A Great Year for IBM Power Systems, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and SAP HANA

It’s that time of the year again, time for snowflakes and holiday cheer, but also time for end of year recaps and sharing our thanks to great partners. 2019 was a great year for the IBM-SUSE Alliance with addition of hundreds of new customers. Thanks to an incredible team for making it happen!

Speaking of success stories, SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems with SUSE is a tremendous success story in itself. Since jointly launching the solution in August of 2015, we have seen such rapid adoption that it is no exaggeration to say our joint solution has caught on like wildfire. Just 4 years down the road, there are thousands of customers who deployed SAP HANA on our solution and over 50 published customer success stories. These customers also include many managed service providers (MSPs) and cloud service providers (CSPs) who host SAP HANA on Power Systems as a cloud solution for their own customers.

This accomplishment did not come as a surprise to either SUSE or IBM. We knew there was a lot of pent up demand from SAP customers and IBM Power Systems has always had a reputation for performance, availability and reliability – it’s a natural choice for many customers with demanding workloads. And of course, given SUSE’s long and trusted relationship with SAP and our overwhelming market share in SAP HANA, SUSE has always been the #1 OS of choice when it comes to any SAP HANA project. But mostly, it’s not a surprise because IBM and SUSE have such a superb history of co-innovation that spans over 2 decades and the extent of collaboration we’ve seen across product management, engineering and go-to-market teams has been deep and exceptional.

Elephant in the Room?

Perhaps some folks in the industry are a little surprised at this continued success in this particular year, due to a major elephant in the room – IBM now owns Red Hat, doesn’t that change everything? We are happy to say, no – it does not. Both SUSE and IBM are committed to customer choice and to customer success. From SUSE’s standpoint, it’s all about empowering our customers to “be the difference” – to help them modernize their SAP landscape, simplify Data Analytics and accelerate their Digital Transformation. IBM Power Systems is a key component to this process.

Vicente Moranta, Vice President Offering Management – Enterprise Linux Workloads on IBM Power Systems for IBM, said, “At IBM, our focus is customer success – as indicated through client adoption and client satisfaction. There is no stronger indicator of that success than some of the amazing deployments we’ve seen over the last four years. The co-innovation that comes out of IBM and SUSE has enabled many of our clients to do things that were simply not possible before. In 2019, we are just as dedicated to continuing this co-innovation as we were back in 2015 and look forward to many more joint customer deployments in 2020 and beyond.”

Michael Miller, SUSE’s Vice President for Corporate Development and Strategic Alliances, said, “As the world’s largest independent open source solution provider, SUSE is committed to supporting technologies that our customers need for their enterprise transformation.  IBM is a key partner and a significant part of SUSE’s success around SAP and SAP HANA. We are proud to see thousands enterprise customers on our joint solution and see continued growth accelerating into the new decade.”

Still not convinced? Here is what some of our joint customers have to say:

Centurylink: “Our ongoing strategic transformation is all about achieving greater speed to market and greater process efficiency, running SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA on Power Systems definitely supports those outcomes.”

Mondi Austria: ““IBM Power Systems provides a high-performance, ultra-robust platform for our mission-critical SAP ERP systems.”

Bosch: “Thanks to the close collaboration between SUSE, SAP and IBM, we get quick and comprehensive responses from the support team and can keep our systems running reliably.” “Our strategy is to add more and more digital services and integrate our products with IoT solutions, with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications on IBM Power Systems, we are ready for these real-time analytics and growth challenges.”

Virtual Persistent Memory

A good example of our continued co-innovation is Virtual Persistent Memory. As we said, our focus has been about embracing the open ecosystem and giving clients choices to solve real world problems. One of these real world problems is the downtime of a SAP HANA system.

Like all IT systems, there will be planned maintenance for SAP HANA. This could lead to time wasted in waiting for systems to shut down, be patched, be brought back up, by reloading data into memory. Considering how large HANA databases tend to get, this time can be quite substantial. IBM recently introduced “Virtual Persistent Memory” capability to address this problem by providing memory persistence.

Vicente says, “Virtual persistent memory is a testimony of our client focused innovation. It not just addresses the problem of long outage time, but unlike the competition, we addressed it in a way that delivers significantly better customer experience on many levels. All clients need to do to get this capability is upgrade their firmware at no additional cost! So, no rip and replace or purchasing expensive hardware add-ons. Solution is built on virtualization hypervisor and uses existing DRAM to deliver persistence. So, clients get the DRAM performance benefits and the flexibility to change the size of persistence volume on-demand with virtualization”

In summary, four years, three thousand customers and over two decades of co-innovation together? IBM and SUSE definitely having a winning formula together, and you can be sure of many more great things to come in the new year, and the new decade!