Increasing disruption creates increased complexity and a need to solve problems quickly—as in yesterday. The last year forced businesses to take a quantum leap in the acceleration of, and focus on, digital transformation. We all saw entire industries go completely online overnight, and companies that had started modernizing their businesses were in a better position to adapt quickly, while many struggled to maintain business continuity. What’s clear is today’s customer preferences and appetite for exceptional digital experiences is demanding, and the success of every business relies on the ability to adapt as the needs of customers continue to evolve.

Core business applications, such as SAP HANA, are key to ensuring your organization can keep up with the speed of change; the time to embrace migration and modernization is now. By using SAP business applications, IT teams can simplify workflows, speed processes, and reduce business risk, thus freeing up time and resources to focus on their move to SAP S/4HANA.

Why should running SAP HANA on Power Systems matter to you?

In the simplest terms, SAP HANA is a platform that can efficiently and cost-effectively process data faster than any traditional database. It can help your organization process information that is coming from, including but not limited to, the business, mobile, UX/UI, and the Internet of Things (IoT), efficiently and cost effectively. Notably, SAP HANA facilitates analytics and data processes as well as application development and deployment.

Furthermore, SAP HANA’s in-memory database can be run on-premises, on an IBM Power® Systems server, in the cloud, or both, and can be an integral part of your hybrid cloud strategy. It’s worth mentioning Power Systems is built precisely for memory-intensive applications, such as SAP HANA, offering the resilience, scale, and performance you’ll need to ease the process and still quickly deploy your applications.

Three scenarios where the benefits of SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems are undeniable

So, how can SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems benefit your business? Here are three questions and answers to help you get the most value out of SAP HANA and achieve your broader business goals.

Scenario 1: My SAP HANA application is due for a refresh. What do I stand to gain by updating my SAP HANA application?

If you’re running SAP HANA appliances on architecture that needs a refresh or are in the process of a strategic hybrid cloud transformation, upgrading to SAP HANA on Power Systems can help you reduce data sprawl, increase flexibility, improve reliability, boost performance and consolidate fewer workloads in a smaller footprint.

In fact, even if you’ve never had IBM Power Systems in your data center, establishing the platform will provide you with a powerful Linux system offering significant processor benefits and positions you to develop a customized solution for your business needs.

Scenario 2: I’m running a traditional database or other non-SAP HANA processing solution. Why should I make the costly and challenging move to SAP HANA from a traditional database?

SAP is discontinuing support for the SAP Business Suite with traditional databases in 2027, creating a mandatory move to SAP HANA. By maintaining traditional SAP deployments, you’re consuming IT resources that could be better diverted to more strategic initiatives. Migrating to SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems will significantly boost your performance, ease data administration and processing and increase user response time for transactional in-memory processing.

IBM Power Systems is an important part of this process because, as an in-memory database, SAP HANA performs best with high-quality memory and large memory spaces. With Power Systems you can easily shift resources from your traditional environment to a growing SAP HANA portfolio.

Scenario 3: I have on-premises SAP applications. Can I expand to off premises?

Absolutely! In fact, as customers develop their hybrid cloud strategies—and, simultaneously, SAP discontinues support for SAP Business Suite—there’s even more urgency to develop and execute on a migration plan toward SAP S/4HANA. Fortunately, you can easily extend your SAP environment to our IBM Power Virtual Servers. Power Virtual Servers provide a wide variety of SAP-certified options for running SAP workloads. One use case we see is customers utilizing Power Virtual Servers for non-production/test environments, freeing up on-premises infrastructure to optimize their production SAP workloads.

How to get the most out of SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems

SAP HANA can be complex, but the benefits of running SAP HANA on Power Systems are compelling—you can reliably process and analyze your data-intensive workloads with minimal delays, improved performance, faster load times and a lower overall cost.

If you’re curious and want more information, the IDC white paper, Who Can Benefit from SAP HANA Database and S/4HANA on IBM Power Systems? outlines the benefits of SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems, including deployment options, performance and cloud capabilities. Click below to learn more about how your organization can realize the benefits of SAP HANA on Power.

>> Download the IDC white paper