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10 Reasons to run SAP S/4HANA on IBM POWER Systems

Time to read: 5 minutes

With the recent launch IBM’s Power10 servers there are some compelling reasons for running SAP S/4HANA on IBM Power Systems, which we explore below.

Many businesses trust SAP as their core enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. It’s widely reported that SAP plans to get customers off its ECC ERP platform and onto its preferred S/4HANA system in the public cloud before the support deadline of 2027. However, things aren’t necessarily going to plan with Gartner reporting that SAP’s strategy is to get customers onto S/4HANA, but it is also likely to “continue to provide multiple options that most complex, global companies require.”

SAP is putting a great deal of focus on encouraging organizations to migrate onto SAP S/4HANA ERP running on the in-memory SAP HANA database with new customers being encouraged to implement SAP S/4HANA.

The challenge is that SAP S/4HANA and its in-memory database present a series of technical and commercial challenges concerning the infrastructure it runs on.

SAP runs on a variety of platforms, including the enterprise-grade IBM Power Systems platform – often combined with the AIX operating system and an enterprise-class backend database, such as Oracle or IBM DB2.

The problem many businesses are facing is that they don’t have the required in-house skills or expertise to leverage the bullet-proof reliability of IBM Power Systems, so need a partner to help.

10 Reasons to run SAP S/4HANA on IBM Power 

IBM Power Systems is positioned to meet the SAP S/4HANA challenges – find out why:

1. IBM Power Systems can concurrently run multiple operating system types in separate VMs on the same physical server platform – this includes IBM i, AIX, SUSE Linux (SLES) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

2. IBM Power Systems offer enterprise-class RAS features (reliability, availability & serviceability) that provide a stable, reliable, performant, and secure platform to run workloads on.

3. IBM Power Systems have industry-leading performance capabilities with exceptionally high-speed memory to CPU bandwidth which is essential for in-memory databases such as HANA.

4. The ability to run a mix of operating system types, as well as the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) on the same server platform, enables a smoother path to application modernization. This enables containerized micro-service based systems of engagement applications to run alongside trusted systems of record.

 

5. Highly cost-effective compute resource usage is available using IBM’s Dynamic Capacity for Private Cloud (Enterprise Pools 2.0), which blends CAPEX with OPEX to provide a commercially attractive HA and DR model.

6. Wide choice of locations and cost models to run SAP S/4HANA on IBM Power Systems (plus Tectrade can provide 24×7 support, monitoring, and management on-premises, in Tectrade’s PowerCloud, or the IBM Power Virtual Server cloud).

7. SAP themselves use IBM Power Systems (E980) in their own Enterprise Cloud (SAP HEC)..!

8. IBM’s PowerVM provides a very advanced and secure virtualization technology layer enabling far greater flexibility in supported Tailored DataCenter Infrastructure (TDI) choices than other platforms.

9. IBM’s POWER9 processor technology provides far greater performance than other processor technologies and allows up to 8 threads to run simultaneously on the same physical CPU core.

10. IBM’s new range of Power10 servers now include even faster cores, faster memory bandwidth, and on-chip Matrix Math Assist engine (MMA) to boost AI-infused applications.

Application Modernization with IBM Power Systems

If you are an existing SAP customer looking to explore migration roadmaps, or you’re considering deploying SAP S/4HANA as a greenfield installation – we can help you make the right choices.

Tectrade is experienced in running SAP workloads on IBM Power Systems. We host fully managed SAP environments for several customers on our own Tectrade PowerCloud and can provide consultancy on private or public clouds, with options for backup, high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solutions.

Get in touch to find out how we can support your business with our IBM skills.

Why IBM for SAP