As the deadline approaches to upgrade SAP landscapes to the SAP HANA platform, customers are starting to put together their project plans for how they’re going to tackle what is usually a major IT initiative on their most critical business applications. While the original investment to stand up an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is usually a large one, now is the time to have a modern, performant, scalable, resilient infrastructure that is able to meet the demands of a large-scale SAP platform. With that, I’m happy to announce that the new Pure Storage® FlashArray//XL has been fully TDI certified for SAP HANA workloads.
FlashArray//XL is Pure’s newest addition to the FlashArray™ family—and what an addition it is! Built for next-level performance at scale, it’s the perfect solution to fit all of the persistent data for SAP HANA databases driving your SAP environment. While the SAP S/4 platform has done a good job of consolidating a number of business applications, most SAP landscapes still consist of multiple SAP HANA databases that drive critical business processes.
Customers need to ensure that their persistent storage layer can scale and perform to meet these ERP demands. A typical ERP system has seasonal events (e.g., end-of-quarter processing or Black Friday retail sales) that put more strain on its infrastructure with the same expectations for performance. FlashArray//XL is built to handle these demands with latency levels as low as 150µs, throughput as high as 36GB/sec, and up to a 70% performance boost over FlashArray//X90. It’s neatly delivered in a 5U platform that requires only minimal amounts of precious data center space and power.
Organizations are placing increasing emphasis on sustainability initiatives to reduce the environmental impact of their data centers. As mentioned in our inaugural ESG report, sustainability is an integral part of our technology, operations, and people. The ability to consolidate SAP HANA workloads onto a platform as efficient as FlashArray//XL can drive efficiencies across not only the data center but also the entire application suite as well.
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Performance in an ERP system is critical—it’s why customers invest in a platform like SAP HANA. I’ve seen implementations where the critical SAP HANA savepoint mechanism has caused the database to all but stop because of suboptimal performance at the storage layer. That’s not something you want to face during critical transaction periods.
We’ve extensively tested FlashArray//XL to ensure it will meet the demands of a high-transaction SAP HANA environment, such as SAP S/4 HANA. Savepoints will complete quicker and reload times into memory are much faster, allowing for shorter downtime windows. Also, like our other large FlashArray products, customers can include storage class memory in the array to get even more aggressive on data tiering using Native Storage Extension for SAP HANA. As discussed in this IDC white paper, organizations can save SAP HANA license costs with Intel Optane-based Pure DirectMemory™ cache for SAP HANA.
Like all Pure FlashArray systems, FlashArray//XL comes with enterprise data services to make for easy management of not only the system but also the applications on it. Pure Storage has the industry’s best data reduction services. While SAP did a great job on its compression algorithms (which it needed to fit these large ERP databases into memory), Pure can reduce an SAP HANA database even more (guaranteed 2.09:1).
This allows you to consolidate and store even more workloads on FlashArray//XL. With an effective capacity of 5.78PB, there’s plenty of room for even the largest SAP HANA databases. Plus, FlashArray//XL comes with the same snapshot capabilities and data mobility functions that infrastructure teams, and especially application teams, such as SAP BASIS, have grown to love.
At Pure, we understand that an SAP HANA S/4 system is the crown jewel of most customers’ IT assets. Downtime is not in our vocabulary and FlashArray was built for the same resiliency. With industry-leading availability metrics, pulled directly from our installed base across the globe, we strive for seven-nines of availability—both planned and unplanned downtimes. Your ERP cannot go down, and we make sure FlashArray//XL, like all our FlashArray products, can be upgraded non-disruptively at full performance without interrupting your business.
With organizations in the planning stages for their giant ERP upgrade projects, now is the time to look at modernizing infrastructure to a platform that makes management of a critical IT asset like SAP HANA a much easier endeavor.
Next Steps: Learn more about FlashArray//XL.
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