Expanding customer choice with multiple architectures: Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions on IBM Power Systems

SAP solutions can be critical to your business, but as with all things in enterprise IT, they don’t stand still. This can be seen by the evolution of SAP Business Suite through SAP S/4HANA, which is designed to open up opportunities for the digital enterprises to interconnect almost all aspects of the value chain and help IT leaders anticipate business outcomes in real time.

Red Hat continues to work with partners like SAP to make Red Hat Enterprise Linux the ultimate platform to deploy applications and deliver end to end solutions, such as SAP HANA, across multiple architectures. Below are some ways that customers can benefit from running SAP S/4HANA with Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Power Systems.

Proven and stable platform 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions for Power, LE offers a consistent foundation for SAP customers as they move from SAP business applications to SAP S/4HANA. Additionally, for many customers, the transition to running SAP S/4HANA requires conversions from running SAP applications on a given database platform to running on SAP HANA. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions running on IBM Power Systems, customers can have a consistent experience and platform to support these transitions and migrate to SAP S/4HANA at their own pace. Moreover, by standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions on IBM Power Systems, IT organizations can manage more servers, deploy projects in less time, and respond to changing business needs quickly. That kind of productivity increase across systems and staff can mean lower operational costs and more capacity for strategic projects.

Increased system utilization

Flexibility to make the most out of your resources includes the ability to run production SAP HANA workloads side by side with non-production and non-SAP HANA workloads. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions supports running these workloads with a single operating system allowing customers to run other Linux applications on IBM Power Systems and fully utilize server capacity.

On-demand capacity growth

IBM Power Systems are designed around a capacity-on-demand model, which can enable customers to add cores and memory to a system running SAP HANA without requiring SAP recertification of the configuration. Both Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions on Power, LE and IBM Power Systems are designed to be deployed as part of SAP’s Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI). The TDI approach enables reuse of existing IT resources such as server, storage, and networking assets, giving customers more options regarding the technology they use, especially when compared with pre-configured hardware appliances running SAP HANA.

Reliability

More customers are consolidating SAP HANA workloads onto fewer physical servers. IBM Power Systems are capable of running up to 8 production instances of SAP software and engineered with memory redundancy to provide a more seamless application experience. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions plays an important role in supporting memory redundancy feature and in-memory processing in general, as the interaction between the hardware and the applications is intermediated by the operating system.

Many organizations are using SAP HANA for business-critical applications to drive digital transformation. These applications can not afford downtime. IBM Power Systems and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions together create an ideal environment for compute and memory-intensive applications, like SAP S/4HANA, across physical and virtual domains.