As traditional multi-tier enterprise software is adapting to new realities of cloud infrastructure, it also needs to make use of the latest advances in computational and hardware capabilities. Red Hat has been working with major ISVs and partners, like SAP, on digital transformation scenarios while simultaneously helping them to extract additional performance from their hardware with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

As part of the quest for enhanced performance, the focus for database and analytics applications has been shifting to in-memory execution, a deployment model that SAP HANA is offering. In the future, that trend is likely to include even more complex designs that incorporate entire software frameworks for processing information in-memory, and that is where SAP Data Hub comes into play. As a result, last year Red Hat introduced an enhanced offering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions, that is designed to assist our customers in simplifying their adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and to cater to various use cases they may have, including running SAP S/4 HANA.

To further aid customers and partners in planning, sizing and configuring their environments, SAP and Red Hat, along with other software and hardware partners, have historically used a suite of performance benchmarks. For traditional multi-tier deployments, the Sales and Distribution (SD) module became a “gold standard” for benchmarking across largest enterprises and small businesses alike. With a long history of collaboration with SAP and our mutual hardware OEM partners, like HPE and Dell EMC, among others, Red Hat is no stranger to delivering leading results on these benchmarks across multiple server sizes.

To demonstrate performance and provide additional scalability and sizing information for SAP HANA applications and workloads, SAP introduced the Business Warehouse (BW) edition of SAP HANA Standard Application Benchmark. Presently on version 2, this benchmark simulates a variety of users with different analytical requirements and measures the key performance indicator (KPI) relevant to each of the three benchmark phases defined as follows:

1. Data load phase, testing data latency and load performance (lower is better)
2. Query throughput phase, testing query throughput with moderately complex queries (higher is better)
3. Query runtime phase, testing the performance of running very complex queries (lower is better)

As a result of close collaboration with our OEM partners, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was used in several recent publications of the above benchmark.

Specifically, processing 1.3 billion initial records (a popular dataset size) using a single Dell EMC PowerEdge R940xa server, demonstrated that running the workload on Red Hat Enterprise Linux could deliver the best performance across all three benchmark KPIs and outperform similarly configured servers (see Table 1).

Table 1. Results in scale-up category running SAP BW Edition for SAP HANA Standard Application Benchmark, Version 2 with 1.3B initial records

Additionally, in a much larger dataset size of 5.2 billion initial records, Dell EMC PowerEdge R840 server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux also outscored similarly configured server on two out of three benchmark KPIs demonstrating better dataset load time and query processing throughput (see Table 2).

Table 2. Results in scale-up category running SAP BW Edition for SAP HANA Standard Application Benchmark, Version 2 with 5.2B initial records

These results demonstrate Red Hat’s commitment to helping OEM partners and ISVs deliver high-performing solutions to our mutual customers, and showcase close alignment between Red Hat and Dell EMC that, in collaboration with SAP, led to the creation of certified, single-source solutions for SAP HANA. Available in both single-server and larger, scale-out configurations, Dell EMC’s solution is optimized with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions.

Learn more: https://www.redhat.com/en/partners/dell and https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/red-hat-enterprise-linux-sap-solutions-technology-overview

Results as of July 30, 2018. SAP and SAP HANA are the registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries. See www.sap.com/benchmark for more information.

[1] Dell EMC PowerEdge R940xa (4 processor / 112 cores / 224 threads, Intel Xeon
Platinum 8180M processor, 2.50 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 1024 KB L2 cache per core, 38.5 MB L3 cache per processor, 1536 GB main memory). Certification number #2018023

[2] FUJITSU Server PRIMERGY RX4770 M4 (4 processor / 112 cores / 224 threads, Intel Xeon
Platinum 8180 processor, 2.50 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 1024 KB L2 cache per core, 38.5 MB L3 cache per processor, 1536 GB main memory). Certification number #2018017

[3] Dell EMC PowerEdge R840 (4 processor / 112 cores / 224 threads, Intel Xeon
Platinum 8180M processor, 2.50 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 1024 KB L2 cache per core, 38.5 MB L3 cache per processor, 3072 GB main memory). Certification number #2018028

[4] HPE Superdome Flex (4 processor / 112 cores / 224 threads, Intel Xeon
Platinum 8180 processor, 2.50 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 1024 KB L2 cache per core, 38.5 MB L3 cache per processor, 3072 GB main memory). Certification number #2018025