SAP and IBM share a long history dating back to the very roots of SAP, and on Monday that allegiance got a little closer with two new IBM Power Systems server configurations tailored specifically for SAP's Hana in-memory data platform.
SAP's Hana is already supported across all POWER8 servers from IBM. The new series, which will launch initially in two configurations targeting data warehouses of different sizes, aims to offer tailored support of SAP Business Warehouse version 7.31 or higher.
"The commodity servers used today by many organizations are increasingly stretched to their limits by new workloads, in the cloud or on premises," said Doug Balog, general manager of IBM Power Systems.
The first new offering is based on the IBM Power Systems S824, with 24 POWER8 processor cores and up to 1TB of memory; it's designed primarily for the SAP Business Warehouse application running on SAP Hana, with databases up to 512GB in compressed size. The second new entry, based on the IBM Power Systems E870 with 40 POWER8 cores and up to 2TB of memory, targets databases up to 1TB in compressed size.
"Our internal testing has shown that SAP reports run significantly faster when using SAP Hana on Power," said Bhala Bhosale, senior vice president of Enterprise Services at NTT DATA. "Queries that took an hour to run can now be completed in just minutes."
Pricing and availability details were not immediately available.