The 2019 SAPPHIRE NOW theme, “Bringing the Intelligent Enterprise to Life” combined with a more detailed event description “this event delivers a practical path for companies to become an intelligent enterprise driving meaningful business outcomes that delight customers and support organization growth” is a perfect encapsulation of what Dell Technologies delivers for customers taking this journey with SAP.
My comments reflect only a small, but important, discussion of the key areas where Dell Technologies can drive technology, performance and financial value for customers operating SAP landscapes today or those interested in the transformational value of SAP landscapes. To get the entire experience, please visit us at @DellTech booth #2230.
The first step in the journey is reducing TCO and simplifying IT for SAP landscapes.
Historically, IT has run SAP production and non-production systems on siloed infrastructure, whether by design — to protect production performance — or ad hoc as new projects get added. The result is well understood – higher TCO with strained IT budgets and valuable resources allocated to spending time maintaining, monitoring and managing SAP system landscapes.
Dell solutions provide a modern infrastructure foundation designed to invigorate legacy SAP ERP with reduced cost and ready to power the Intelligent Enterprise with S/4 HANA.
An emerging area of great interest for simplifying IT operations is running SAP HANA on software defined infrastructure.
Today we have great news! Our SAP HANA certified hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) portfolio has grown to include VxFlex to run SAP HANA in production.
VxFlex creates a server-based SAN by combining virtualization software, known as VxFlex OS, with Dell PowerEdge servers and unified management to deliver flexible, scalable performance, and capacity on demand for SAP HANA.
Dell VxFlex HCI System for SAP HANA
The SAP HANA certification encompasses the HCI architecture with VMware vSphere hypervisor and VxFlex OS software defined storage. The certification supports VxFlex systems configured with Intel Xeon SP (Skylake) CPU based PowerEdge servers, including the dual-socket R640 and R740xd and the four-socket R840.
Now let’s take a turn and look at the business – it is all about fueling innovation with intelligence and visibility to actionable data.
Emerging data-driven use cases mean combining SAP HANA business data with external big data, machine learning and AI to fuel intelligent application and business processes. This results in a proliferation of data being aggregated, pipelined, managed and stored from the edge to the core.
Realizing a comprehensive IT framework to orchestrate data management across distributed complex IT landscapes on scale-out secure infrastructure is a key foundation, Dell has partnered with SAP for one of the broadest portfolios of SAP certified infrastructure for SAP HANA and SAP Leonardo IoT.
For managing diverse data sources and applications at the “core”
We know that SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA is foundational for intelligent enterprise applications at the core (check certified infrastructure here), but not all data is stored in SAP HANA. What about big data located outside SAP HANA?
Dell and SAP have you covered;
- SAP Data Hub provides governance and orchestration for data refinement and enrichment by pipelining complex data operations.
- For storing IoT and big data outside SAP HANA, Dell Isilon scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) provides a secure scale-out platform to build a data lake and persist enterprise files of all sizes that scale from terabytes to petabytes in a single cluster.
What about accelerating decision making at the edge?
Not all IoT data will be processed at the core data center in SAP HANA. IoT edge computing will include SAP applications and use cases supporting decisions that need to be made locally with smaller subsets of aggregated data being transmitted to the core.
Dell Technologies and SAP have you covered;
- SAP Edge Services extends the Intelligent Enterprise to the Edge with capabilities for uninterrupted high-performance business processes, optimized data processing – locally or at the digital core, and real-time decision-making and agile responses.
- Dell Technologies sharply reduces time to value with decreased TCO of these Edge capabilities through pre-installation on our SAP certified Edge gateways, bundled with VMware Pulse management for optimized operations.
IT Framework to Orchestrate Data Management
So now that we have introduced Dell’s IT foundation from the edge to the core, the next step in this journey is deploying compelling use cases with our partners!
One of most recent use case studies was develop in cooperation with Camelot ITLab (booth #444) and Intel (booth #1700), showing how blockchain technology is solving a huge challenge in the consumer goods industry: constantly keeping compliant with legally required labeling of regulated compounds, while leveraging a complex, global supply chain.
Again, this was a small sample of the value that Dell Technologies can bring to customers on their SAP journey. Join us at @ DellTech Booth 2230 to see a theatre session with Dell Global System Integrator (GSI) partners for Energy & Utilities, Retail and Energy Management. Also check out the Dell portfolio of solutions, meet with our experts and see just how Dell Technologies and SAP are “Bringing the Intelligent Enterprise to Life.”
