SAP workloads are mission critical for over 378,000 customers, which is why performance, scalability and cost are very important to run it effectively and efficiently. Pure Storage provides many solutions that can help customers achieve these goals.
Pure Storage is focusing more and more on engineered solutions for SAP, to implement and integrate SAP features and functionality directly onto the Pure Storage Arrays. One of these solutions can help customers to fully automate copy, clone and refresh tasks and reduce the time and resources necessary by over 90%, leaving more budget and staff for new innovation. Read here
Besides the technical benefits of running SAP, whether traditional or SAP HANA, we wanted to hear the business results for customers using Pure solutions for SAP. IDC provided a framework to interview customers to get to the bottom of their experience and business benefits. The results even topped our wildest expectations. A few highlights:
UNPLANNED DOWNTIME: ZERO
This is huge, if you consider a minute of downtime can cost companies $10,000 and more. Hardware migrations, bugs, and new functionality can cause significant downtime, increasing cost and risk and puts the business at large in a difficult situation. Rarely can businesses sustain significant downtime before it truly impacts revenue, customer trust and the business. By using Pure Storage, customers reported that the architecture provides 99.9999% of uptime out-of-the-box, therefore limiting the potential downtime to 2.59 seconds per month (compared to 99.99% – 4.32 minutes per month).
But that’s not all. Migrating data between storage arrays due to the fact that new hardware needs to be deployed after a typical refresh cycle is a must, but not with Pure storage. Thanks to our Evergreen program, customers never have to shutdown their mission critical infrastructure, because of new hardware or software. All upgrades (sw/hw) are done while SAP is running and it has no impact on the SAP performance at all.
THREE-YEAR ROI: 472%
Customers sometimes compare just the raw cost for storage arrays and completely keep out of their calculations things like no unplanned downtime, no downtime for sw, hw upgrades, advanced data reduction through superior algorithms and optimization between software and hardware. (read more here) As you can read in the IDC white paper, customers in average can achieve a data reduction for SAP workloads of 4.5 : 1. Even with in-memory technology such as SAP HANA there is still a significant data reduction, since SAP HANA flushes the data every 5min, writes the log files and simply keeps some of the data temporarily on the persistency layer for performance reasons. Now if you keep all of this in mind when calculating the ROI of your storage array over 3, 6 and even 10 years customers could achieve in average an ROI of 472% in three years. Pure Storage is all about the value you get out-of-the-box. This is just another proof-point.
Lowering the resources necessary to maintain the status quo results in more innovation
OPERATIONAL BENEFITS: 65% less staff, 75% faster deployments
When I talk to customers I often get the questions about migrating SAP data from the existing storage solution onto Pure Storage, plus the operational changes that needs to be considered when deploying SAP on a new storage array system. IDC wanted to know exactly what this migration and the operational changes truly mean and again the results blew us away. It is not just that customers perform the last migration from existing non-Pure-Storage arrays onto Pure Storage and then no more migrations thanks to Evergreen (see THREE-YEAR ROI). The additional operational savings deploying the gear in 75% less time and 65% less staff to maintain can be translated into huge cost savings.
This can help customers to free up resources (e.g. budget, time and personnel) to do more innovative projects, such as IoT, Big Data, AI etc. This is also true when SAP infrastructure administrators and BASIS folks are afraid to lose their jobs, due to increased automation build into our arrays and the the operational savings. The reality is that they now have an opportunity to boost their resumes with new trends and next generation technology, making them the new data center heroes.
These are only three examples of the business benefits customers achieved by deploying and running their mission critical SAP workloads on Pure Storage. If you want to be another customer taking advantage of our SAP solutions, contact us today.
1 SAP Q4/2017 Statement: https://www.sap.com/docs/download/investors/2017/sap-2017-q4-statement.pdf
