HP and SAP Release the Kraken With HANA Appliance, Cloud Services

HP announced a new infrastructure solution for SAP's in-memory computing system HANA, which converges database and application platform capabilities for transactions, analytics, text analysis, predictive and spatial processing. The system is a product of the HP and SAP co-innovation initiative called “Project Kraken.”

This is the latest in HP's effort to deepen services around HANA. In addition to the converged system, the company also announced a cloud delivery model for HANA and various support and consulting offerings.

HP is not the only hardware vendor building a business around HANA. Its rivals IBM, Cisco, Dell and Fujitsu also have infrastructure solutions and services for the German business software giant's in-memory computing system.

“Businesses are adopting SAP HANA to make real-time business decisions based on massive data sets, but are often constrained by their infrastructure’s scalability and availability,” said Tom Joyce, senior vice president and general manager of HP's Converged Systems division. “With HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA, HP is helping customers achieve business transformation with SAP HANA by delivering a system optimized for the largest, most mission-critical workloads.”

HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA, which follows a previously released ConvergedSystem 500, is a pre-configured, optimized and tested system. It is certified by SAP to deliver up to 12 terabytes of data in a single memory pool.

HP and SAP announced the converged system in conjunction with the SAP SapphireNow conference taking place this week in Orlando, Florida. At the event, they are demonstrating a test system, built on HP servers and optimized with HANA SAP's Business Suite applications.

In addition to buying the infrastructure solution, customers can instead choose to make HANA an operational expense by opting for HP's new managed cloud offering. HP will host the HANA infrastructure and provide SAP's business applications as a service. This is part of HP's Helion cloud services initiative, announced in May.

HP also offers Rapid Deployment Services for SAP solutions in the cloud, which aims to help clients deploy new application functionality optimized for SAP HANA quickly.

The vendor expects to make ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA available worldwide in the fall. Cloud-based HP Helion Business Applications for SAP are available now.