SAP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) forged their strategic industry relationship 30 years ago back in 1994. As global technology partners, HPE is now the leading systems provider for SAP HANA globally. Serving 25,000 joint customers, SAP and HPE are able to leverage an expansive joint portfolio of assets to deliver customer outcomes at the highest levels of scale and performance.
While the cloud computing model of utility-centric IT services provisioning has become widely adopted on many levels, an all-encompassing move to public cloud-native technologies is still some way off for many organisations.
What this means is a practical and pragmatic approach to real world cloud deployments; SAP and HPE customers who want to bring applications to the public cloud can do so, but those who want to locate a defined set of computing resources in their own datacentre can still work on their own terms.
This reality sits at the confluence point between SAP’s RISE strategy for cloud adoption and acceleration and HPE GreenLake, the company’s distributed IT services edge-to-cloud platform designed to provide customers with an optimised and consistent hybrid cloud experience for all applications and data. In other words, bringing the cloud to you.
An on-premise cloud still has the potential to exhibit many of the core operational characteristics of the public cloud model. Just because a customer owns the physical hardware a cloud runs on, that same customer is not prevented from taking advantage of consumption-based billing for cloud services, management portal functionalities and the cover that comes with an enterprise-grade service level agreement (SLA).
SAP HANA, supported by HPE
To get the most out of any customer’s use of the SAP HANA platform, HPE explains that the technology infrastructure supporting it must address rigorous availability, security and reliability standards, which often span on-premise, hybrid architectures and even multiple clouds.
Organisations now have the ability to get faster time to value with enterprise software solutions optimised for SAP HANA by leveraging certified SAP hardware from HPE. Under the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform experience, businesses can deploy faster with reference architectures provided by HPE Pointnext services.
This joint technology proposition brings together SAP-certified hardware, operating system and services for mission-critical workloads on what are some of the biggest and fastest bare metal appliances available, all in a pay-per-use model with the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform.
Tiers of operational responsibility
Some cloud customers will want to be able to choose the hypervisor, database, management tools and applications that their staff already know, which may often be tightly woven with other pre-existing parts of their stack. In other use cases, it may be the opposite. The point is, the freedom now exists for customers to separate their cloud infrastructure vendor from their cloud architecture functionality layer.
It all comes down to where each customer needs to place the various tiers of operational responsibility that come together to make up its total technology proposition for cloud. It also comes down to how the customer perceives the direction and precise application point for cloud computing to be implemented.
With SAP RISE and HPE GreenLake combined, customers can now adopt hybrid cloud with the traditional advantages of public cloud, but now with a more progressive approach to the on-premise element of their stack.
This is an opportunity to leverage the full scope of cloud capabilities while keeping a customer’s core SAP landscape on-premise. The innovation here facilitates the move to SAP S/4 HANA with the SAP RISE Private Edition Customer Datacenter option (PE CDC) delivered on the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform.
