Stacking the Deck in Your Favor | SUSE Communities

Stacking the Deck in Your Favor

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Secrets of tricks and focuses at use of playing cards

No cheating. From a very young age we’re taught to play games fairly by following the rules, but as adults in the business world it seems we’re always looking for ways to “cheat” … ethically, of course. For example, the Open Source community didn’t follow the rules that say you can’t innovate and be profitable if you share intellectual property. In school, we’re told to never copy another person’s work without giving credit. However, as a marketing manager I’m genuinely flattered when I see a PowerPoint slide I created in someone else’s presentation (bonus points if it’s a business partner!). Even in casual card games with friends, the dealer asks another player to cut the cards after shuffling the deck. This is to assure everyone that a player didn’t pre-arrange or “stack the deck” to get the best cards. Yes that would be cheating. And yet I’m about to tell you how you can stack the deck in your favor by building your SAP HANA system on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and IBM Power Systems.

Stacking performance. SAP HANA delivers real-time analytics results by replacing traditional row-based databases on hard-drives with in-memory, columnar computing and data compression. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a reference development platform for SAP HANA, and is inherently tuned to optimize performance. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications includes this base OS and a page cache management system that allows you to prioritize SAP application performance over filesystem performance. Now put all of that on a POWER8 processor-based server with its eight processor threads, large cache and high memory bandwidth and you get a system that delivers complex analytics results in record time. Of course your business units don’t know or care about the details. They just know they got their reports faster which allows them to make business decisions faster and with the latest information. Read how UCS Solutions has seen up to 600% improvement for some reporting processes.

Stacking reliability and availability. SAP HANA provides a System Replication feature that saves a copy of the in-memory data in a back-up system. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications includes a full high availability solution (SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension) and system replication agents to fully-automate the failover process for faster recovery of the data. And you can choose from five … that’s right 5 different disaster recovery scenarios that best fit your business requirements. Now put all that on a Power Systems server that is inherently reliable with error detection and recovery features built into the processor, memory and I/O systems and you have the most resilient SAP HANA system possible.

Stacking simplicity. The design of SAP HANA simplifies the IT stack by eliminating the need for a database for each application and then another data store for analytics. Everything runs on a common database for business data and analytics. Oh and speaking of analytics, that gets a lot easier too because DBAs don’t have to spend time creating aggregates and tuning databases to make complex queries run faster. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications includes an installation wizard that cuts SAP application installation time from hours to minutes. Also you can avoid the hassle of supporting multiple OS’s in mixed SAP environments, or as Rob Van Acquoy, Operations Manager of Ctac said:

“SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is the best solution for SAP HANA, giving us the flexibility to support Intel, IBM Power Systems and VMware architectures with a single operating system.” (You can read more here.)

But if you’re ready to simplify your mixed IT environment onto a single platform supporting both UNIX and Linux, then IBM Power Systems is a great server to reduce the number of systems to manage, eliminate complexity and minimize points of failure.

Yes running SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and IBM Power Systems is stacking the deck to get better business decision-making, easier IT management and faster time-to-market. Your competitors may not think this is fair, but your customers and business executives won’t mind.

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