Trusted, open innovation that matters for SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems

It’s been about 5 years since SUSE started collaborating with IBM to deliver SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems. I remember because I was the Product Manager for analytics solutions in the IBM Power organization at the time who was responsible for getting it to market. We had a growing number of customers who saw the value in SAP HANA and were committed to only the POWER server platform for their SAP environments. I also remember a sales manager who complained bitterly, because of Red Hat’s market share, about the fact that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server would be the first platform available. Being a typical PM in a hardware organization, I was thinking that “Linux is Linux” and I was just happy we had any working solution that we could jointly test with SAP.

Fast-forward about 18 months and I’m working at SUSE as the Marketing Manager for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications. I begin to see not only why SUSE Linux was the first and only option for about two years, but also why it was the best choice.

Trusted: SUSE is SAP’s in-house implementation platform.

SAP trusts SUSE solutions for internal operations and for their initial offerings of customer-facing services like HANA Enterprise Cloud and SAP Cloud Platform. SUSE is also trusted by about 90% of customers running SAP HANA. This includes about 2200 instances of SAP HANA on IBM Power, the vast majority of which run on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.

Open and Flexible: SUSE is the world’s largest open source provider, promising customers retain control and flexibility.

SUSE is the Open Open-source company delivering a broad set of software-defined infrastructure (SDI), application delivery, infrastructure management, and services solutions that enable customers to transform into a Digital Enterprise. All of the unique features and packages that SUSE engineers in the SAP Linux Lab develop they offer upstream to the open source community.

Innovative: SUSE is an SAP co-innovation partner, enabling customers to run with the best.

SUSE solutions are a reference development platform for solutions like SAP Business One, SAP S/4HANA, SAP Data Hub and more. SAP and SUSE engineers collaborate to deliver optimal agility, performance, reliability, security and management for SAP services.

SUSE and SAP have become such close partners that we produced an original rock music video together starring employees of both companies and the SUSE Band at the SAP facilities in Walldorf, Germany. Check out the video here.

If you’re attending the IBM Systems Technical University in Atlanta, be sure to download the IBMTechU Agenda Guide mobile app from Google Play or the App Store, and add this session to your conference agenda:

Never reboot SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems? Not quite, but we are getting closer

Wednesday, 10:15 – 11:15 Embassy Hall D

Jay Kruemcke, IBM Power Champion (and “@mr_sles” on Twitter), will give you the latest information on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server enhancements for SAP NetWeaver applications and SAP HANA on Power servers, as well as new support for SUSE Manager and SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching.

And, as always, we’ll be at the SUSE kiosk to answer your questions about how SUSE can help you build and open, reliable and secure infrastructure for your SAP S/4HANA environment. We’ll also have a drawing for prizes, and will be looking for good homes for chameleon plushies.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter @MichaelDTabron.