As the 2027 deadline looms for enterprises to make the mandated upgrade to SAP S/4HANA, now is the time for SAP customers to modernize their SAP HANA infrastructure to not only meet those demands but also simplify them. Whether you’re modernizing your data infrastructure or launching new initiatives, Pure Storage ensures SAP HANA runs with the highest performance you want with an efficient footprint and resiliency that you need. FlashArray//X™ and FlashArray//XL are fully TDI certified for SAP HANA workloads, delivering the performance, efficiency, and flexibility enterprises need to future-proof their SAP environments with confidence.
Storage Challenges for SAP HANA
While SAP HANA is an in-memory database, application performance is often determined by the data storage infrastructure behind it. Behind the scenes, many of these SAP HANA databases are still running on traditional storage architectures that simply weren’t built for today’s demands. As workloads become more diverse, organizations start seeing the impact. Latency increases, throughput suffers, and managing everything becomes more complicated than it should be. On top of that, as SAP HANA database volumes grow, so do the physical space and energy requirements. Without an efficient storage solution, organizations struggle to reduce their data center footprint while maximizing performance.
Pure Storage helps customers power modern SAP HANA workloads with a unified platform that makes it simple to build and deploy an enterprise data cloud. Unlike legacy storage solutions, Pure does this by providing the highest performance in a simple, efficient footprint, intelligent automated operations, strong cyber resiliency, and unified data visibility and control.At the core of the platform is the Pure Storage FlashArray™, which provides fast, efficient unified block and file storage.
Built for latency-sensitive databases, FlashArray is certified for both block and file storage for SAP HANA and is the perfect solution to fit all of the persistent data driving your SAP environment. With the R5 release, FlashArray//XL130 supports 53% higher SAP HANA node density, while FlashArray//XL170 sees an 81% boost, maximizing performance and consolidation over the previous release.
We have extensively tested FlashArray//XL to ensure it will meet the demands of large-scale SAP HANA deployments, supporting growth in node counts and workload diversity, including SAP S/4HANA. FlashArray accelerates every aspect of your business workloads. Savepoints complete faster and SAP HANA restart times get greatly reduced. Transactions process more quickly,ensuring your SAP environment drives faster time to value.
What’s more, Purity operating software delivers enterprise data services with every FlashArray//X at no additional cost. This means our SAP customers get industry-leading data reduction, always-on encryption, space-efficient snapshots, and full fabric support—with continuous, non-disruptive innovation.
Snapshots: A Unique Value-add for SAP HANA
On FlashArray//XL (with an effective capacity of up to 7.4 PB) there’s plenty of room for even the largest SAP HANA databases while also reducing your data center footprint. It also 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.
These space-efficient snapshots can be automated and embedded in common SAP IT processes to improve efficiencies and keep critical IT environments up and functional. Both have always-on ransomware protection, with SafeMode™ immutable snapshots that secure your data backups by default and prevent any loss.
Reduce Risk and End Downtime
The Pure Storage platform can help teams protect their critical SAP HANA data with always-on encryption, always-on logging, industry-leading reliability, and robust replication capabilities, ensuring unmatched uptime, availability, and SafeMode™ protection. With Pure Storage Evergreen®, teams can also benefit from proactive updates and non-disruptive upgrades that keep their storage infrastructure modern, secure, and resilient, providing predictable access and safeguarding SAP HANA data against disasters or breaches without downtime or unexpected costs.Pure Storage can also reduce backup and recovery times, with minimal overhead and bandwidth requirements. Teams can use space-efficient Pure Storage snapshots to quickly restore and meet the most stringent recovery point objectives.
They can also replicate to other arrays with ActiveCluster™ and ActiveDR®. ActiveCluster also enables non-disruptive workload migration between arrays, allowing them to decouple database operations from underlying storage maintenance. Both features can be combined with native platform and/or database-level availability features to further enhance resiliency. Additionally, FlashArray provides a SLA guarantee of 99.9999% uptime as well as a zero planned downtime guarantee. All components of Pure Storage arrays are also designed to minimize or eliminate disruptions during updates or upgrades.
Like the other members of the FlashArray family, FlashArray//X was designed to be the most planet-friendly storage on the market. Customers have found they can reduce their storage footprint in their data center by up to 85% when they upgrade to Pure Storage. Not only does this save on expensive data center real estate, but it also dramatically reduces spiraling energy costs.
Get Enhanced SAP Performance and Availability
You wouldn’t put an old engine in your beautiful new fast car. The same goes for infrastructure behind your SAP HANA environment. We’ve extensively tested FlashArray//X and FlashArray//XL to ensure they will meet the demands of a high-transaction SAP HANA environment, such as SAP S/4HANA. Savepoints will complete quicker and reload times into memory are much faster, allowing for shorter downtime windows.
At Pure, we understand that an SAP S/4HANA system is the crown jewel of most customers’ IT assets and at the heart of an organization’s digital transformation strategy. FlashArray//X was built with the same resiliency and availability as past models.
Your ERP cannot go down; therefore, we make sure FlashArray//X and FlashArray//XL, like all our FlashArray products, can be upgraded non-disruptively at full performance without interrupting your business. You can upgrade your FlashArray systems at no cost and without disrupting critical business services through an Evergreen® subscription. With industry-leading availability metrics, pulled directly from our installed base across the globe, we deliver six-, and even seven-nines of availability, to reduce both planned and unplanned downtimes.
Next Steps
With organizations in the planning stages for their giant ERP upgrade projects, now is the time to take the biggest leap forward to scale your business operations and move to a platform that makes management of a critical IT asset like SAP HANA a much easier endeavor.
Learn more about Pure Storage and SAP and FlashArray//X.
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