Accelerate adoption of RISE with SAP using IBM Power Virtual Server

• New offering designed to move SAP S/4HANA workloads from IBM Power Systems on-premises to cloud within 90 days
• Industry-leading reliability¹ and built-in security of Power platform²
• Customized investment program to ease the transition to RISE with SAP

For over half a century, enterprises have used IBM's infrastructure to host their mission-critical SAP systems for round-the-clock operations and safeguarding their sensitive business data. In 2022, SAP partnered with IBM to offer cloud infrastructure and technical managed services with the Premium Supplier option for RISE with SAP.

To further help clients accelerate their move to Cloud ERP, IBM and SAP have announced the upcoming release of RISE with SAP on IBM Power Virtual Server. IBM Power Virtual Server offers a unique advantage to those enterprises that run SAP workloads on IBM Power servers in on-premise environments. It can help reduce risk and improve SAP S/4HANA migration time from IBM Power Systems on-premises to cloud within 90 days.³ The solution is planned to be available in the second quarter of 2025.

Today, more than 10,000 businesses run SAP landscape on IBM Power hardware. For their move to RISE with SAP, only IBM Cloud offers SAP-certified instances on Power systems.

Based on IBM’s experience with executing cloud migrations of SAP ERP workloads, moving from Power on-premises to IBM Power Virtual Server can help reduce migration risk profile and improve migration time by up to 15-25% as compared to the heterogeneous move from Power to x86 environments in other clouds because of the architecture consistency between both environments and compute performance of the Power processors.⁴

With industry-leading reliability¹ and built-in security², Power servers are designed for running business-critical applications handling sensitive data. In the 2023 ITIC Server Reliability report, 93% of 1,900 responding C-level executives across 37 vertical markets gave IBM Power a 99.9999% or greater availability rating. Among SAP-certified servers, this is the top availability rating. The hypervisor in Power servers, PowerVM, is built into the underlying firmware of the infrastructure stack. This deep integration helps deliver a superior isolation, which is reflected in at least 6x fewer Critical Vulnerabilities and Exposures reported in NIST since 2020 as compared to the SAP-certified clouds using other hypervisors. The transparent memory encryption in the Power10 servers is designed so that someone with physical access to the server memory will not be able to access SAP HANA data that resides in memory.

Once the business critical and sensitive SAP ERP data is moved to Power Virtual Server on IBM Cloud, customers can leverage the cloud platform services to readily build AI-powered surround applications connecting SAP and select non-SAP data sources, with automated and end-to-end AI lifecycle governance.

With Power in IBM Cloud, customers can now continue their transition to Cloud ERP on the platform that has delivered the highest levels of availability among SAP-certified servers⁴ with built-in security.²

To further help ease customers transition to RISE with SAP on Power Virtual Server, IBM is starting a customized investment program to support early-stage technical assessments by SIs or resell partners, migration execution, and the deployment of surrounding non-RISE (SAP and non-SAP) workloads to cloud.

As customers scale their operations in cloud, Power Virtual Server offers yet another advantage specifically with the tailored option for RISE with SAP: customers will have access to a granular average memory increment of 1TB when SAP HANA data size grows greater than 6TB. This helps ensure that they don't have to provision systems with more memory than they need, addressing unnecessary costs.

For businesses running their SAP landscape in Power servers today, IBM Power Virtual Server is designed for a faster and nondisruptive path to RISE with SAP. It helps accelerate Cloud ERP modernization with architecture consistency between on-premises and cloud environments³. The reliability and security of Power platform extending to cloud enable customers to continue to build and run their most business-critical applications with trust and the customized investment program help ease their transition to RISE with SAP.

Learn more about RISE with SAP on IBM Power Virtual Server

Footnotes:

1. ITIC 2023 Global Hardware, Global Server Reliability Report
2. IBM Power Security Catalog
3. Estimate based upon internal IBM modeling of onboarding customers in an SAP landscape when moving SAP S/4HANA from Power on-premises to Power Virtual Server assuming the right level of customer collaboration around network integration and testing.
4. Up to 15-25% in Power8 or newer generation systems based on IBM’s blinded anecdotal feedback from actual customer migrations.
5. 6x fewer CVEs in PowerVM since 2020 compared to hypervisors in other SAP-certified clouds based on NIST vulnerability database records.
6. Based on ITIC 2023 Global Hardware, Global Server Reliability Report and list of Certified and supported SAP HANA Hardware.