Synergized Huawei+SAP Prowess Delivers Ultimate Business Agility | SAP Innovation Forum 2017

In the Chinese martial arts philosophy, there is a saying that swiftness is the ultimate art of all moves. In today's business world, the same rule applies. Amidst the fierce competition in the business arena, the company who makes the earliest move will get a head start. The Internet of Everything is producing massive data every moment. It is a huge challenge for every enterprise to mine value information out of the ocean of data and make the correct business decision accordingly. When it comes to this, having a powerful business data platform is crucial for the enterprise.

SAP HANA is a high-performance real-time data computing platform launched by SAP based on in-memory computing technologies. In the traditional transactional database architecture, programs do not support real-time business applications based on massive data. SAP HANA puts the data to be processed in the memory and unleashes the enormous power of real-time service applications.

Huawei has worked closely with SAP to not only present the SAP HANA appliance, but also develop a rich array of industry solutions and best practices based on SAP HANA, thereby simplifying the SAP HANA implementation for enterprises and playing an indispensable role to service development assurance.

Huawei SAP HANA Appliance

SAP HANA has been the focus of the industry since its debut in 2011. As the first real-time business analytics platform of SAP, SAP HANA enables enterprises to analyze business data in real time and make prompt decisions. SAP HANA is able to do so because it incorporates technologies such as in-memory computing, column-based storage, parallel computing, and data compression. Additionally, SAP HANA has been deeply integrated with Huawei infrastructure. In this way, the ultimate computing resources required by SAP HANA for advanced prediction and analytics, text mining, graph analysis, and geographical information processing are perfectly integrated with the computing and optimization capabilities offered by Huawei infrastructure to form an appliance. The appliance serves as a data platform that is tightly integrated from the bottom-layer CPUs to PCIe flash cards, servers, storage, and all the way up to the HANA computing engine, application release containers, and various analytic tools.

In 2012, Huawei became the global technical partner of SAP. Huawei works with SAP to launch the innovative SAP HANA appliance solution, which enables real-time analytics for industry customers based on cutting-edge all-in-memory computing. The in-depth integration enables Huawei SAP HANA appliance to expedite application deployment and deliver rapid service experience to customers. In this way, companies are able to focus on business development, spot high-value customers, and drive down OPEX.

Huawei offers novice IT infrastructure to optimize and boost the operation efficiency of SAP HANA, and builds SAP cloud solutions based on the Huawei cloud operating system, FusionSphere. These solutions enable enterprises to obtain high-performance SAP products and services through private and public clouds and drive down CAPEX as well as simplify IT O&M.

Huawei SAP HANA Appliance: Agile, Reliable, Trustworthy

Most vendors cooperate with SAP by means of server certification. Huawei takes a more effective approach by implementing end-to-end optimization on the SAP HANA appliance, from servers, storage, network, to virtualization, and therefore delivers better experience to customers. To sum up, the Huawei SAP HANA appliance has three highlights.

Agile：The Huawei SAP HANA appliance single-node solution adopts software and hardware integrated acceleration, for example, by using Huawei’s leading-edge ES3000 PCIe SSDs, to boost the SAP HANA write performance by 3 times. The Huawei SAP HANA cluster solution is based on the Huawei FusionCube hyper-converged infrastructure. The solution offers distributed storage, SSD, and 56 Gbit/s InfiniBand high-speed network, improving network performance by 7 times and meanwhile driving concurrent I/O performance by 3 to 5 times.

Reliable：The Huawei SAP HANA appliance is based on servers and storage devices with a fully modular design, and is the industry’s only server that supports individually maintainable CPUs and memory modules. Leveraging innovative reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) 2.0 technologies, the Huawei SAP HANA appliance is able to proactively predict risky components, assist maintenance personnel in precisely locating the fault source, and proactively diagnose faults. In addition, the appliance supports CPU and memory module hot swap, reducing service downtime by 85% and thereby setting a new standard for reliability.

Trustworthy：Huawei has extensive best-practice experience with SAP HANA systems. Additionally, Huawei provides the most comprehensive SAP-certified infrastructure solution offerings that cover servers, storage, network, cloud computing, and Big Data products. Boasting professional SAP system infrastructure solution planning and design capabilities, Huawei is able to translate its IT best practices into services to better serve enterprise customers.

Strategic Partnership That Goes Beyond the Product Level

Actually, the partnership between Huawei and SAP has gone deeper than just adding SAP HANA software to Huawei servers. Instead, the Huawei-SAP partnership has gone beyond products and has in fact been cultivated as a strategy.

In recent years, SAP has made it public that it is now positioning SAP HANA not as a product, but rather as an innovation platform. The latest product R&D and technology innovation focus of SAP, including its core ERP software, have also been shifted to the SAP HANA platform. SAP has launched multiple products, including SAP Business Suite on HANA and SAP S/4HANA. SAP S/4HANA will replace the SAP flagship product R/3. These moves all reflect the importance of SAP HANA to SAP.

The core strategic position of SAP HANA has offered an enormous space for the collaboration between Huawei and SAP. Horizontally, Huawei provides end-to-end holistic hardware solutions that cover SAP application servers, storage, and network devices for SAP Business Suite on HANA and SAP S/4HANA to implement high-performance computing. Meanwhile, Huawei offers corresponding data backup and disaster recovery solutions. For different application scenarios, Huawei also provides various SAP HANA cluster solutions. Some cluster solutions are based on the FusionCube hyper-converged infrastructure, some are based on the traditional infrastructure composed of huawei FusionServer high-end servers + OceanStor storage, and some cluster solutions deliver an over 64 TB capacity.

Thanks to the strategic partnership between Huawei and SAP, the two companies have realized in-depth integration and optimization in various solutions that have been vastly recognized and trusted by customers in the marketplace. For example, Huawei SAP HANA appliance solutions have been deployed on large scale in countries and areas such as China, Europe, the Middle East, America, and Africa. The solutions have been serving over 20 Fortune 500 customers, including the BAIC Group, Dongfeng Automobile Group (Dongfeng Renault), Sinopec, China Huaneng Group, and CEPSA. CEPSA uses the Huawei SAP HANA appliance to power its enterprise ERP core production system. The high performance and reliability of the Huawei SAP HANA appliance have been proved by service applications. The solution is highly recognized by the customer, and the Phase 1 project (13 TB) has been successfully expanded to the Phase 2 project (30 TB).

With every large-scale SAP HANA system deployed, Huawei's experience and expertise with SAP HANA system development and O&M have deepened, and meanwhile Huawei is delivering tangible benefits to the enterprises. The practices and experience have made Huawei the best practitioner of SAP system infrastructure solutions and the best choice as the partner for enterprises in their digital transformation.

It is worthwhile to mention that the collaboration between Huawei and SAP is just one of the examples of how Huawei is building a large ecosystem. Following the philosophy of "Continuous Integration, Focus on IT Infrastructure, and Acting as a Partner Enabler", Huawei has attached enormous significance to building the ecosystem. As an endorsement to this philosophy, Huawei has made the statement that "We will not touch content or data", which protects the benefits of Huawei's partners and allows for maximum space for the partners' innovations. It is also inspired by this co-work and win-win spirit that Huawei is gradually fostering an open, collaborative, and win-win ecosystem that is full of vitality.

This article was orginally published on WeChat. 

Huawei is one of the main partners in SAP Innovation Forum 2017. #SAPForum