SGI and SAP Plan In-Memory Appliance

SGI announces plans to develop an appliance based on the SAP HANA platform, and Switzerland telecom Sunrise Communications selects Violin Memory to dramatically speed up processing times.

SGI plans SAP HANA appliance. SGI announced plans to develop an in-memory appliance based on the SAP HANA platform, working in collaboration with SAP AG. Using the scalable shared memory architecture of SGI's next-generation UV system together with SAP HANA, the new in-memory appliance will be designed to streamline database management for single large node environments, which require extremely high capacity and scale to meet the needs of in-memory databases. The appliance is expected to help enable businesses and government agencies running high volume databases and multi-tenant environments to leverage high performance DRAM that can offer up to 200x the performance of flash memory to help deliver faster insight. In addition, SGI's shared memory technology will enable unprecedented scale in a single node, helping to enable customers to reduce the cost of management by up to 50 percent compared with multi-node solutions. The powerful SGI UV high performance computing technology will enable customers to scale with ease - providing efficient and reliable performance to help handle workloads using up to 64 terabytes of memory.

"Many companies are running database sizes and multi-tenant environments that require exceptional scale-up capacity capabilities, where SGI leads with its expertise and technology," said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO of SGI. "By working with SAP, a trusted provider to the enterprise and one of the innovative leaders in in-memory technology, SGI will now be able to target a significant high-end user requirement, representing an exciting market opportunity for us."

Violin Memory selected by Swiss Telecom.  Violin Memory (VMEM) announced that Switzerland telecom Sunrise Communications AG has selected the Violin 6000 Series Flash Memory Array to accelerate the billing process for its nearly three million customers. By deploying the Violin solution, Sunrise reduced processing time for its mission critical billing application by more than 75 percent, streamlining operations and improving customer satisfaction. More stringent internal service level requirements set a 24-hour completion goal to allow for potential re-runs. By deploying Violin Flash Memory Arrays, the company has seen processing time drop dramatically – a 76 percent improvement compared to the previous solution based on Fibre Channel disk drives complemented by Solid State Drives (SSD). “Violin Flash Memory Arrays have proven to be a vast improvement compared to our previous system, which often forced us to bill in arrears,” said Detlef Steinmetz, CIO of Sunrise. “This is no longer the case as we now have a fast, reliable process. Our goal is to get the billing process down to less than one day and I’m confident that with Violin Memory we will be able to achieve this objective quickly and easily.”