white paper hpe data platform for sap hana · the hpe data platform for sap hana provides an...

© 2018 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

End-to-end Data Lifecycle Management By Michael Leone, ESG Senior Analyst; and Leah Matuson, Research Analyst April 2018 This ESG White Paper was commissioned by HPE and is distributed under license from ESG.

Enterprise Strategy Group | Getting to the bigger truth.™

HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA

White Paper

White Paper: HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA 2


Contents

IT Challenges ........................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Complexity Extends to Data Analytics and Business Intelligence Environments................................................................ 3

Digital Transformation and Data-driven Initiatives ................................................................................................................ 3

HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA ........................................................................................................................................... 4

HPE and SAP HANA, Better Together .................................................................................................................................. 5

The HPE Ecosystem of Products and Solutions ....................................................................................................................... 5

HPE Compute .................................................................................................................................................................. 5

HPE Primary Storage ....................................................................................................................................................... 5

HPE Data Protection Storage .......................................................................................................................................... 6

Management, Services, and Support .............................................................................................................................. 7

Better Business Outcomes ...................................................................................................................................................... 7

Retail - Dansk ...................................................................................................................................................................... 7

Travel - Prescient................................................................................................................................................................. 8

Distribution - Multipharma ................................................................................................................................................. 9

The Bigger Truth .................................................................................................................................................................... 10



IT Challenges

In today’s dynamic business world, the speed at which a business can gain insight into its own operations and customers

can make all the difference to its survival. That ability enables the business to remain efficient, relevant, and competitive in

its respective market. But with a majority of organizations relying on IT to ensure they remain agile enough to support the

dynamic needs of the business, the complexity of IT environments continues to be put under a microscope. In fact, recent

ESG research shows that 68% of surveyed IT professionals believe their organization’s IT environment is either more

complex or significantly more complex today than it was two years ago.1 The number of components from multiple

vendors, the different internal IT groups managing said components, and the different support centers all tie back to this

growing level of complexity. And that’s just looking at on-premises. Factoring in the cloud, those challenges are

compounded due to a different consumption model and management structure.

Complexity Extends to Data Analytics and Business Intelligence Environments

Looking at big data and analytics, the challenges associated with complexity get even worse with the sheer number of tools

and elements across the data analytics workflow that are leveraging the siloed IT infrastructure. Businesses are dealing

with a variety of data sources consisting of structured, unstructured, and multi-structured data that make data integration

complex. And on top of that, the sheer magnitude of data from the varying data sources, along with a multitude of

separate data repositories across the siloed IT infrastructure, make it extremely challenging to analyze data, gain

actionable insights in a reasonable timeframe to benefit the business never mind the efforts to ensure end-to-end data

integrity and data protection.

In fact, when it comes to data analytics challenges, ESG research shows that the most commonly identified challenge was

the complexity of data integration (which stands to reason due to the number of data sources involved). Further, nearly

one-third of respondents said data set sizes limit their ability to perform analytics, and 25% stated they had difficulty

running analytics across disparate/siloed IT systems.2

Digital Transformation and Data-driven Initiatives

Many companies are on the road to digital transformation. And while digital transformation means different things to

different companies, a key part of digital transformation is becoming more data driven—using data analytics, real-time

business intelligence, and data center modernization to obtain new business insights faster, more easily, and more reliably.

According to ESG research, using data analytics for real-time business intelligence and customer insight is not only a top

2018 IT initiative, but also among the leading forces driving IT spending. Data center modernization also appeared as one

of the top five most often cited important IT initiatives for this year.3

For data analytics specifically, it is an umbrella term, and it’s not unusual for organizations to take on a number of

initiatives under that umbrella. Based on the research, nearly half (45%) of survey respondents said business intelligence is

an area of data analytics where they will make the most significant investments over the next 12-18 months (see Figure 1).4

1 Source: ESG Research Report, 2018 IT Spending Intentions Survey, February 2018. 2 Source: ESG Research Report, Enterprise Big Data, Business Intelligence, and Analytics Trends: Redux, July 2016. 3 Source: ESG Research Report, 2018 IT Spending Intentions Survey, February 2018. 4 Source: ESG Master Survey Results, 2018 IT Spending Intentions Survey, December 2017.

https://research.esg-global.com/reportaction/2018IT_SpendingIntentions/Toc

https://research.esg-global.com/reportaction/RR_EBDT07292016/Toc

https://research.esg-global.com/reportaction/2018IT_SpendingIntentions/Toc

https://research.esg-global.com/reportaction/2018ITSpendingIntentions/Toc



Figure 1. 2018 Data Analytics Spending Priorities

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group

HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA

The HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA provides an end-to-end data lifecycle management solution that enables

organizations to yield better business outcomes. The comprehensive data platform concentrates on reducing complexity,

improving efficiency, and reducing risk within constantly evolving business intelligence environments. Through a complete

ecosystem of HPE products across hardware, software, networking services, management, and support, organizations gain

an end-to-end solution from a proven vendor that optimizes data management and provides an effortless set of data

protection capabilities that meet the dynamic needs of a modern, data-driven organization.

Figure 2. HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group

10%

14%

16%

17%

18%

20%

22%

30%

31%

31%

32%

45%

Spark platform(s)

NoSQL databases

Stream processing or streaming analytics

Hadoop platform(s)

Machine learning

Edge analytics for IoT

Data preparation

Data warehouse

SQL databases

Cloud-based analytics

Data integration

Business intelligence

In which of the following areas of data analytics will your organization make the mostsignificant investments over the next 12-18 months? (Percent of respondents, N=373,

five responses accepted)



HPE and SAP HANA, Better Together

Both HPE and SAP are proven technology vendors that have enjoyed a long, collaborative partnership built upon nearly

three decades of providing customers with innovative technology solutions. Being a trusted partner of SAP, HPE serves as

an SAP-preferred infrastructure partner, with HPE boasting more than 12,000 SAP HANA deployments with 2,400

customers running SAP applications on HPE infrastructure. In fact, HPE runs the world’s largest HANA system in production

with a total of 130 TB of HANA data. According to HPE, it is the only vendor offering a fully automated, failover, and data

recovery solution for mission-critical SAP HANA deployments.

SAP HANA benefits from HPE’s broad hardware and software portfolio to simplify and consolidate SAP deployments,

reducing data redundancy, providing real-time insights that enable businesses to discover and capitalize on untapped

opportunities, and optimizing business services to enhance the user

experiences. And with HPE having more than 100 dedicated SAP subject

matter experts, over 200 SAP and HPE collaborative engineers, and a cloud-

based proof-of-concept lab, customers gain peace of mind knowing their

data is in the right hands. HPE has witnessed its customers realize such

significant benefits that it is implementing a massive SAP HANA deployment

within its own organization to consistently drive better business outcomes

in a timely manner. And this move isn’t motivated solely by self-interest:

HPE will be deploying the latest SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA on the

latest HPE hardware and taking any lessons learned to its customers.

The HPE Ecosystem of Products and Solutions

HPE offers a complete ecosystem of products, solutions, and partnerships to deliver a comprehensive data platform that

supports end-to-end data lifecycle management. The HPE ecosystem encompasses compute, primary storage, data

protection storage, networking, management, and services/support, all of which work together to deliver on the promise

of optimizing the management and protection of data over its lifecycle. Assisting with data optimization and management

through predictive analytics is HPE InfoSight, watching over the infrastructure to predict, prevent, and resolve issues

before administrators even know there is an issue. This helps to reduce risk by preventing downtime of critical business

applications. IT administrators gain peace of mind knowing HPE InfoSight takes cares of everything. And in the off chance

that the problem cannot be resolved automatically, IT will be quickly alerted to the pending issue. While InfoSight has

already had a powerful impact on Nimble customers, it has recently expanded to 3PAR, and will soon be integrated into

HPE servers and networking. Furthermore, HPE’s ability to reduce complexity, improve efficiency, and reduce risk across

the complete infrastructure ensures customers that the livelihood of their business, the data, is in good hands.

HPE Compute

Compute is the core of HPE Solutions for SAP HANA, and HPE has a number of compute offerings—as purely compute or as

part of converged systems. Designed for flexibility and scalability, these offerings allow organizations to choose the most

appropriate solution for their unique hardware, software, and business intelligence requirements—from the cost-

optimized HPE ProLiant DL380 Compute Blocks for entry-level workloads, through the HPE Superdome Flex TDI Compute

Blocks for mission-critical workloads, to the HPE ConvergedSystem solutions for SAP HANA.

HPE Primary Storage

HPE has been consistently responsive to changing SAP HANA market trends. A market shift from appliance to tailored data

center integration (TDI) provided HPE with the impetus to add flash-enabled modular storage arrays (MSA) and Nimble

Storage to its product offerings. Seeing the demand for a broader storage portfolio, HPE now provides end-to-end flash for

SAP HANA, as well as supporting flash-integrated data protection for SAP HANA. HPE’s all-flash storage solutions allow

HPE’s Testament to SAP

“We're taking the latest S4/HANA, deploying it

on the latest and greatest HPE hardware and

implementing it all first internally. We’re going

from over 100 SAP instances to a single

instance. Then we’ll take everything we learn

and give it to the customers.”

- HPE Pointnext



organizations to buy what they need, while staying within budget. From the cost-efficient HPE MSA Storage block to the

high-end HPE XP7 storage, HPE runs the full scale of storage required for an SAP HANA deployment. Additionally, 3PAR

StoreServ All Flash Storage has been integrated into HPE ConvergedSystem solutions, which serve as an ideal option for

many customers diving into SAP for the first time.

Note the key capabilities of HPE’s flagship offerings for SAP HANA:

• HPE Nimble storage, offering advanced predictive analytics, cloud-ready all-flash and hybrid flash and application

integrated data protection.

• HPE 3PAR StoreServ, delivering highly resilient and scalable storage with a low total cost of ownership, workload

sharing, and snapshot-based, fully integrated data protection for mission-critical SAP HANA.

HPE Data Protection Storage

Business continuity is essential to a successful SAP HANA deployment, as organizations require constant availability and

accessibility to their data. That’s where HPE’s business continuity solutions for SAP HANA come in. Organizations gain high-

performance persistence, mission-critical HPE software, and fully integrated data protection solutions purpose-built for

SAP. And by leveraging HPE Pointnext, organizations have a go-to for advisement, implementation, and support. Put it all

together and customers benefit from a solution that satisfies the needs of a modern business embracing hybrid IT while

ensuring data is protected wherever it resides: fast and non-disruptive backup and recovery, simplified and effortless

disaster recovery, and optimized data protection for hybrid IT environments, drastically reducing the risk of downtime,

while improving operational and infrastructure efficiency.

Figure 3 highlights the components that work together in an SAP HANA environment to meet the business continuity

requirements of an always-on business.

1. HPE 3PAR StoreServ All-Flash for high-performance and high-resilience data persistence, delivering on the

efficiency and uptime requirements, while ensuring mission-critical RTOs and RPOs can be met across both SAP

and non-SAP shared storage.

2. HPE Serviceguard for intelligent and fully automated HA, and DR failover and failback that is built for SAP HANA.

3. HPE StoreOnce with Recovery Manager Central and Catalyst Plug-in for flash- and application-integrated data

protection.

a. HPE StoreOnce serves as a disk backup solution for entry to enterprise-level markets and delivers federated

deduplication for capacity savings and failover with auto-restart to eliminate failed backups. Further, it

enables backups to external object storage (on-premises or off-premises), and assessment tools to help

organizations understand their backup environment.

b. HPE Recovery Manager Central for SAP HANA delivers flash-integrated data protection that meets the

simplicity, efficiency, and reliability requirements of SAP deployments. By directly moving snapshots to an

HPE StoreOnce backup target, backup/restore speeds are significantly increased compared to traditional

approaches.

c. HPE StoreOnce Catalyst Plug-in for SAP HANA integrates with the database’s native backup tool, Backint,

and provides efficient data protection without the need for other backup/recovery software. Additionally,

organizations benefit from faster application-consistent backups, and more DBA visibility and control for

data protection tasks, including the incorporation of deduplication and replication management.

d. HPE Cloud Bank Storage is a feature of HPE StoreOnce Systems that delivers highly efficient data transfer to,

and storage in, the cloud. The combination of the HPE StoreOnce deduplication and cloud storage delivers a

low cost, high performance and zero risk disaster recovery and long term retention solution.



4. HPE Pointnext serves as a go-to service for organizations to receive advice from HPE on their SAP solutions, from

design and implementation to management and support.

Figure 3. HPE Business Continuity Solutions for SAP

Source: HPE

Management, Services, and Support

HPE has comprehensive management tools and a 24/7 global services/support team. HPE’s Pointnext Services organization

is designed to assist companies with their HPE SAP HANA deployments from start to finish—from advisory and

transformation services, through consumption-based IT and professional services, to operational services. Within the

Pointnext portfolio is GreenLake, HPE’s infrastructure service and a suite of on-premises, consumption-based solutions for

big data, backup, recovery, database platforms, SAP HANA, and edge computing. HPE GreenLake leverages HPE GreenLake

Flex Capacity, which offers on-demand capacity and choice of infrastructure so organizations can enjoy the responsiveness

and cost-effectiveness of the public cloud, with the security and performance of an on-premises data center.

Better Business Outcomes

To understand how HPE and SAP continue to meet the demands of dynamic businesses across a large customer base, ESG

spoke with the HPE Pointnext Services team to shed light on and quantify where a few of their many customers have had

success in deploying HPE SAP HANA solutions across a few of the many key verticals.

Retail - Dansk

When Dansk, Denmark’s leading retailer with more than 1,400 stores (including four chains and several ecommerce

businesses) saw a shrinking bottom line and low growth, it knew it needed to

act. Knowing what customers are buying, and using that information to take

action, is essential to keeping the bottom line healthy. But obtaining this

information was difficult, and the company’s IT department was the

bottleneck, unable to efficiently collect massive volumes of data, apply

analytics, and produce timely reports so the retailer could stock its shelves

with products its customers wanted to buy.

Educating Customers

“One thing we do is have knowledge

transfers. We are educating operators,

system administrators, and even the end-

users on how to best use the system –

reducing risk and smoothing integrations.”

- HPE Pointnext



Customer Requirements

• Improve scalability.

• Minimize costs.

• Achieve better IT agility and flexibility.

HPE Solution

• HPE ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA with HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage and HPE StoreOnce backup and recovery.

• Flexible, pay-as-you-go consumption model through HPE Flexible Capacity.

Business Benefits

• Faster time to value with point-of-sales reporting speed increasing by 30-40%.

• Maximized revenue and minimized waste through better, more informed decisions regarding daily inventory.

• Improved productivity through faster report generation that saved 200 staff hours per day, freeing up staff to be

involved in more strategic initiatives.

• Elimination of the IT bottleneck by empowering IT to use the system as efficiently as possible, turning them into agile

analytics providers and enablers.

Travel - Prescient

Prescient, a global operations and solutions integrator aids its clients by identifying and analyzing risk associated with

domestic and international business dealings. The company needed assistance in bringing Prescient Traveler, its new

disruptive offering, to market. The product relies on real-time data aggregation and analyses (big data analytics) to help

individuals and companies mitigate risk and keep them safe. It was essential that their requirements be met in order to

build an effective, real-time comprehensive threat picture of the areas in which corporate and individual travelers are

visiting, (i.e., provide situational awareness and accountability) so that they could stay safe anywhere in the world.


• Compute massive amounts of data across a variety of

sources with high performance.

• Maintain constant up-time through a no-fail high-

availability solution.

• Achieve real-time geospatial and natural language

processing.

HPE Solution

• HPE ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA with HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage and HPE StoreOnce backup and recovery.

• HPE Factory Express prebuilt, turnkey design, which was purpose-built and optimized for SAP HANA workloads to

enable faster data-driven decision making and innovation.

• Financing through HPE Financial Services for maximum flexibility with options to support all future growth scenarios.

Business Benefits

• Efficient disruptive product design with advanced big data support, resulting in a market leadership position.

Improving Performance to Improve Services “Most customers expect an incredible performance boost

because of the in-memory based database as opposed to a

legacy underlying database. What surprises customers is that

they're able to change not just that things will happen faster,

but in some cases, they can change the kind of services they

provide their customers because of the performance

improvement.”

– HPE Pointnext



• Higher operational capacity, allowing IT to scale out to 4x the initial operational capacity.

• Improved workload performance that increased productivity by 39%.

• Significant capacity and costs savings via a reduction in SAP HANA backups from 23 TB to 1.8 TB of actual data

through HPE StoreOnce deduplication.

• Confidence and peace of mind that the product would perform without fail thanks to HPE global support services.

Distribution - Multipharma

Egyptian distributor Multipharma supplies pharmaceuticals, paramedic and lab equipment, supplements, and cosmetics to

El Ezaby, the nation’s leading drugstore chain with more than 80 retail pharmacies. Multipharma planned to expand its

network of El Ezaby pharmacies by 50%, but its IT infrastructure couldn’t handle the massive increase in data necessary to

manage supply chains, inventory, and customer relationships. It needed to quickly modernize its IT environment before it

lost customers as well as revenue.


• Provide superior customer service.

• Improve organizational efficiency.

• Increase IT agility to be more responsive to the business.

• Increase performance and scalability.

HPE Solution

• HPE Integrity Superdome X servers.

• HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7400 Storage.

• HPE StoreOnce Backup and Recovery.

Business Benefits

• Increased performance and scalability allowed the company to ensure the highest levels of efficiency and

responsiveness to customers, enabling them to deliver superior customer service.

• Data consistency and high availability to deliver an always-on business, ensuring the company will be able to maintain

business continuity and revenue streams in the event of power outages or component malfunctions.

• Improved performance and reduced latency, with the company achieving 12-18x faster transaction processing—what

used to take two to three hours now takes ten minutes.

• Improved data collection times by 12-24x—what used to take a full day now takes one to two hours, improving

employee productivity.

A Mature, Resilient Ecosystem

“Organizations depend on the HPE hardware. Because of

its resilience, uptime has never been an issue. We’ve

gone through churn over as much as 20 years to build a

resilient infrastructure”

- HPE Pointnext



The Bigger Truth

As organizations pursue opportunities for digital transformation, leveraging an end-to-end data platform that simplifies,

optimizes, and reduces risk across the lifecycle of data—from storing data in its primary format through backup and

protection to access, integration, and analysis—is appealing to all organizations. And with the attempt to be more data

driven by improving data analytics for real-time business intelligence and customer insight, organizations require a

comprehensive solution or data platform that simplifies processes, optimizes existing assets and resources, and reduces

risk across the lifecycle of all data. Organizations want a solution free of headaches that just works. Enter HPE.

Together, HPE and SAP HANA provide a complete data platform that enables organizations to use data analytics and real-

time business intelligence to obtain new business insights faster, more easily, and more reliably through an end-to-end

solution. Whether piecing together ideal components on their own, deploying a purpose-built converged solution, or

leveraging HPE Pointnext services to take care of all of it, the HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA continues to meet the

demands of organizations of all sizes in all markets. And HPE helps its 2,400+ existing customers evolve, maintain their

edge, remain competitive, and deliver next-generation applications that meet the dynamic needs of the business.

Learn more

All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject

to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this

publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express

consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable,

criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at 508.482.0188.

www.esg-global.com [email protected] P. 508.482.0188

Enterprise Strategy Group is an IT analyst, research, validation, and strategy firm that provides actionable insight and intelligence to the global IT community.


https://www.hpe.com/us/en/storage/mission-critical-applications.html#tab=TAB5

white paper hpe data platform for sap hana · the hpe data platform for sap hana provides an...

Documents