Getting Fast Business Insight with SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and IBM Power Systems

Transcription

1 Front cover Getting Fast Business Insight with SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and IBM Power Systems Michael Tabron Redguide

2

3 Executive overview Many organizations are struggling to turn growing amounts of data into business value. They are looking for ways to do this rapidly and affordably. SAP HANA running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications on IBM Power Systems can give organizations the tools they need to compete effectively in the world of big data. SAP HANA is an in-memory database that provides much faster results than traditional relational databases. By running SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems, a platform designed for the high performance and scalability demands of in-memory workloads, organizations can give business users reliable access to mission-critical data analytics. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was the first Linux distribution for SAP HANA and the first Linux to run on Power Systems servers. By using key features of both SAP HANA and the Power Systems platform, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications gives organizations a highly-available, cost-effective way to tackle their big data challenges. This IBM Redguide publication explains to business users how SAP HANA running with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on the Power Systems platform addresses the major challenges of organizations today, and what benefits their organizations can expect. This guide describes the solution in detail, explains how it can fit into an organization s environment, and provides links and contact information for those who want to learn more. Copyright IBM Corp All rights reserved. 1

4 Too much of a good thing: The challenge of data Making wise business decisions requires a combination of experience and accurate information. For the modern organization, information technology is not just a way of enabling productivity, but the most important way of providing the data to support good decisions. To make these decisions quickly, organizations need an infrastructure that can handle all of the relevant data. Then they need a way to analyze that data and get results to business users. Data volumes are exploding. Organizations once made decisions, such as how much inventory to stock, based on the previous quarter s sales and minimal public data, for example current prices on the commodities market. Now, making decisions with so little information leaves organizations at a competitive disadvantage. You need to consider many factors, such as foreign markets, weather patterns, customer buying behavior, and floods of unstructured data coming from social media or the web. The availability of all this information is a great benefit to businesses but is also a challenge to the IT departments charged with handling it. Taking this data in is only part of the challenge. You must then store it in a way that allows for rapid access. Traditionally, organizations have used relational databases to store information. Unfortunately, it is difficult to get data out of these relational databases quickly. A typical query might take several hours to return a result, and for larger, more complex queries, your business users might be stuck waiting days for answers. If an organization only had one question to ask, this query process might be acceptable. But often, you are testing hypotheses and asking multiple questions to better understand a new market or competitive environment. This situation means it can take weeks of asking and waiting just to explore a business opportunity. In this era of fast moving markets and rapid product innovation, spending months on a decision-making process will put your organization at a distinct disadvantage. The value of SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and IBM Power Systems Running SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and IBM Power Systems servers can help speed your decision making process and give your business users fast access to all of your organization's data. SAP HANA is an in-memory database that provides much faster data access than relational databases. IBM Power Systems platforms offers the reliable and high-performance platform you want for a business-critical tool, such as SAP HANA. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is the crucial link between the hardware and software. It is an operating system that takes advantage of the Power architecture, provides high availability features, and supports SAP HANA's unique demands for performance and scalability. With this solution, your organization gets answers to its business questions faster. You can respond quicker to customers and increase revenue by seizing new business opportunities. SAP HANA can serve as the source of customer data for contact center agents. With SAP HANA, agents can make queries about a customer's history while on the phone with the customer. Agents can find out what customers ordered previously or if they have ever returned products while they are speaking with the customers. This capability empowers your agents to improve customer service and revenues. 2 Getting Fast Business Insight with SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and IBM Power Systems

5 SAP HANA can also provide the information your marketing operations team needs to tailor campaigns. With the rapid response provided by SAP HANA, a marketing executive can ask questions about previous campaigns and get the information needed to tailor future campaigns on the fly. This insight enables the executive to adjust for a factor that might change customer behavior, such as the unexpected appearance of a competitor s new offering. Manufacturing operations can use real-time analytics results from SAP HANA to drive greater efficiency. Meeting the demands of sales channels requires up-to-date information about the current mix of products. At the same time, manufacturers must manage the supply chain so that parts are available when needed and so that the costs of shipping are not excessive. With fast access to analysis of historical sales transactions, operations personnel can manage the supply chain to predict production requirements and select transportation options that minimize the need for costly expedited shipping. SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and Power Systems offers the IT department as many benefits as it does the business. SAP HANA runs on all IBM POWER8 processor-based servers, giving IT planners tremendous flexibility in choosing and deploying right-sized infrastructure for their data analytics needs. When combined with the reliability, availability, and serviceability of IBM Power Systems, the solution helps your IT department offer a stable and robust service to the business. While other SAP HANA solutions typically package the database as an appliance, this solution offers tailored data center integration. The tailored data center approach combines the simplicity of pre-selected configurations with the ability to use your existing resources and modify the installation to match your requirements and environment. By taking advantage of your current IBM Power Systems investments to run SAP HANA, you could save significantly on operating expenses. With Power Systems, you can run other applications (including other SAP applications) on the same server as HANA. By consolidating on a single server platform, you save on maintenance and administration and avoid increasing the complexity and footprint of your data center. Meanwhile, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server gives you an enterprise operating system without the high licensing expenses. Together, this approach can reduce your total cost of ownership so the cost of implementing your solution does not get in the way of reaping value from it. Implementing SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and IBM Power Systems In this solution, SAP HANA runs on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications which runs directly on the IBM Power Systems platform. Traditionally, SAP HANA was offered as a closed appliance. This architecture allowed SAP to ensure that a customer s configuration changes did not damage the performance and reliability SAP promised. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications provides a foundation for these appliance implementations. So, although server appliance versions of SAP HANA are available, they limit you to specific storage and networking configurations. In contrast, this solution takes the tailored data center integration approach so that you can fit SAP HANA into your current environment, while maintaining the performance and reliability that you need. 3

6 Figure 1 shows what the solution looks like when run by itself on an IBM Power Systems server. Figure 1 SAP HANA running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and IBM Power Systems You can connect SAP HANA to your current sources of data and use a variety of business analytics applications to access the data in HANA and provide the user interface and answers your workforce needs. You can also take advantage of the capabilities of Power Systems servers to run multiple workloads and use it to support your SAP HANA implementation and the systems HANA connects to, shown in Figure 2. Figure 2 SAP HANA and other applications running on multiple instances of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on a single IBM Power Systems server 4 Getting Fast Business Insight with SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and IBM Power Systems

7 If you have a Power Systems server running a SAP or third-party application that you want to connect to SAP HANA, you can use the available capacity of that Power Systems server to run your HANA systems as well, described in Virtualization on page 5. Fitting the solution to your environment Tailored data center integration enables you to match your implementation to your data center. SAP HANA runs on all IBM POWER8 processor-based servers. In addition, IBM provides three starter configurations that you can customize and modify according to your needs. These configurations enable you to quickly optimize and deploy SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems while maintaining the ability to add virtualized workloads and capacity on demand. Power Systems included are: IBM Power Systems S824, with 24 cores and a minimum of 512GB RAM IBM Power Systems E850, with 32 cores and a minimum of 1TB fully active RAM IBM Power Systems E870, with 40 to 80 cores and a minimum of 1TB fully active RAM As shown in the Figure 3, each configuration can be expanded with additional RAM. Figure 3 The three IBM configuration options for tailored data center integration IBM has similar ways to purchase its largest enterprise-class system, the IBM Power System E880, for SAP HANA workloads. Virtualization You can run other SAP solutions or your business analytics applications on the same Power Systems server as SAP HANA using the built-in virtualization available through IBM Power Systems and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications allows you to take advantage of the benefits of either IBM PowerVM or PowerKVM and supports PowerVM features, such as 5

8 active memory sharing and dynamic memory remove. With SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and Power VM, your virtualization layer takes up fewer computing resources. Virtualizing workloads in this way means that you can use fewer cores to meet your business needs. High performance features The newest generation of Power Systems servers are built on POWER8. POWER8 is the first processor designed for big data, with massive parallelism and bandwidth for real-time analytics results. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications takes advantage of some of the unique properties of the IBM Power Systems server to further optimize the solution for big data. IBM Power Systems offer the processors, memory, and cache you need to take full advantage of SAP HANA: Up to 1,536 threads per system, for flexible, fast execution of analytics algorithms Up to 16 TB of memory, providing the large, fast workspace crucial for in-memory databases like SAP HANA Up to 224 MB cache per socket to ensure continuous data load for fast responses Up to 230 gigabytes per second of sustained memory bandwidth, providing a constant stream of data to allow all execution threads to proceed at peak efficiency These performance features mean that your queries on your SAP HANA implementation return much faster. In fact, SAP benchmarks show that IBM and SUSE achieved a world record in the SAP Business Warehouse Enhanced Mixed Workload Standard Application Benchmark 1 at 2 billion records, demonstrating twice the performance per core over previous benchmarks. 2 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications offers tuning options for performance gains in I/O, memory and compute-intensive workloads. Features, such as the flexible large page support allows you to tune SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications to match your SAP HANA workload. Running SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and Power Systems can help you consolidate and reduce the number of systems in your data center, eliminating complexity, minimizing points of failure, reducing latency, and simplifying management. High availability features SAP HANA provides multiple options to implement high availability: System Replication with data-preload (extremely short RTO) System Replication without data-preload (longer RTO compared to data-preload, but less memory requirements on failover host) Storage Replication, host auto-failover or data backup (long RTO) 1 SAP BW Enhanced Mixed Load (BW EML) Standard Application Benchmark Results, 2 Announcing General Availability of SAP HANA on IBM Power System, Kyle Garman, Aug 21, s/ 6 Getting Fast Business Insight with SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and IBM Power Systems

9 The SAP HANA System Replication feature requires additional high availability cluster software to automate the failover process. IBM Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms has a SAP HANA System Replication high availability policy for IBM Power Systems. 3 Third party high availability cluster software is also available. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications comes with the SUSE High Availability extension. With high availability cluster software in place you can minimize the impact of updates and changes and prepare your systems for natural disasters and other unplanned interruptions. When you depend on analytics for business decisions, any downtime can hurt your operations. Downtime might mean the inability to access critical systems, such as healthcare patient information or the inability to identify fraud, giving attackers more time to cause damage. Minimize the impact of downtime Avoiding and surviving unplanned downtime, whether it is caused by a hardware failure, a natural disaster, or a malicious attack, means you can protect both your reputation and revenue. SAP HANA system replication is one way to protect your HANA instance. Normally, this type of replication would be a manual process, but a high availability cluster implementation makes it faster and easier to fail over and recover your in-memory data. The high availability features in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications support the capabilities of Power Systems for switching the SAP HANA server to a backup server for high availability and disaster recovery. As your organization comes to realize the value of SAP HANA, it will rely more and more on the solution. Having the high availability eliminates time consuming manual processes and saves precious time in protecting your organization's data and maintaining its operations. Flexibility and support Building your SAP HANA implementation on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and Power can save your IT team time and effort. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications comes with time-saving installation, configuration, deployment, and administration tools, all powered by the market s fastest integrated packet management subsystem, Zypper. As your business grows, your SAP HANA deployment can grow with it. IBM Power Systems offer capacity on demand options. With capacity on demand, you have memory and cores available in your Power Systems server that you can activate and use when your organization needs them, such as in the following instances: Elastic capacity on demand gives you temporary use of cores or memory. You rent the capacity by the day. IBM tracks your use for quarterly billing. Utility capacity on demand automatically delivers additional CPU core capacity temporarily. Your extra CPU use is measured in processor minutes. These cores are available for virtual machines and you can prepay or pay afterwards. Trial capacity on demand allows you to test additional processors or memory. You can activate available processors and memory partially or entirely for a fixed time. Trial 3 IBM Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms - SAP HANA System Replication high availability policy, 7

10 capacity on demand requires no formal commitment, meaning your organization can experiment to find the best solution for your unique business challenges. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications offers you integrated priority support from both SUSE and SAP for your SAP HANA deployment. It is a range of support options that includes 24/7 electronic and phone support with industry-leading response times and instant access to all of the latest fixes and patches through a separate, dedicated update channel. Industry partnerships SUSE and IBM have worked together for more than 20 years and both companies have long standing relationships with SAP. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the SAP development platform for Linux, and SAP and SUSE have a close joint testing and development relationship that starts at the SAP Linux Lab in Germany. SUSE was the first to develop Linux for Power Systems and continues to support new Power Systems features. IBM and SUSE work together to maintain a joint software development center in Toronto. These partnerships provide a smoother implementation experience for you. SAP and IBM have worked together closely on SAP HANA implementations. Because IBM Power Systems comply with SAP HANA system KPI requirements, tools and processes defined by SAP, you can use SAP tools when planning your HANA implementation on Power Systems, including the SAP HANA Quicksizer, SAP database sizing tools, and the Hardware Configuration Check Tool. Conclusion Business insight is of no use if it arrives late. SAP HANA offers organizations, such as yours the chance to discover new business insights faster, in a way that allows you to change and innovate quicker than the competition. To reap the full benefits of SAP HANA, however, you must run it on the right platform. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and IBM Power Systems form the ideal combination of operating system and server platform to maximize the performance and reliability of your SAP HANA implementation. In this paper you have seen how the high performance and high availability features of this solution can provide superior access to business data for your organization. The partnerships between SAP, SUSE, and IBM have helped these organizations optimize the solution and offer convenient configuration options that allow you to take advantage of your previous investments and make adjustments for your unique environment. With SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and IBM Power Systems, your organization can take full advantage of SAP HANA. This combination means that when new business challenges surface, you have the data you need to make rapid decisions and drive your organization forward. Get a feel for what SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and IBM Power Systems would look like in your environment by contacting SUSE today. 8 Getting Fast Business Insight with SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and IBM Power Systems

11 Other resources for more information Authors For more information and contacts: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications website SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on IBM Power website SAP HANA System Replication on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems website and solution brief SAP HANA TDI overview presentation You can also contact us at: SUSE LINUX GmbH Maxfeldstr Nürnberg, Germany Tel: +49 (0) This guide was produced by a specialist working with the International Technical Support Organization (ITSO). Michael Tabron is a Product Marketing Manager for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server solutions at SUSE, Gmbh. He has worldwide responsibility for marketing programs, campaigns, and collateral for solutions that are associated with SAP software and IBM Power servers. He has over 30 years of IT industry experience in product marketing and development. He started his career at IBM as a networking hardware design engineer, eventually moving to various roles in product marketing and channels marketing. Prior to joining SUSE in 2015, he was the Product and Solution Manager for analytics solutions on IBM Power Systems servers. Now you can become a published author, too! Here s an opportunity to spotlight your skills, grow your career, and become a published author all at the same time! Join an ITSO residency project and help write a book in your area of expertise, while honing your experience using leading-edge technologies. Your efforts will help to increase product acceptance and customer satisfaction, as you expand your network of technical contacts and relationships. Residencies run from two to six weeks in length, and you can participate either in person or as a remote resident working from your home base. Find out more about the residency program, browse the residency index, and apply online at: ibm.com/redbooks/residencies.html 9

12 Stay connected to IBM Redbooks publications Find us on Facebook: Follow us on Twitter: Look for us on LinkedIn: Explore new IBM Redbooks publications, residencies, and workshops with the IBM Redbooks weekly newsletter: Stay current on recent Redbooks publications with RSS Feeds: 10 Getting Fast Business Insight with SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and IBM Power Systems

13 Notices This information was developed for products and services offered in the U.S.A. IBM may not offer the products, services, or features discussed in this document in other countries. Consult your local IBM representative for information on the products and services currently available in your area. Any reference to an IBM product, program, or service is not intended to state or imply that only that IBM product, program, or service may be used. Any functionally equivalent product, program, or service that does not infringe any IBM intellectual property right may be used instead. However, it is the user's responsibility to evaluate and verify the operation of any non-ibm product, program, or service. IBM may have patents or pending patent applications covering subject matter described in this document. The furnishing of this document does not grant you any license to these patents. You can send license inquiries, in writing, to: IBM Director of Licensing, IBM Corporation, North Castle Drive, Armonk, NY U.S.A. The following paragraph does not apply to the United Kingdom or any other country where such provisions are inconsistent with local law: INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION PROVIDES THIS PUBLICATION "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Some states do not allow disclaimer of express or implied warranties in certain transactions, therefore, this statement may not apply to you. This information could include technical inaccuracies or typographical errors. Changes are periodically made to the information herein; these changes will be incorporated in new editions of the publication. IBM may make improvements and/or changes in the product(s) and/or the program(s) described in this publication at any time without notice. Any references in this information to non-ibm Web sites are provided for convenience only and do not in any manner serve as an endorsement of those Web sites. The materials at those Web sites are not part of the materials for this IBM product and use of those Web sites is at your own risk. IBM may use or distribute any of the information you supply in any way it believes appropriate without incurring any obligation to you. Any performance data contained herein was determined in a controlled environment. Therefore, the results obtained in other operating environments may vary significantly. Some measurements may have been made on development-level systems and there is no guarantee that these measurements will be the same on generally available systems. Furthermore, some measurements may have been estimated through extrapolation. Actual results may vary. Users of this document should verify the applicable data for their specific environment. Information concerning non-ibm products was obtained from the suppliers of those products, their published announcements or other publicly available sources. IBM has not tested those products and cannot confirm the accuracy of performance, compatibility or any other claims related to non-ibm products. Questions on the capabilities of non-ibm products should be addressed to the suppliers of those products. This information contains examples of data and reports used in daily business operations. To illustrate them as completely as possible, the examples include the names of individuals, companies, brands, and products. All of these names are fictitious and any similarity to the names and addresses used by an actual business enterprise is entirely coincidental. COPYRIGHT LICENSE: This information contains sample application programs in source language, which illustrate programming techniques on various operating platforms. You may copy, modify, and distribute these sample programs in any form without payment to IBM, for the purposes of developing, using, marketing or distributing application programs conforming to the application programming interface for the operating platform for which the sample programs are written. These examples have not been thoroughly tested under all conditions. IBM, therefore, cannot guarantee or imply reliability, serviceability, or function of these programs. Copyright IBM Corp All rights reserved. 11

14 This document, REDP , was created or updated on December 8, Trademarks IBM, the IBM logo, and ibm.com are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. These and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with the appropriate symbol ( or ), indicating US registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at The following terms are trademarks of the International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both: Redbooks (logo) IBM Power Systems POWER8 PowerVM Redbooks Redguide The following terms are trademarks of other companies: Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both. Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. 12 Getting Fast Business Insight with SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and IBM Power Systems

15

16 Back cover REDP ISBN X Printed in U.S.A. ibm.com/redbooks