HP and SAP advance SAP HANA through joint innovation

HP and SAP AG have announced advancements to a joint initiative, codenamed “Project Kraken,” to improve business processes and mitigate risks for customers.

A test system, built from years of HP server technology innovations and optimized with the in-memory SAP HANA® database for SAP® Business Suite, will be demonstrated for the first time at SAPPHIRE® NOW, which is being held in Orlando, Fla., through today.

Unveiled last January, Project Kraken is a coinnovation effort between HP and SAP that focuses on SAP HANA, enabling customers to reduce the time required to rapidly transact, analyze and process large amounts of data within a single server.

Project Kraken’s goal is to provide customers additional choice in scalability for large, online transaction processing applications, with requirements for real-time analytical insights into this data. This allows organizations, including retailers, financial institutions, utilities and governments, another alternative to quickly detect patterns, analyze massive data volumes on the fly, and perform their operations quickly.

The prototype system, optimized with 16 Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family (codenamed Ivy Bridge-EX) central processing units (CPUs) and 12 terabytes of memory, has been engineered specifically for complex, data-intensive workloads. These include supply chain, customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and data analysis. HP and SAP chose Intel processors because of the company’s leading-edge technology that enables customers to improve system performance.

The solution leverages years of engineering and design across HP’s enterprise server business for customers that need the very highest levels of performance and availability, and where minutes of downtime can mean millions of dollars lost.

With this solution, customers can consolidate multiple online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytic processing (OLAP) databases into one vertically scalable server with improved performance. This will further the capabilities of SAP HANA, providing real-time analytics on transactional data, eliminating the need to spend time and resources moving data between environments.

“The combination of our best technologies—SAP HANA with HP Converged Infrastructure—revolutionizes in-memory computing to redefine the speed at which market leaders will soon operate, to speed transactions to a matter of seconds,” said Bill Veghte, chief operating officer, HP. “With the collaboration of HP and SAP, organizations can consolidate online transaction and analytic processing into one place and perform real-time analytics at never-before-imagined speeds, while competitors continue to move data between multiple environments to access meaningful insights at a far slower pace.”

HP, leveraging decades of engineering expertise of mission-critical systems, and SAP, with a focus on design of business-critical database solutions, are working together to create a marketable solution capable of scaling to the highest levels of memory within a single server for speeding business operations.

“With Project Kraken, HP and SAP are illustrating how customers can achieve a step jump in performance, while adding simplicity in the management of the environment,” said Vishal Sikka, member, Executive Board, SAP AG Technology and Innovation. “It shows how large enterprises can confidently run their enterprise applications, including SAP Business Suite, with growing quantities of data in shorter windows of time. This offering will fundamentally and forever change the database market.”