SAP HANA customer adoption at supersonic speed

Back in August I wrote a blog about important updates for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, and I gave a shout out to SUSE alliance partner IBM for two years delivering SAP HANA solutions on the Power Systems platform. Well a few months later they achieved a significant milestone. There are now 1000 happy customers running SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise and IBM Power.

That is an amazing adoption rate, but not terribly surprising. Since the introduction of SAP HANA, many businesses running their SAP systems on Power servers were waiting for the in-memory database to be available on their platform of choice. Since SUSE delivered the first Linux for Power Systems AND SAP HANA was developed on SUSE Linux, it didn’t take long for us to get a performance-optimized version ready for the Power platform in Big Endian mode. About a year later, SAP validated SAP HANA on Power and we immediately went to work on a distribution for Little Endian mode. Over the last year we’ve introduced several updates and enhancements specifically for this platform including:

• Extended subscription life with LTSS for Big Endian support to March 2022
• Full support for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications support for Little Endian mode
• Increased memory support to 32TB and up to 2058 processors for SAP HANA in Big Endian mode
• Increased memory support to 512TB for SAP HANA in Little Endian mode
• Full support for all SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications features
• Enablement for the upcoming POWER9 processor-based servers
• SUSE Studio Express support for custom images
• SUSE Manager can be run on Power servers in Little Endian mode for lifecycle management

And we’re not stopping there. In response to strong customer demand, there will soon be support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching on IBM Power.

It’s no wonder that there are so many satisfied customers like Ctac:

“As a managed services provider, we need to be able to respond rapidly to set up a new customer or expand an existing customer’s capacity,” said Guy Schwartzmans. “The combination of IBM Power Systems and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications makes it easy to do just this, which is why this has become our platform of choice for deploying new SAP HANA systems.”

Today IBM has 24 customer references for SAP HANA on IBM Power … all on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications. Check them out here.

And as always you can follow me on Twitter @MichaelDTabron.