Overview
The Challenge
Thierry Martin, Commercial Director of MBV SI, said: “Our clients recognize that their vast stores of ERP data are a source of deep intelligence that can help them steer their businesses. By analysing that data in new ways and in real time, they can identify commercial opportunities and threats much faster and respond more appropriately. For clients using SAP ERP, there is also an interest in trying out new cloudbased systems and interfaces alongside their existing on-premises infrastructure.”
MBV SI saw a clear opportunity to help its clients on both fronts by launching a hosted SAP HANA offering that would enable them to create cloud-based environments for high-speed analysis.
SUSE Solution
“We knew that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is SAP's own development platform for Linux, and that the two companies have a close testing and development relationship,” said Thierry Martin. “We also knew that the SUSE OS is currently used in more than 5,800 SAP HANA installations worldwide, so we were confident that it was the right choice.”
Given MBV SI’s focus on enterprise-class services, the integration of the SAP Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications was another attractive feature. Deploying similar capabilities in the other leading Linux distribution would have required MBV SI to license an additional three products, increasing the complexity and the cost.
“The combination of Dell servers and storage with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server gave us a fully supported and certified platform for running SAP HANA, including certification for SAP HANA Virtualized,” said Thierry Martin. “With SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, we can offer our clients high-availability, high-performance SAP HANA landscapes in the cloud.”
MBV SI uses a kernel-tune option in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications to optimize performance for its SAP HANA workloads. As standard, the Linux kernel swaps out rarely accessed application memory pages and uses them as a cache to accelerate file system operations. The kernel-tune option ensures that when the page-cache is filled to the configured limit, application memory takes priority and does not get paged out in this way-keeping it available for SAP applications.
“Deploying SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was easy, and the support is great from all three parties: Dell, SUSE and SAP,” said Thierry Martin. “We plan to deploy SUSE Manager in the near future to help us manage our whole SUSE Linux Enterprise Server landscape more efficiently and effectively.”
The Results
A major area of interest for MBV SI’s clients is using SAP HANA to accelerate the SAP Business Planning Consolidation application. This solution helps clients streamline financial planning, budgeting and forecasting and provides what if analysis and scenario planning to help them make better decisions in real time.
“To support real-time decision making in SAP HANA, our clients need complete confidence that the platform will always be running optimally,” said Thierry Martin. “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server offers the required enterprise-level reliability, availability, scalability, manageability and security. High availability is a cornerstone of our commercial offer: clients know that they can trust us to keep their systems running at all times.”