Better data orchestration for the intelligent enterprise – Part 1: The database | SUSE Communities

Better data orchestration for the intelligent enterprise – Part 1: The database

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There is more data generated in businesses today than ever before, and more ways to store it and use it.

Every enterprise wants to unlock all that value but usually data is kept in silos across the enterprise, e.g. in enterprise applications, databases, plain files, Hadoop data lakes, data warehouses, IoT or various forms of cloud storage.

Combining data across those silos is needed and, more than a challenge, is an opportunity.

The Intelligent Enterprise

According to SAP, one of SUSE`s biggest partners, the Intelligent Enterprise is the concept that the way systems and people connect with your enterprise should be as seamless as the way we currently live our digital lives. Users should be able to get the data needed to make intelligent decisions whenever they want from whatever device they are using. In other words, your work digital life should have the same ease of use as your personal digital life.

To accomplish this, you need the right infrastructure, database and applications and there are three major areas of seamless integration:

  • The intelligent suite (think of it as front or customer-facing end)
  • The digital platform (the data management side)
  • Intelligent technologies (such as machine learning and IoT delivering the accelerated intelligence).

So, what is the starting point?

The starting point is having a good ERP system.

You have different offerings for this, but we will focus on the SAP solutions for this series and SAP HANA is your answer for a database.

SAP HANA is the in-memory database and the basis for S/4 HANA, an intelligent, integrated ERP system that runs on SAP HANA and adds real-time analytics and a major reduction in the data footprint when compared to current ECC environments.

Fundamentally, it’s about having the right database back-end capable of supporting the S/4 HANA environment and replacing the existing Business Suite.

In today’s world, the SAP Business Suite (the applications front end) can operate in a variety of database back-ends (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2) to name a few. The first migration step is to transition the database back-end to SAP HANA with the current Business Suite front end. And, finally, the application layer is updated to S/4HANA.

What are my options on adopting SAP HANA?

Again, you have multiple, but here we will focus on our partnership with Lenovo as an independent hardware vendor (IHV) and their portfolio for SAP HANA solutions including SUSE software.

Like SUSE, Lenovo is a long-term SAP partner.  As such, they have significant expertise designing and implementing the right SAP HANA solution for customers.

These solutions can be either fully integrated (an almost “appliance-like” experience”) or a what SAP calls a “Tailored Datacenter Integration” or TDI solution. The Lenovo solutions can scale-up for larger operations-centric environments or scale-out for analytical-type workloads. And they can be deployed on bare-metal or virtualized. In other words, systems can be configured to the individual customer workload. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.

Lenovo also has two SAP HANA solutions in the hyperconverged space.

  1. Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Solution for SAP HANA – a Nutanix-based solution ideal when running under 3TB of RAM. Lenovo is one of the very few vendors with an SAP-certified solution for SAP HANA on Nutanix. It requires SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP applications for the SAP HANA DB nodes.
  2. Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Solution for SAP HANAtargeting enterprises running on VMWare solutions. It is ideal for customers wanting to deploy SAP HANA on their VMWare environment. In this Lenovo Press document written in cooperation with the Lenovo SAP engineering team in Walldorf you`ll find specific processor, memory, networking and storage guidelines to deploy SAP HANA and SAP Business Suite.

In Summary

Lenovo can design and support the SAP HANA environment that meets your very particular requirements.

  • From dedicated bare-metal instances, scale-up and scale-out systems.
  • For smaller HANA instances (< 3TB RAM), ThinkAgile HX (Nutanix) and ThinkAgile VX (VMWare) platforms are good options and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP application is available for them as well.

And it’s not only hardware – Lenovo also provides professional support services to install, maintain & manage the infrastructure as needed.

As for SUSE, it’s not just the Operating System – SUSE has the software-defined infrastructure designed and tested with SAP’s assistance to deliver on the critical SAP requirements. Both SAP and Lenovo run their own SAP infrastructure on SUSE. Also, you can add SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching, and configuration management tools like SUSE Manager to race towards zero downtime.

Learn more

 

Or, simply talk to us at lenovo@suse.com

 

On Part 2 of this series we discuss how to migrate to S/4HANA (an integrated ERP system). Read it now! 

This blog series was co-written with Jose Betancourt.

 

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Carolina Pereira Alliance Partner Marketing Manager at SUSE and passionate about Marketing and Technology.