On May 11th, 2022, IBM and SAP jointly announced the RISE with SAP, Premium Supplier Option extended partnership. The availability of IBM Power as an infrastructure offering to clients selecting RISE with SAP to migrate their on-premises ERP or S/4HANA business applications to the S/4HANA cloud was announced. IBM Power on IBM Cloud will help clients by accelerating deployment, maximize uptime and drive continuous innovation in their organization. An excerpt from the announcement mentions:
"To provide clients more flexibility and computing power, including those in highly regulated industries, IBM is making the same cloud-based computing power that is underpinning its own migration available to clients. For clients who run RISE with SAP on IBM Cloud, an expansion of the premium supplier option provides an additional choice to run workloads on IBM Power on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud."
And this finally becomes available starting from June 30th. 2022
IBM Systems together with the IBM Consulting team enabled the Power systems for RISE with SAP. One major piece of the enablement was done by the Worldwide Technical Enablement Team out of the IBM R&D Lab in Böblingen, Germany.
The development team lead by Thomas Heinlein worked on the RISE Automation design and development combined with the infrastructure enablement and connectivity to the VPC (Intel) control plane for RISE.
Arnold Beilmann, SAP Lead Architect and Suraj Bharadwaj, SAP Automation Team Squad Lead & Developer did an outstanding work to define, design and enable the Power Systems for the SAP use with RISE.
And Power will be the differentiator within the RISE offering as there are unique features unleashed due to the extraordinary architecture of the CPU's and the system components which will accelerate S/4 and HANA DB to the next performance and capacity level. There are no restrictions with IBM Power and it's the best platform to run SAP. Enclosed there are some key differentiators for IBM Power with RISE for SAP:
- Flexibility – Faster provisioning of HANA instances using built-in low overhead virtualization. In a virtualized environment, you can not only create new instances easily but also make changes to the existing instances without shutting down applications or procuring new hardware. Whether you need to increase or decrease capacity, or consolidate multiple production/dev/test environments, you can quickly achieve all of that in the virtualized environment and with the largest scale-up VM at 22.5TB.
- Reliability/Resiliency – IBM Power was rank second only to IBM System Z for availability for the past 13 years in the ITIC 2021 report on server reliability (with 99.999% availability). Clients expect their tier-1 business applications to be available 24x7x365. IBM Power delivers this through having 2x better memory RAS than industry standard DIMMS with x86. With advanced recovery and self-healing capabilities, IBM continues to innovate on ways to reduce application and system downtime, making sure businesses continues to thrive in an uncertain world.
- Security - The modern business requires a secure and resilient infrastructure, immune to the rampant and blatant attacks orchestrated by pirates and thieves. To survive in this constant of change, businesses must harness the power of data that exists in their client base and drive new revenues and client insights.
- Environmental sustainability - Earth's changing climate has big implications for individuals, businesses, and policy makers. With IBM Power, IBM remains committed to creating more resilient, sustainable infrastructure through efficient scaling, monitoring and predictive maintenance — along with extending the life of equipment by minimizing energy consumption and space requirements.
- Made for BIG data and HANA – Database Sizes up to 48TB can be realized in the IBM cloud through ScaleOut. Power CPU architecture is designed to run many parallel threads which accelerates HANA to the top of all installed HANA DBs
- Certified by SAP – The Power 9 Flagships are certified with HANA. There's no better match to run SAP in an enterprise environment
- Best TCO option compared to X86 systems in regard to performance
IBM Power underpins the entire environment of the Breakthrough with IBM for RISE with SAP offering. Together with IBM Consulting, IBM Systems Lab Services and the plethora of IBM software offerings, IBM brings the Power of One (company) to this RISE with SAP offering.
If you would like to know more about RISE with SAP on IBM Power in the cloud, please don't hesitate to contact Thomas Heinlein directly (thomas_heinlein@de.ibm.com)