May 4, 2021 By Osi Otugo 2 min read

IBM is pleased to announce Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® (RHEL 8.1) for SAP availability on IBM Power® Systems Virtual Server. 

Customers will now be able to run critical SAP HANA workloads on RHEL using IBM Power Systems Virtual Server. Customers can enjoy the flexibility and scalability Power Systems Virtual Server brings to the table. Additionally, Power Systems Virtual Server helps clients adapt to ever-changing business needs with pay-as-you-go billing.

Together, IBM, Red Hat and SAP offer a complete hardware and software foundation for SAP HANA workloads. Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions and IBM Power® Systems, this integrated solution delivers the flexibility, resilience and performance SAP HANA requires.

Customers can rest assured their mission-critical SAP HANA workloads will run on the industry-leading, IBM Power Systems E980s — boasting five nines of availability [1]. Achieve up to 4x performance benefit due to our eight-way multi-threading versus the two-way multi-threading seen on other processors [2]. The performance is evident, with IBM Power Systems Virtual Server achieving the highest SAPS benchmark score across cloud and virtual infrastructure offerings [3]. This results in customers being able to consolidate servers and gain new insights faster.

Why IBM + Red Hat

IBM and Red Hat have, together, built a next-generation open hybrid cloud solution. This hybrid multicloud platform enables SAP clients to accelerate their hybrid cloud journey without fear of technology or vendor lock-in and with the lowest TCO. The platform is designed to provide easy integration across all the cloud environments and traditional IT; faster movement of applications, workloads and data between the clouds; and consistent and secure management of the new mix of cloud, virtual infrastructure and on-premises environments.

SAP HANA applications can deliver rapid, efficient insight. Your underlying operating system and hardware platforms can greatly impact the performance of your analytical workloads. To support demanding applications, IBM Power Systems feature simultaneous multithreading, allowing them to execute more threads per core and more instructions per clock cycle than x86-based servers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions adds automatic non-uniform memory access (NUMA) capabilities and SAP-specific performance tuning to deliver unrivaled speed to insight for users.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for SAP Solutions on IBM Power Systems (POWER9™) provides a consistent, flexible platform across POWER® implementations running SAP applications, delivering a common control plane that easily integrates into broader data center operations.

Why IBM + SAP

IBM has been a global SAP partner for 49 years and is SAP’s most recognized partner, winning 36 SAP Pinnacle Awards. IBM has experience gained from over 37,000 SAP-certified professionals and 5,500 SAP migrations to cloud and virtual infrastructure offerings. 

Sampling of top use cases

  • New Test and Development instances to try out SAP workloads with Power Systems Virtual Server
  • Run mission-critical production SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver workloads
  • Disaster recovery and business resiliency
  • Data center evacuation due to a lease expiring
  • SAP planning as part of a corporate strategy for acquisitions/divestitures of Business Units (BUs)
  • Financial business strategy to move from a CAPEX to OPEX model

Learn more

[1] ITIC 2020 Reliability Survey

[2] Who Can Benefit from SAP HANA Database and S/4HANA on IBM Power Systems?

[3]  SAP Standard Application Benchmarks

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