand on the opportunity for greater efficiency and cost savings associated with supporting mission-critical solutions by extending that value to all infrastructure resources. With a unified approach to reliability and uptime, HCI enables users to configure, manage, and debug infrastructure resources in software across a common control plane.“

Availability:
VxRail is certified for SAP HANA.

Additional resources:
Virtual Blocks blog: Key Factors for SAP HANA Customers Considering HCI for Production Workloads
VMware vSphere
VMware vSAN
Dell EMC VxRail

(1) Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, 2Q18, September 25, 2018.

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