Survival techniques

Waiting until closer to the 2025 deadline for migrating to SAP HANA might turn out to be a costly mistake 

Today’s IT departments are at a crossroads. Do they embrace the new technology of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions now or carry on with the old way of working as long as possible? Although most agree that turning to HCI solutions to handle ever-increasing amounts of complex data will benefit their business, playing the waiting game in such a fast-moving technology market always means companies get more for their money when they finally make their investment. Or does it?

SAP HANA – more to consider than solutions

Even assuming the product offerings relevant to a particular migration get more attractive over the next few years, there is still the thorny issue of implementation. It takes time. In fact, it will almost certainly take more time than originally planned. This is simply a reflection of the fact that such complex tasks almost always raise issues that were not taken into account in the first estimates. Migration to SAP HANA will almost certainly involve both custom codes and queries, so the longer companies put off implementing the shift, the greater the risk of pitfalls.

Another extremely important factor to bear in mind is securing the necessary expertise. There is only a finite number of SAP HANA migration experts and the deadline approaches, these consultants will become increasingly in demand. This will possibly be reflected in their pricing, and it will certainly be reflected in their availability. 

The push/pull effect

The biggest argument for HANA on Nutanix is virtualization and consolidation of up to three databases on a single machine. As well as not having to reinstall when something fails, disaster recovery is easier to manage. Also, because the application servers can be hosted onto the same cluster, the SAP landscape is manageable like a cloud but with the peace of mind of knowing where the data is located. 

Solutions that move with your business

Data centre infrastructures often combine on-premise, cloud, and hybrid technologies. This is both complex, resource-heavy and unwieldy. HCI solutions simplify data centre resources to a single management suite.

A hyper-converged infrastructure uses virtualized software to consolidate the system’s tools into an easily managed resource pool. The savings in costs and labour coupled with the increased efficiency make it an attractive proposition, which is probably one of the reasons why the IDC predicts that 50% of SAP HANA workloads will be virtualized by the year 2020. 

But it’s not just about more efficiency here and now. SAP HANA workloads on a hyper-converged infrastructure can move with the agility and scale of the business, allowing enterprises to reap the combined benefits of in-memory databases. This means faster access to integrated data analytics and machine learning, and the ability to scale for bandwidth demands in storage, compute and networking. 

Meeting business needs in real time

New insights and fresh opportunities are dependent on business intelligence. The ideal scenario to get the necessary data is an ultra-scalable, lightning fast yet secure enterprise datacentre architecture that enhances performance, reduces costs, simplifies ongoing management and makes rollouts easier. And thanks to the latest technological developments within hyperconverged infrastructures, it is now all achievable. 

Living proof

The sooner companies make the move to SAP HANA, the sooner they can be reaping the benefits. An ESG white paper from January 2018 calculated that the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX series incorporating the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS could allow businesses to deploy HCI solutions that cut data centre costs by 57% and deliver more that 300% ROI. And nobody can argue with those figures! 

“Customers can easily run their SAP HANA workloads with high levels of performance and reliability on the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX solution for SAP HANA.”

?Mike Leone, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc.