Lenovo says "Make it so" to HANA + SUSE Enterprise Storage

Quietly, and without fanfare, SUSE partner Lenovo went where nobody has gone before. They asked a question, and after investigating for a period of time said, “Make it so!”  What exactly did Lenovo do?  They certified a Ceph based storage solution with SAP for HANA TDI deployments!

I know, you are probably saying, “Don’t you always shy away from performance oriented use cases?”  In general, yes.  However, in contrast to my general position, this is a case where the partner has taken extreme care in developing, testing, and tuning the configuration so that it meets the very strict performance requirements of SAP.  Lenovo’s investment in time and engineering expertise enables them to provide a very cost-effective and scalable, open source storage solution to SAP’s HANA customers. This effort illustrates the point made in Carol’s blog at the end of last year, Building up on our Partnership with Lenovo! 2017 is looking good.

If you want in-depth technical detail on the solution, I’ll let you talk with our friends at Lenovo (booth #881 at Sapphire), or listen to my colleague Jose present about it in their mini-theater on Tuesday, May 16 @ 2:30pm and Thursday, May 18 @ 1pm.  You can also visit about it in the  SUSE booth, #559 . The high level is there are multiple versions of the platform with specific configurations targetted at capacity or performance needs.  Of course, Lenovo has utilized redundant networks and their enterprise class hardware throughout the solution to ensure the best availability possible.  The result is a scalable, software-defined storage solution for HANA TDI deployments that grows as you need it to.

This industry first is a proof point supporting both the fact that Ceph is enterprise ready and that SUSE is the right partner for Ceph.  From the enterprise readiness perspective, you don’t get much more intense than SAP HANA environments.  In regards to being the right partner, it makes sense to choose the vendor that has been leading with various storage technologies for decades.