Infrastructure to meet your needs, wherever you are on the SAP journey
Here at Centiq we understand a Cloud first strategy may not be for everyone. It’s not as simple as lifting and shifting workloads — there is a whole complexity around new processes and operating models that will ensure you leverage your Cloud platform and all its benefits so you can maximise your investment. Our partner of choice to tackle SAP HANA landscapes is Dell Technologies.
Internal skill sets, cultural challenges, compliance and security, pace of change, total cost of ownership and budget constraints can all impact digital transformation strategies and result in the Cloud not featuring on that map.
We realise a future proof, SAP approved, optimised design for on-premise infrastructure is required in today’s market. Together, Dell Technologies and Centiq can deliver that.
Centiq are proud of our 20 years of experience in building infrastructure to complement and enhance SAP landscapes, and we believe Dell Technologies' broad infrastructure portfolio can deliver solutions that meet requirements, wherever you are in your SAP journey.
Combine that with Centiq’s expertise in optimising your design (which usually leads to costs being optimised too), as well as with the speed we can implement your project, and you have a winning team!
Dell Technologies SAP HANA Appliances and TDI Solutions explained
SAP HANA was released in November 2010 and has been growing ever since. HANA provided a big change for many SAP customers. Previously users could run their preferred database on their preferred hardware, but SAP HANA made things more prescriptive.
Another significant difference was the shift from ‘on-disk’ databases to ‘in-memory’. Disk-based databases tend to store just the data being worked on in memory, whereas in-memory systems store all of the data in memory, all the time. With SAP HANA, sizing for the database layer also changed from a metric based on CPU performance to the memory footprint of the solution.
In the early days, SAP HANA was only available as an appliance, which was a certified, pre-configured system that included all of the components required to run HANA. Appliances were based on the memory size of the system and provided the correct amount of disk and performance required by the HANA certification.
Appliances represented a quick and straightforward approach to implementing SAP HANA. However, large enterprises often found the appliance route somewhat unpalatable. The appliance approach meant adopting technology ‘as-is’. and for customers who had stringent data centre policies, appliances were not always a good fit.
TDI Solution for SAP HANA
A few years after launch, SAP introduced the Tailored DataCentre Integration (TDI) program for HANA. TDI has been introduced in phases and is now in phase five of development. TDI phase one and two allowed some of the components that would be present in an appliance to be provided by the data centre. The most common example of this was replacing the HANA appliance storage with enterprise-grade centralised storage.
The TDI program is focused on providing HANA customers with choice. However, with increased choice comes increased responsibility. SAP appliances are certified and supported by SAP, where as TDI users must run a series of tests to show SAP that their configuration meets and exceeds the required KPIs. Moreover, TDI users must support their technology stack, whereas appliance users can rely on SAP managing the majority of their support tickets.
Dell Technologies is uniquely placed in the SAP HANA world
Dell have a rapidly growing portfolio of SAP HANA certified systems, both HANA appliances and HANA certified enterprise storage solution. Their range of HANA two and four socket appliances and TDI systems that range in capacity from 64GiB to 6TiB support both scale-up and scale-out requirements, enabling TDI customers to exploit any one of the eight certified storage platforms supported by SAP for HANA.
Only Dell Technologies can offer integration for the full stack of Intel compute, hypervisor and storage by the same vendor!
To find out more on Dell Technologies solutions for SAP HANA, contact us today.