Over the last two years, EMC’s IT organization has undergone the strategic process of replacing our legacy ERP environment with a new one from SAP. I’m thrilled to report … mission accomplished. In the process, we have significantly transformed and optimized several dimensions of EMC’s business. SAP’s HANA in-memory data management and application platform helps us mitigate performance risks associated with the heavy, end-of-quarter priority reporting to address real-time business critical quote-to-order, manufacturing, and shipping processes. For example, by migrating SAP Business Planning and Consulting (BPC) to SAP HANA, EMC IT was able to reduce monthly forecasting runs from 12 hours to only 3 hours, an improvement of 4x. As a result, these faster BPC executions enable the business to run more planning iterations and explore more “what if” scenarios to optimize EMC’s overall business execution.
Similar to many IT organizations, EMC IT continually strives to unlock greater levels of more performance and value from our systems to provide users, partners, and customers with greater flexibility and agility to more cost-effectively run their business. As EMC moves toward a Software Defined Data Center architecture (SDDC) with the introduction of virtualized SAP HANA on VMware, EMC is another step closer.
What does this mean for IT organizations?
With VMware’s virtualized SAP HANA offering , IT organizations like EMC’s can also:
1. Reduce the TCO and time to SAP HANA deployment by up to 80%! The provisioning of a new SAP HANA node is a simple VMware task that uses copy/clone technology tightly integrated with EMC storage arrays.
2. Enable live migration of virtual SAP HANA instances using vMotion. Recent benchmarks validated that a 512GB virtual SAP HANA instance under a heavy load can be cloned and copied with vMotion among datacenters in fewer than 10 minutes. Now planned hardware maintenance can be completed easily, without any application production downtime!
3. Avoid additional costs for hardware appliances by using their existing HANA certified server and storage, via HANA’s Tailored Datacenter Integration methodology, to increase ROI by up to 40%! EMC IT now uses VMware’s HA to bolster availability of Virtualized SAP HANA applications, versus a fully provisioned standby node in the appliance-based physical HA model. EMC uses VMware’s HA because the Virtualized HANA instance is automatically restarted during a server failure.
Like other IT organizations, we are looking to maximize ROI on our HANA implementation. Deploying VMware Virtualized SAP HANA has allowed us to minimize our implementation costs through flexible resource allocation and automation capabilities.
In essence, virtual SAP HANA on VMware provides choice to users like EMC IT. EMC IT can use SAP’s HANA cloud offering for testing or to add capacity on demand. Or, it can use the appliance model, like VCE’s Vblock Specialized SAP HANA System to minimize the risk to setup the entire virtualization environment for SAP HANA. Either way, IT shops like EMC win with virtual SAP HANA on VMware.
We are excited that the SAP and VMware partnership is paying these dividends for innovation and simplicity in the whole application stack and in our journey towards a Software defined Data Center.
Want to learn more? Read the latest on EMC’s SAP HANA implementation.