VMware Announces SAP HANA Integration

During this week’s EMC World 2014 in Las Vegas, VMware (VMW) CEO Pat Gelsinger announced the release of SAP HANA on VMware vSphere 5.5 for production use. The new integration is aimed at simplifying the data center by achieving faster time-to-value, higher service levels and lower total cost of ownership.

"Our customers are evolving their IT infrastructures from physical environments to a software-defined data center architecture and they are looking for solutions that provide agility, high availability, elasticity, efficiency and control for their most mission-critical and demanding in-production enterprise environments," said Gelsinger in a prepared statement. "The SAP and VMware partnership is truly transformative. We are delighted to further extend that partnership and answer those customer needs by certifying SAP HANA for production use on VMware vSphere 5.5."

SAP HANA is an architecture that combines database, data processing and application platform capabilities in-memory, according to SAP. HANA also provides libraries for predictive, planning, text processing, spatial and business analytics. HANA users can utilize real-time analysis for data and can handle data warehouses integrated with Apache Hadoop.

According to VMware, SAP HANA support of vSphere 5.5’s virtualized environment will help users to streamline their data center operations for customers implementing a data center virtualization strategy. SAP HANA customers will benefit from increased infrastructure utilization, agility and productivity with the combined solution, the company noted.

"SAP HANA has led the market as the real-time enterprise platform by driving IT simplicity and by enabling breakthrough innovations for business," said Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG. "Together with VMware, we are enabling customers to operate their SAP HANA-based mission-critical applications in virtual environments with confidence and to accelerate their journey to software-defined data centers and ultimately to the cloud."

SAP HANA on vSphere has been released to customers on certified SAP HANA appliances or on SAP HANA tailored data center integration application-verified hardware, according to the press release. The system supports up to 1TB and 32 physical cores per VMware vSphere instance, and supports vSphere capabilities for management of customer system landscape. VMware and SAP said they plan on continuing to collaborate on more advanced capabilities of SAP HANA on virtual environments to provide more deployment options to their joint customers in the near future.