What should you look for when choosing SAP HANA infrastructure?

Organisations are deploying SAP HANA to get faster insights from their data. As more applications migrate to the platform, the demands on SAP HANA environments will continue to change. Therefore, it is critical to choose a server infrastructure that can easily adapt to these changes while providing the scalability and reliability required by SAP applications.

So, what should you look for when choosing SAP HANA infrastructure?

Here are 4 key questions you should be asking of the options out there…

1)     How easily and quickly can it absorb changes in business needs?

As your business needs change, so do the demands on SAP HANA and its underlying infrastructure. While you may have an estimated capacity for the coming year, your actual capacity could vary. Your infrastructure needs to easily accommodate these possible fluctuations without having to invest in additional systems.

2)     How much can it scale while keeping costs down?

SAP HANA infrastructure scales using a scale up or a scale out approach. To maximise performance and throughput, SAP recommends scaling up as far as possible. It is critical to evaluate the memory scalability in scale up and scale out approaches. You should also consider the following options provided by the infrastructure to keep costs in check:

? Granular capacity allocations: More granular allocations help you scale gradually rather than requiring you to allocate more capacity than you need. This enables you to avoid overpaying for capacity.

? Performance per core: Executing more throughput per core lowers the number of cores necessary to reach processing capacity, further reducing costs.

? Sharing processor capacity: Efficiently utilize processing capacity across SAP HANA instances to further reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

3)     Can it deliver mission critical resilience?

According to ITIC’s 2018 Hourly cost of Downtime Survey, 33% of enterprises say hourly downtime costs their firms from $1 million to over $5 million per year. With SAP HANA becoming the one data platform to run all SAP applications, your infrastructure will have to quickly adapt to planned or unplanned events and continue running 24x7 with minimal business impact.

4)     Can it enable your move to the cloud?

As you move your workloads to a hybrid cloud environment, the on-premises infrastructure for SAP HANA should not only easily integrate with rest of your IT, but it should also offer the flexibility to match workloads to the cloud environment of your choice (i.e., private, public or hybrid multicloud).