SGI UV for SAP HANA Doubles Sockets, In-Memory Computing Capacity
Within about six months, SGI doubled the number of sockets on its SGI UV for SAP HANA and is awaiting SAP's certification on the next iteration of its appliance.
Today, SGI disclosed it has expanded SGI UV for SAP HANA to 12 and 16 sockets, providing enterprises with up to 12 terabytes of in-memory computing capacity in one node. Last October, SAP certified SGI's product at 4 and 8 sockets, and a 32-socket appliance is not too far away, Bob Braham, chief marketing officer at SGI, told Enterprise Technology. Within about six months, then, SGI doubled the sockets and in-memory computing capacity, he said.
"From a timing perspective, I think it is notable the pace at which we certified. We shrunk our biggest system to be optimal for SAP. The next path is, as you would imagine, certifying for 32 sockets. SAP doesn’t allow us to announce timelines. But suffice it to say, they've been testing aggressively," added Brian Freed, vice president of in-memory architecture at SGI, in an interview. "The HANA software continues to mature. The hardware is ready."
The SGI-SAP partnership helps corporations running large enterprise resource planning (ERP), Oracle, or other databases in the 50TB to 200TB range transition to SAP HANA, said Braham. These customers, which account for about 10 percent of HANA's clientele, want to leverage SAP HANA's benefits, such as real-time replication service; unified information modeling and design environment; simplified operations and monitoring, and enhanced data access, insight, and analysis, according to SAP, MS.NET, and Java solution provider Infinite Solutions.
Anticipating aggressive growth, some smaller businesses also find SGI UV for SAP HANA an attractive solution since it scales as they expand, Freed said. The single-node system eliminates the need for clustered systems management and provides high availability, he said.
"You can grow from four sockets to [eventually] 32 sockets just by adding modules," said Braham.
SGI UV for SAP HANA features SGI UV 300H, which melds together seventh-generation SGI in-memory computing technology, Intel Xeon processor E7-8890 v2 with 15-core processors, and SGI NUMAlink 7 interconnects. It is SAP-certified with general availability from 4 to 8 sockets with up to 6TB of shared memory, and has controlled availability for 12 and 16 sockets with up to 12TB of shared memory.
Ultimately designed to scale to 32 sockets and up to 24TB as a single-node system, the SGI UV 300H architecture includes NetApp E2700 RAID arrays to back up data and log files. The appliance includes SAP HANA running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and SGI's professional services is available to deploy the appliances, and sell and support SAP HANA licenses.
A longtime player in high-performance computing, SGI now is focusing some of its energies on the enterprise, in part through this partnership with SAP, said Freed. Sigma-Aldrich, for example, last fall bought 24 appliances of SGI UV for SAP HANA, delivering a total of more than 50TB of in-memory compute power to run all the life science company's SAP HANA-based enterprise applications.
“For over a decade, NetApp has worked with SGI to deliver solutions to some of the highest performance systems in the world,” said Maria Olson, vice president of Global & Strategic Alliances at NetApp, in a statement. “SGI’s experience in high performance computing provides customers with a unique solution to protect against power loss and ensures data storage support. Our ongoing partnership with SGI enables us to provide our joint customers with the right solutions for their business need.”
