IBM, HP Power Big Data Analytics With SAP HANA

SAP HANA (High Performance Analytics Appliance) is the powerful in-memory database technology from German enterprise software powerhouse SAP. Built from the ground up as a platform to tackle real-time analytics for big data volumes, HANA lets organizations analyze business operations based on a large volume and variety of detailed data in real time. SAP has grown the popular big data platform for sports and entertainment, and its own cloud platform for giving businesses the deployment option to run their mission-critical SAP ERP, SAP CRM and SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA.

IBM DB2, HANA and SmartCloud

Global IT powerhouse IBM has announced new SmartCloud capabilities, including DB2 with BLU Acceleration that can result in as much as 25 times faster reporting and analytics, and SmartCloud availability for SAP's HANA. BLU Acceleration technology from IBM adds innovative dynamic in-memory analytics to DB2 database software on IBM SmartCloud to help companies and governments tackle big data. IBM's new SmartCloud offering includes a SAP HANA Appliance on IBM SmartCloud for SAP Applications, hosted on SmartCloud Enterprise+. In addition, a virtual SAP HANA Appliance is now available on IBM SmartCloud Enterprise (SCE) for early stage development and test.

"Clients are looking to leverage big data and analytics at the speed of business," said Jim Comfort, general manager of IBM SmartCloud Services. "Today’s news shows how IBM is delivering mission-critical cloud services to provide essential analytics innovations to business users at the point of impact."

The integrated managed service combining SAP HANA and IBM SmartCloud for SAP Applications helps business leaders acquire the information they need to make decisions quickly, drilling down into critical marketing, sales and supply chain insights. Both the physical and virtual SAP HANA Appliances on SmartCloud are offered on a "bring your own license" (BYOL) model; however, a license can be purchased through IBM when working with IBM Global Business Services.

HP and SAP Project Kraken

During the SAP SapphireNow event last week HP and SAP announced advancements to a joint initiative, codenamed “Project Kraken,” to improve business processes and mitigate risks for customers. At the event HP and SAP demonstrated a test system, built from years of HP server technology innovations and optimized with the in-memory SAP HANA database for  SAP Business Suite. The prototype system, optimized with 16 Intel Xeon processor E7 family (codenamed Ivy Bridge-EX) CPUs and 12 terabytes of memory, has been engineered specifically for complex, data-intensive workloads.

“The combination of our best technologies—SAP HANA with HP Converged Infrastructure—revolutionizes in-memory computing to redefine the speed at which market leaders will soon operate, to speed transactions to a matter of seconds,” said Bill Veghte, chief operating officer, HP. “With the collaboration of HP and SAP, organizations can consolidate online transaction and analytic processing into one place and perform real-time analytics at never-before-imagined speeds, while competitors continue to move data between multiple environments to access meaningful insights at a far slower pace.”