To empower customers to innovate, simplify and move toward a software-defined data centre architecture, SAP AG and VMware have announced that the SAP HANA platform on VMware vSphere 5.5 for production use has been released to customers.

By combining the power of SAP HANA with VMware vSphere 5.5, a foundational component of VMware vCloud Suite, customers can innovate and simplify their data centres by achieving faster time-to-value, higher service levels and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

“SAP HANA has led the market as the real-time enterprise platform by driving IT simplicity and by enabling breakthrough innovations for business,” says Bernd Leukert, member of the executive board of SAP AG.

“Together with VMware, we are enabling customers to operate their SAP HANA-based mission-critical applications in virtual environments with confidence and to accelerate their journey to software-defined data centres and ultimately to the cloud.”

“Our customers are evolving their IT infrastructures from physical environments to a software-defined data centre architecture and they are looking for solutions that provide agility, high availability, elasticity, efficiency and control for their most mission-critical and demanding in-production enterprise environments,” says Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware.

“The SAP and VMware partnership is truly transformative. We are delighted to further extend that partnership and answer those customer needs by certifying SAP HANA for production use on VMware vSphere 5.5.”

“AMG-Mercedes is now live in production with SAP HANA and VMware vSphere 5.5 with a 1TB memory configuration, accelerating our move to a software-defined data centre,” says Reinhard Breyer, CIO, AMG. “We believe virtualised SAP HANA with VMware vSphere could be the key to our future, as we move to cut operational costs and simplify our data centre operations.”

“SAP HANA on VMware vSphere is in production at EMC to run our next-generation SAP ERP system, and it is delivering tremendous value to our company,” says Bill Reid, senior director, IT, EMC. “We have increased capacity of SAP HANA five times without growing headcount, are experiencing 99.9 percent uptime, can deploy new SAP HANA instances in minutes and are realising significant OPEX and CAPEX reductions.”

SAP HANA support of VMware vSphere 5.5’s virtualised environment will help further simplify and streamline data centre operation for customers implementing a data centre virtualisation strategy. It will also accelerate provisioning of new SAP HANA instances for production use.

SAP HANA customers can benefit from increased infrastructure utilisation, agility and productivity with the combined solution:
* SAP HANA on vSphere has been released to customers on certified SAP HANA appliances or on SAP HANA tailored data centre integration application-verified hardware.
* Up to 1Tb and 32 physical cores (64 virtual cores) per VMware vSphere instance are supported
* SAP HANA supports VMware vSphere capabilities for management of customer system landscape, including vMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and VMware High Availability (HA)
* Additional deployment best-practices and consideration are available via the SAP Notes tool and www.saphana.com.

SAP and VMware intend to continue their strong collaboration and deliver more advanced capabilities of SAP HANA on virtualised environments providing more deployment options to SAP HANA customers.

“By extending Capgemini and VMware’s next-generation enterprise cloud orchestration and management platform to support SAP solutions, we plan to be able to help our clients improve their TCO, accelerate the adoption of SAP HANA and ultimately optimise the business value of migrating to a new platform,” says Olivier Sévillia, CEO of Application Services, Continental Europe, and member of the group management board of Capgemini.

“Capgemini’s industry solutions from SAP are available on the SAP HANA platform, and can now be hosted on a highly available virtualised VMware vSphere infrastructure.”