SAP HANA and ESS: A Winning Combination

SAP HANA on IBM® POWER® is an established HANA solution with which customers can run HANA-based analytic and business applications on a flexible IBM Power based infrastructure. IT assets, such as servers, storage, and skills and operation procedures, can easily be used and reused instead of enforcing more investment into dedicated SAP HANA only appliances. In this scenario, IBM SpectrumTM Scale as the underlying block storage and files system adds further benefits to this solution stack to take advantage of scale effects, higher availability, simplification, and performance. With the IBM Elastic StorageTM Server (ESS) based on IBM Spectrum ScaleTM, RAID capabilities are added to the file system. By using the intelligent internal logic of the IBM Spectrum Scale RAID code, reasonable performance and significant disk failure recovery improvements are achieved. This IBM RedpaperTM publication focuses on the benefits and advantages of implementing a HANA solution on top of IBM Spectrum Scale storage file system. This paper is intended to help experienced administrators and IT specialists to plan and set up an IBM Spectrum Scale cluster and configure an ESS for SAP HANA workloads. It provides important tips and bestpreferred practices about how to manage IBM Spectrum Scale''s availability and performance. If you are familiar with ESS, IBM Spectrum Scale, and IBM Spectrum Scale RAID, and you need only the pertinent documentation about how to configure a IBM Spectrum Scale cluster with an ESS for SAP HANA, see Chapter 5, "IBM Spectrum Scale customization for HANA" on page 25. Before reading this IBM Redpaper publication, you should be familiar with the basic concepts of IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM Spectrum Scale RAID. This IBM Redpaper publication can be helpful for architects and specialists who are planning an SAP HANA on POWER deployment with the IBM Spectrum Scale file system. For more information about planning considerations for Power, see the SAP HANA on Power Planning Guide.