© 2018 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
End-to-end Data Lifecycle Management By Michael Leone, ESG Senior Analyst; and Leah Matuson, Research Analyst April 2018 This ESG White Paper was commissioned by HPE and is distributed under license from ESG.
Enterprise Strategy Group | Getting to the bigger truth.™
HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA
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© 2018 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Contents
IT Challenges ........................................................................................................................................................................... 3
Complexity Extends to Data Analytics and Business Intelligence Environments................................................................ 3
Digital Transformation and Data-driven Initiatives ................................................................................................................ 3
HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA ........................................................................................................................................... 4
HPE and SAP HANA, Better Together .................................................................................................................................. 5
The HPE Ecosystem of Products and Solutions ....................................................................................................................... 5
HPE Compute .................................................................................................................................................................. 5
HPE Primary Storage ....................................................................................................................................................... 5
HPE Data Protection Storage .......................................................................................................................................... 6
Management, Services, and Support .............................................................................................................................. 7
Better Business Outcomes ...................................................................................................................................................... 7
Retail - Dansk ...................................................................................................................................................................... 7
Travel - Prescient................................................................................................................................................................. 8
Distribution - Multipharma ................................................................................................................................................. 9
The Bigger Truth .................................................................................................................................................................... 10
White Paper: HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA 3
© 2018 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
IT Challenges
In today’s dynamic business world, the speed at which a business can gain insight into its own operations and customers
can make all the difference to its survival. That ability enables the business to remain efficient, relevant, and competitive in
its respective market. But with a majority of organizations relying on IT to ensure they remain agile enough to support the
dynamic needs of the business, the complexity of IT environments continues to be put under a microscope. In fact, recent
ESG research shows that 68% of surveyed IT professionals believe their organization’s IT environment is either more
complex or significantly more complex today than it was two years ago.1 The number of components from multiple
vendors, the different internal IT groups managing said components, and the different support centers all tie back to this
growing level of complexity. And that’s just looking at on-premises. Factoring in the cloud, those challenges are
compounded due to a different consumption model and management structure.
Complexity Extends to Data Analytics and Business Intelligence Environments
Looking at big data and analytics, the challenges associated with complexity get even worse with the sheer number of tools
and elements across the data analytics workflow that are leveraging the siloed IT infrastructure. Businesses are dealing
with a variety of data sources consisting of structured, unstructured, and multi-structured data that make data integration
complex. And on top of that, the sheer magnitude of data from the varying data sources, along with a multitude of
separate data repositories across the siloed IT infrastructure, make it extremely challenging to analyze data, gain
actionable insights in a reasonable timeframe to benefit the business never mind the efforts to ensure end-to-end data
integrity and data protection.
In fact, when it comes to data analytics challenges, ESG research shows that the most commonly identified challenge was
the complexity of data integration (which stands to reason due to the number of data sources involved). Further, nearly
one-third of respondents said data set sizes limit their ability to perform analytics, and 25% stated they had difficulty
running analytics across disparate/siloed IT systems.2
Digital Transformation and Data-driven Initiatives
Many companies are on the road to digital transformation. And while digital transformation means different things to
different companies, a key part of digital transformation is becoming more data driven—using data analytics, real-time
business intelligence, and data center modernization to obtain new business insights faster, more easily, and more reliably.
According to ESG research, using data analytics for real-time business intelligence and customer insight is not only a top
2018 IT initiative, but also among the leading forces driving IT spending. Data center modernization also appeared as one
of the top five most often cited important IT initiatives for this year.3
For data analytics specifically, it is an umbrella term, and it’s not unusual for organizations to take on a number of
initiatives under that umbrella. Based on the research, nearly half (45%) of survey respondents said business intelligence is
an area of data analytics where they will make the most significant investments over the next 12-18 months (see Figure 1).4
1 Source: ESG Research Report, 2018 IT Spending Intentions Survey, February 2018. 2 Source: ESG Research Report, Enterprise Big Data, Business Intelligence, and Analytics Trends: Redux, July 2016. 3 Source: ESG Research Report, 2018 IT Spending Intentions Survey, February 2018. 4 Source: ESG Master Survey Results, 2018 IT Spending Intentions Survey, December 2017.
White Paper: HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA 4
© 2018 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Figure 1. 2018 Data Analytics Spending Priorities
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group
HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA
The HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA provides an end-to-end data lifecycle management solution that enables
organizations to yield better business outcomes. The comprehensive data platform concentrates on reducing complexity,
improving efficiency, and reducing risk within constantly evolving business intelligence environments. Through a complete
ecosystem of HPE products across hardware, software, networking services, management, and support, organizations gain
an end-to-end solution from a proven vendor that optimizes data management and provides an effortless set of data
protection capabilities that meet the dynamic needs of a modern, data-driven organization.
Figure 2. HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group
10%
14%
16%
17%
18%
20%
22%
30%
31%
31%
32%
45%
Spark platform(s)
NoSQL databases
Stream processing or streaming analytics
Hadoop platform(s)
Machine learning
Edge analytics for IoT
Data preparation
Data warehouse
SQL databases
Cloud-based analytics
Data integration
Business intelligence
In which of the following areas of data analytics will your organization make the mostsignificant investments over the next 12-18 months? (Percent of respondents, N=373,
five responses accepted)
White Paper: HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA 5
© 2018 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
HPE and SAP HANA, Better Together
Both HPE and SAP are proven technology vendors that have enjoyed a long, collaborative partnership built upon nearly
three decades of providing customers with innovative technology solutions. Being a trusted partner of SAP, HPE serves as
an SAP-preferred infrastructure partner, with HPE boasting more than 12,000 SAP HANA deployments with 2,400
customers running SAP applications on HPE infrastructure. In fact, HPE runs the world’s largest HANA system in production
with a total of 130 TB of HANA data. According to HPE, it is the only vendor offering a fully automated, failover, and data
recovery solution for mission-critical SAP HANA deployments.
SAP HANA benefits from HPE’s broad hardware and software portfolio to simplify and consolidate SAP deployments,
reducing data redundancy, providing real-time insights that enable businesses to discover and capitalize on untapped
opportunities, and optimizing business services to enhance the user
experiences. And with HPE having more than 100 dedicated SAP subject
matter experts, over 200 SAP and HPE collaborative engineers, and a cloud-
based proof-of-concept lab, customers gain peace of mind knowing their
data is in the right hands. HPE has witnessed its customers realize such
significant benefits that it is implementing a massive SAP HANA deployment
within its own organization to consistently drive better business outcomes
in a timely manner. And this move isn’t motivated solely by self-interest:
HPE will be deploying the latest SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA on the
latest HPE hardware and taking any lessons learned to its customers.
The HPE Ecosystem of Products and Solutions
HPE offers a complete ecosystem of products, solutions, and partnerships to deliver a comprehensive data platform that
supports end-to-end data lifecycle management. The HPE ecosystem encompasses compute, primary storage, data
protection storage, networking, management, and services/support, all of which work together to deliver on the promise
of optimizing the management and protection of data over its lifecycle. Assisting with data optimization and management
through predictive analytics is HPE InfoSight, watching over the infrastructure to predict, prevent, and resolve issues
before administrators even know there is an issue. This helps to reduce risk by preventing downtime of critical business
applications. IT administrators gain peace of mind knowing HPE InfoSight takes cares of everything. And in the off chance
that the problem cannot be resolved automatically, IT will be quickly alerted to the pending issue. While InfoSight has
already had a powerful impact on Nimble customers, it has recently expanded to 3PAR, and will soon be integrated into
HPE servers and networking. Furthermore, HPE’s ability to reduce complexity, improve efficiency, and reduce risk across
the complete infrastructure ensures customers that the livelihood of their business, the data, is in good hands.
HPE Compute
Compute is the core of HPE Solutions for SAP HANA, and HPE has a number of compute offerings—as purely compute or as
part of converged systems. Designed for flexibility and scalability, these offerings allow organizations to choose the most
appropriate solution for their unique hardware, software, and business intelligence requirements—from the cost-
optimized HPE ProLiant DL380 Compute Blocks for entry-level workloads, through the HPE Superdome Flex TDI Compute
Blocks for mission-critical workloads, to the HPE ConvergedSystem solutions for SAP HANA.
HPE Primary Storage
HPE has been consistently responsive to changing SAP HANA market trends. A market shift from appliance to tailored data
center integration (TDI) provided HPE with the impetus to add flash-enabled modular storage arrays (MSA) and Nimble
Storage to its product offerings. Seeing the demand for a broader storage portfolio, HPE now provides end-to-end flash for
SAP HANA, as well as supporting flash-integrated data protection for SAP HANA. HPE’s all-flash storage solutions allow
HPE’s Testament to SAP
“We're taking the latest S4/HANA, deploying it
on the latest and greatest HPE hardware and
implementing it all first internally. We’re going
from over 100 SAP instances to a single
instance. Then we’ll take everything we learn
and give it to the customers.”
- HPE Pointnext
White Paper: HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA 6
© 2018 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
organizations to buy what they need, while staying within budget. From the cost-efficient HPE MSA Storage block to the
high-end HPE XP7 storage, HPE runs the full scale of storage required for an SAP HANA deployment. Additionally, 3PAR
StoreServ All Flash Storage has been integrated into HPE ConvergedSystem solutions, which serve as an ideal option for
many customers diving into SAP for the first time.
Note the key capabilities of HPE’s flagship offerings for SAP HANA:
• HPE Nimble storage, offering advanced predictive analytics, cloud-ready all-flash and hybrid flash and application
integrated data protection.
• HPE 3PAR StoreServ, delivering highly resilient and scalable storage with a low total cost of ownership, workload
sharing, and snapshot-based, fully integrated data protection for mission-critical SAP HANA.
HPE Data Protection Storage
Business continuity is essential to a successful SAP HANA deployment, as organizations require constant availability and
accessibility to their data. That’s where HPE’s business continuity solutions for SAP HANA come in. Organizations gain high-
performance persistence, mission-critical HPE software, and fully integrated data protection solutions purpose-built for
SAP. And by leveraging HPE Pointnext, organizations have a go-to for advisement, implementation, and support. Put it all
together and customers benefit from a solution that satisfies the needs of a modern business embracing hybrid IT while
ensuring data is protected wherever it resides: fast and non-disruptive backup and recovery, simplified and effortless
disaster recovery, and optimized data protection for hybrid IT environments, drastically reducing the risk of downtime,
while improving operational and infrastructure efficiency.
Figure 3 highlights the components that work together in an SAP HANA environment to meet the business continuity
requirements of an always-on business.
1. HPE 3PAR StoreServ All-Flash for high-performance and high-resilience data persistence, delivering on the
efficiency and uptime requirements, while ensuring mission-critical RTOs and RPOs can be met across both SAP
and non-SAP shared storage.
2. HPE Serviceguard for intelligent and fully automated HA, and DR failover and failback that is built for SAP HANA.
3. HPE StoreOnce with Recovery Manager Central and Catalyst Plug-in for flash- and application-integrated data
protection.
a. HPE StoreOnce serves as a disk backup solution for entry to enterprise-level markets and delivers federated
deduplication for capacity savings and failover with auto-restart to eliminate failed backups. Further, it
enables backups to external object storage (on-premises or off-premises), and assessment tools to help
organizations understand their backup environment.
b. HPE Recovery Manager Central for SAP HANA delivers flash-integrated data protection that meets the
simplicity, efficiency, and reliability requirements of SAP deployments. By directly moving snapshots to an
HPE StoreOnce backup target, backup/restore speeds are significantly increased compared to traditional
approaches.
c. HPE StoreOnce Catalyst Plug-in for SAP HANA integrates with the database’s native backup tool, Backint,
and provides efficient data protection without the need for other backup/recovery software. Additionally,
organizations benefit from faster application-consistent backups, and more DBA visibility and control for
data protection tasks, including the incorporation of deduplication and replication management.
d. HPE Cloud Bank Storage is a feature of HPE StoreOnce Systems that delivers highly efficient data transfer to,
and storage in, the cloud. The combination of the HPE StoreOnce deduplication and cloud storage delivers a
low cost, high performance and zero risk disaster recovery and long term retention solution.
White Paper: HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA 7
© 2018 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
4. HPE Pointnext serves as a go-to service for organizations to receive advice from HPE on their SAP solutions, from
design and implementation to management and support.
Figure 3. HPE Business Continuity Solutions for SAP
Source: HPE
Management, Services, and Support
HPE has comprehensive management tools and a 24/7 global services/support team. HPE’s Pointnext Services organization
is designed to assist companies with their HPE SAP HANA deployments from start to finish—from advisory and
transformation services, through consumption-based IT and professional services, to operational services. Within the
Pointnext portfolio is GreenLake, HPE’s infrastructure service and a suite of on-premises, consumption-based solutions for
big data, backup, recovery, database platforms, SAP HANA, and edge computing. HPE GreenLake leverages HPE GreenLake
Flex Capacity, which offers on-demand capacity and choice of infrastructure so organizations can enjoy the responsiveness
and cost-effectiveness of the public cloud, with the security and performance of an on-premises data center.
Better Business Outcomes
To understand how HPE and SAP continue to meet the demands of dynamic businesses across a large customer base, ESG
spoke with the HPE Pointnext Services team to shed light on and quantify where a few of their many customers have had
success in deploying HPE SAP HANA solutions across a few of the many key verticals.
Retail - Dansk
When Dansk, Denmark’s leading retailer with more than 1,400 stores (including four chains and several ecommerce
businesses) saw a shrinking bottom line and low growth, it knew it needed to
act. Knowing what customers are buying, and using that information to take
action, is essential to keeping the bottom line healthy. But obtaining this
information was difficult, and the company’s IT department was the
bottleneck, unable to efficiently collect massive volumes of data, apply
analytics, and produce timely reports so the retailer could stock its shelves
with products its customers wanted to buy.
Educating Customers
“One thing we do is have knowledge
transfers. We are educating operators,
system administrators, and even the end-
users on how to best use the system –
reducing risk and smoothing integrations.”
- HPE Pointnext
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© 2018 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Customer Requirements
• Improve scalability.
• Minimize costs.
• Achieve better IT agility and flexibility.
HPE Solution
• HPE ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA with HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage and HPE StoreOnce backup and recovery.
• Flexible, pay-as-you-go consumption model through HPE Flexible Capacity.
Business Benefits
• Faster time to value with point-of-sales reporting speed increasing by 30-40%.
• Maximized revenue and minimized waste through better, more informed decisions regarding daily inventory.
• Improved productivity through faster report generation that saved 200 staff hours per day, freeing up staff to be
involved in more strategic initiatives.
• Elimination of the IT bottleneck by empowering IT to use the system as efficiently as possible, turning them into agile
analytics providers and enablers.
Travel - Prescient
Prescient, a global operations and solutions integrator aids its clients by identifying and analyzing risk associated with
domestic and international business dealings. The company needed assistance in bringing Prescient Traveler, its new
disruptive offering, to market. The product relies on real-time data aggregation and analyses (big data analytics) to help
individuals and companies mitigate risk and keep them safe. It was essential that their requirements be met in order to
build an effective, real-time comprehensive threat picture of the areas in which corporate and individual travelers are
visiting, (i.e., provide situational awareness and accountability) so that they could stay safe anywhere in the world.
Customer Requirements
• Compute massive amounts of data across a variety of
sources with high performance.
• Maintain constant up-time through a no-fail high-
availability solution.
• Achieve real-time geospatial and natural language
processing.
HPE Solution
• HPE ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA with HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage and HPE StoreOnce backup and recovery.
• HPE Factory Express prebuilt, turnkey design, which was purpose-built and optimized for SAP HANA workloads to
enable faster data-driven decision making and innovation.
• Financing through HPE Financial Services for maximum flexibility with options to support all future growth scenarios.
Business Benefits
• Efficient disruptive product design with advanced big data support, resulting in a market leadership position.
Improving Performance to Improve Services “Most customers expect an incredible performance boost
because of the in-memory based database as opposed to a
legacy underlying database. What surprises customers is that
they're able to change not just that things will happen faster,
but in some cases, they can change the kind of services they
provide their customers because of the performance
improvement.”
– HPE Pointnext
White Paper: HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA 9
© 2018 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
• Higher operational capacity, allowing IT to scale out to 4x the initial operational capacity.
• Improved workload performance that increased productivity by 39%.
• Significant capacity and costs savings via a reduction in SAP HANA backups from 23 TB to 1.8 TB of actual data
through HPE StoreOnce deduplication.
• Confidence and peace of mind that the product would perform without fail thanks to HPE global support services.
Distribution - Multipharma
Egyptian distributor Multipharma supplies pharmaceuticals, paramedic and lab equipment, supplements, and cosmetics to
El Ezaby, the nation’s leading drugstore chain with more than 80 retail pharmacies. Multipharma planned to expand its
network of El Ezaby pharmacies by 50%, but its IT infrastructure couldn’t handle the massive increase in data necessary to
manage supply chains, inventory, and customer relationships. It needed to quickly modernize its IT environment before it
lost customers as well as revenue.
Customer Requirements
• Provide superior customer service.
• Improve organizational efficiency.
• Increase IT agility to be more responsive to the business.
• Increase performance and scalability.
HPE Solution
• HPE Integrity Superdome X servers.
• HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7400 Storage.
• HPE StoreOnce Backup and Recovery.
Business Benefits
• Increased performance and scalability allowed the company to ensure the highest levels of efficiency and
responsiveness to customers, enabling them to deliver superior customer service.
• Data consistency and high availability to deliver an always-on business, ensuring the company will be able to maintain
business continuity and revenue streams in the event of power outages or component malfunctions.
• Improved performance and reduced latency, with the company achieving 12-18x faster transaction processing—what
used to take two to three hours now takes ten minutes.
• Improved data collection times by 12-24x—what used to take a full day now takes one to two hours, improving
employee productivity.
A Mature, Resilient Ecosystem
“Organizations depend on the HPE hardware. Because of
its resilience, uptime has never been an issue. We’ve
gone through churn over as much as 20 years to build a
resilient infrastructure”
- HPE Pointnext
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The Bigger Truth
As organizations pursue opportunities for digital transformation, leveraging an end-to-end data platform that simplifies,
optimizes, and reduces risk across the lifecycle of data—from storing data in its primary format through backup and
protection to access, integration, and analysis—is appealing to all organizations. And with the attempt to be more data
driven by improving data analytics for real-time business intelligence and customer insight, organizations require a
comprehensive solution or data platform that simplifies processes, optimizes existing assets and resources, and reduces
risk across the lifecycle of all data. Organizations want a solution free of headaches that just works. Enter HPE.
Together, HPE and SAP HANA provide a complete data platform that enables organizations to use data analytics and real-
time business intelligence to obtain new business insights faster, more easily, and more reliably through an end-to-end
solution. Whether piecing together ideal components on their own, deploying a purpose-built converged solution, or
leveraging HPE Pointnext services to take care of all of it, the HPE Data Platform for SAP HANA continues to meet the
demands of organizations of all sizes in all markets. And HPE helps its 2,400+ existing customers evolve, maintain their
edge, remain competitive, and deliver next-generation applications that meet the dynamic needs of the business.
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© 2018 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.