IBM and SAP’s long-standing partnership has evolved through the years. In June, we expanded our relationship to include the Test and Evaluation (TEA) Program enabling SAP HANA, an in-memory database, to run on IBM Power technology. And now, based on strong customer interest, we’re excited about SAP’s introduction of the SAP Ramp-Up program, an early adoption program that extends early customer access to SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems.

Announced at the SAP TechEd & d-code conference in Las Vegas, the SAP Ramp-Up program represents the next step forward as we work with SAP to deliver a GA product running on POWER7+ and the newly introduced POWER8 system on Linux. The SAP Ramp-Up is a broader program than the TEA program in terms of participation and testing. While still controlled, it allows additional customers with HANA licenses to begin early testing of SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems and to also deploy production workloads prior to the formal GA announcement from SAP.

IBM Power Systems are optimized for big data utilizing a higher number of threads per core to run more concurrent queries in parallel with faster response. These systems are optimized to deliver scale-out or scale-up cloud economics and security. The new SAP HANA on Power is ideally suited for IBM Power Systems clients who are moving to SAP HANA as well as existing SAP HANA and SAP BI Accelerator clients running on x86 who are looking to take advantage of the latest POWER7+ / POWER8 technologies.

Expanding on the topic of choice, IBM currently offers clients a rich set of Power Systems-based business analytics solutions that combine Power Systems with industry-leading business analytics software from IBM. Among these is IBM Solution for BLU Acceleration – Power Systems Edition, leveraging SAP’s recent certification of IBM DB2 with BLU Acceleration for SAP Business Warehouse. Available now, this solution enables faster and less complex analytic queries and reporting using dynamic in-memory columnar technologies for business intelligence, predictive analytics and data warehouse applications. And from an ERP perspective, DB2 on Power is the world’s fastest per the SAP 3-tier benchmark and has been for last 10 years.

The newly announced SAP Ramp-Up program is ideal for SAP BW (Business Warehouse) customers seeking to improve the scalability and resiliency of their current HANA deployments or interested in adding SAP HANA capabilities to their existing Power environments. To participate in the SAP Ramp-Up program, customers will require a valid SAP HANA license. Through this partnership, customers can take advantage of the following benefits:

• SAP HANA In-Memory database
• SAP HANA optimization of SAP Business Suite on HANA and SAP BW on HANA
• New applications developed on SAP HANA by SAP and the SAP HANA start-up ecosystem on IBM’s latest Power technology – all without having to migrate data to an SAP HANA appliance

To meet the basic pre-requisites for running HANA on Power, all IBM Power Systems must meet the minimum hardware configuration requirements. Additionally, they must also run SUSE Linux SLES11 SP3 within a dedicated PowerVM partition or SAP BW 7.4 or above with HANA.

To read more about the SAP Ramp-Up program, please click here. IBM clients who wish to participate in the SAP Ramp-Up program can contact their local SAP representative for further details.
 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Terri Virnig is Vice President of Power Ecosystem and Strategy in IBM’s Systems and Technology Group. In this role Terri has responsibility for all aspects of the Power ecosystem, including ISVs, Solutions, OpenPOWER, Universities and MSPs.