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Don’t let Unix to Linux migration hold you back — HPE can help

HPE Compute — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 16:41:06 +0000

Many businesses delay SAP HANA migrations citing risk, cost, and complexity. The transformation story of India’s biggest steelmaker’s critical SAP environment with HPE lays those fears to rest.

The voyage to SAP HANA has been a long one for many organizations. Since around 2010, when the in-memory database-focused SAP platform first launched, businesses running their SAP environments in Unix systems have known the time to migrate must eventually come.

So, why are many still running SAP on Unix? There are several reasons, and when we ask our customers, ‘risk to business continuity’ is often mentioned. SAP HANA runs on Linux, and moving SAP environments from Unix to Linux infrastructure presents a challenging first step. SAP workloads are also often mission critical, and it’s natural to want to avoid disruption and minimize risk — not to mention the financial investment and technical challenges that come with a large migration project.

But HPE customers reflecting on their infrastructure transformation with us, as they journey towards SAP HANA, have a different perspective.

Like any challenge, SAP HANA migration brings opportunities. With HPE as your transformation partner, the opportunities include future readiness, vastly improved performance, and the optional flexibility with control that HPE GreenLake offers.

A new case study with Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), India’s largest steelmaker and an employer of over 60,000 people, shows why you can be confident of embarking toward SAP HANA with the proven solutions and partnership offered by HPE.

Minimized risk and downtime

A misconception about SAP modernization is that it must involve downtime for critical systems, while new servers are installed and data is migrated to them.

These were concerns initially felt by SAIL. “We didn’t have the luxury to stop the system and migrate to a new platform,” recalls Sharad Kumar Singh, Manager at SAIL’s Bokaro plant, in our case study. “The migration had to be seamless and transparent so that users wouldn’t feel anything had changed.”

Thankfully, the SAP teams at HPE have plenty of expertise to call on when planning migrations. We give confidence to our customers because:

HPE and SAP have a 30+ year partnership, during which time we have collaborated on many proven solutions.
HPE experts have over two decades of experience migrating Unix to Linux environments, including proven processes and key tools to enable successful migrations.
More than 40,000 HPE servers have been deployed for SAP HANA worldwide. Thousands of customers have migrated with us.
HPE’s own IT runs on SAP HANA, and our production database is nearly 100 TB in size.

You can check out this infographic for more information about how we support you at every step of the journey to SAP HANA.

With careful planning, SAIL’s migration was implemented smoothly over a national holiday weekend. When the system users arrived to work after the weekend, the applications were up and running on the new platform in what Singh calls “a very nice experience for us.”

Higher performance, mission critical reliability

When modernizing infrastructure as part of your SAP HANA journey, there are several aspects to consider. When the SAP environment is mission critical for you, it’s important to choose a platform that is as reliable as the servers it replaces. It also should support long-term growth, and give you the performance and flexibility you require.

HPE offers a deep infrastructure portfolio designed to address a broad range of customers’ needs. For SAIL, the optimum solution was built on SAP-certified HPE Superdome Flex 280, HPE Primera storage systems, and HPE StoreOnce systems. The value of the solution is clear when running on this modern, standardized platform; at SAIL, the outcomes included:

Consolidation of all business services onto a single instance of SAP S4/HANA as part of a long-term strategy
New insights that help to optimize production cycles, enabling expansion of steel production capacity
10x faster backups and end-of-month reconciliations

A key reason why SAIL chose HPE Superdome Flex 280 as the platform to support their SAP environment is its mission critical availability. This platform features differentiated reliability, manageability and serviceability (RAS) features not found in other x86 platforms, making it ideal to support environments that demand the highest levels of uptime.

SAIL was also able to bring its valued high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solution, HPE Serviceguard, over to its new environment. HPE Serviceguard for Linux (SGLX) is a hybrid cloud-ready HA and DR solution that increases uptime for critical applications. SGLX is SAP-certified and provides unattended cluster failover capabilities for SAP HANA databases, and protects the application tier, whether SAP S/4HANA or SAP NetWeaver.

Enjoy the cloud experience while retaining control

As public cloud adoption accelerates, and more organizations plan to run components of their core systems in the cloud, the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform provides the option of a cloud-like experience for SAP HANA environments — with the control of on-premises, or co-located infrastructure.

At SAIL, HPE GreenLake has brought a more service-focused approach, with consumption-based billing, flexible capacity, and management by HPE experts.

“HPE GreenLake offered the ability to expand and scale and have on-demand capacity, giving us a cloud-based platform experience on our own premises,” says Singh in the case study. “That has given us confidence that we will be able to run this application infrastructure for another 10 years or more —and enable our future plans to bring together all business units of SAIL onto the one S4/HANA platform.”

Come on in, the water's fine

Migrating to SAP HANA is a daunting prospect for many businesses. But it’s also an opportunity to modernize, accelerate workloads, and enable business growth. With HPE, you can minimize risk with a smooth migration, as well as achieve flexibility with control with the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform.

To learn more about what it’s like to migrate to SAP HANA with HPE, click below.

Read the full story on SAIL’s SAP transformation
Get the guide: “HPE—your solution partner for mission-critical SAP HANA workloads”
Read the infographic: “Accelerate your SAP HANA and S/4HANA transformation journey with HPE”

Diana Cortes

Diana has spent the past 24 years working with the technologies that power the world’s most demanding IT environments and is interested in how solutions based on those technologies impact the business. A native from Colombia, Diana holds an MBA from Georgetown University and has held a variety of regional and global roles with HPE in the U.S., the U.K. and Sweden. She is based in Stockholm, Sweden. Connect with Diana on LinkedIn.

Intel and HPE align around diverse AI data and processing units

Kelly Luna — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 18:00:10 +0000

In many industries, ’tis the season for artificial intelligence (AI). In some ways it’s a redux of the early days – in 1956, to be precise – immediately following the coining of the term “AI”, at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA.

Back then, AI investments among competing countries created an effective AI “arms race”. There were controversies, with early applications being developed in gaming, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. Sound familiar? Well, innovation is either something new, or something nobody remembers. But today’s modern AI is a mixture of both, and HPE and Intel® have the something new part.

Machine learning comes to the distributed edge

With the newly announced HPE Swarm Learning, the industry’s first privacy preserving, decentralized machine learning solution, HPE is bringing AI to distributed enterprise edges – where the action is – and where large data sets contain pent-up insights that directly affect business outcomes. With HPE AI Swarm Learning, multiple geographically dispersed locations contribute to the machine learning, rather than depending on the limitations of a single location. When the training begins, the accuracy and efficacy of the AI algorithms benefit from diverse data sets applied to the problem at hand.

This approach to AI, based on inclusive data from multiple distributed edges, aligns well with the Intel’s new Data Center GPU Flex Series, which is targeted for AI, along with cloud gaming and enterprise graphics. It supports an open, flexible, standards-based software stack – and its unified programming model means developers can quickly deploy applications on Intel GPUs or combined CPU/GPU-based systems.

HPE Swarm Learning accommodates a diversity of data from edge to cloud, and paired with Intel Flex Series GPU open software a diversity of processing unit configurations is enabled. These flexibilities can enhance AI IT deployments, which are particularly useful in distributed edge-to-cloud architectures. That is, it won’t be necessary to replicate IT infrastructures at every edge and, as common production code may run at many existing edge locations.

Enhanced, secure data management – even at remote edges

Further, edge data can remain at the edge while HPE AI Swarm Learning transmits just the insights on the data. This feature, coupled with Intel Software Guard Extensions on HPE servers with Intel Xeon® Processors, affords secure data management at remote edges. With a choice of the Intel Flex Series 140 an Intel Flex Series 170 GPUs, the diversity of deployment options are further enhanced.

This makes remote enterprise edges secure and smarter and puts them to work faster in support of business outcomes.

Discover more! Learn how HPE and Intel digitally transform edge-to-cloud platforms with AI.

Meet the author, Dr. Tom Bradicich!

Dr. Tom Bradicich began his career at IBM serving as an IBM Fellow, Server CTO, R&D VP, and Distinguished Engineer. He led teams to conceive and develop the new product categories of private on-premises clouds, Converged Systems/HCI, predictive analytics SW for Windows, cofounded several industry standards, and was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology. While at National Instruments, an industrial OT company, he served as a NI Fellow, leading teams to pioneer today’s modern OT/IT convergence, industrial systems reliability, and big analog data solutions.

In 2021 Tom was named a Top IoT Influencer by Onalytica, IoT Czar of the Year by IoT Innovator, Top IIoT Influencer by CB Tech, and CRN’s Top 100 Executives and Top 25 Disrupters for 3 years. He was inducted into the NC State University Alumni Hall of Fame, and received the IBM Chairman’s Award.

Currently, Tom is an HPE Fellow, heading marketing initiatives such as HPE solutions stacks, developing and delivering marketing collateral, sales training, and innovative partner GTM programs. He has held various roles at HPE such as GM & VP of the Servers and Edge Systems & SW BU with P&L responsibility, which was HPE’s fastest growing BU. As VP of Server Engineering, and HPE Edge & IoT SW Labs Director, Tom led teams to conceive and launch HPE’s first Edge/IoT corporate strategy, the new product category Converged Edge Systems, Edge as-a-Service SW, and industrial data management SW.

Throughout his career, Tom and his teams developed, launched, and sold dozens of SW and systems products, receiving many analyst, media, and industry awards. He holds several US patents, was executive sponsor for the IBM Women’s Inventors Network, and currently advises financial and industry analysts. Tom served on the Board of Directors of Aspen Technology, a public industrial AI SW company, and the advisory boards of three SW and silicon chip start-ups. He frequently delivers keynotes and media interviews, is an advisor to womenincloud.com, University of Florida Advisory Board and Diversity Committee, and founded the charity www.sockrelief.com.

HPE extends supply chain security by adding AMD EPYC™ processors

Kelly Luna — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 16:31:09 +0000

Server security starts with corruption-free server manufacturing and auditing the integrity of every component, including hardware and firmware—ensuring that the server begins its lifecycle uncompromised. HPE ProLiant Gen10 Plus v2 servers with AMD EPYC processors are now available with the HPE Trusted Supply Chain initiative option, helping secure product lifecycles through the supply chain and beyond.

The security journey

I find that many organizations these days believe that the security health of their IT environment begins once they receive, turn on, and operate their equipment. But what many fail to realize is that the security journey of their IT products really begins with a secure supply chain, in transit during shipping, or even on the factory floor where they are being built. Server security starts with corruption-free server manufacturing and auditing the integrity of every component, including hardware and firmware—ensuring that the server begins its lifecycle uncompromised.

There have been growing concerns that products delivered to a customer’s data center from supply bases that are not properly vetted can contain rogue tiny chips, malware, or compromised code. Without having an assurance of where their new IT products came from, or who had access to them, customers are now focusing on critical processes—including the manufacturing, distribution, and delivery aspects of a product’s lifecycle for assurance that products delivered to their data centers are free from unauthorized activity.

Securing product lifecycles through the supply chain and beyond

As part of this broad supply chain security initiative, HPE is offering the world’s most secure, industry-standard servers that are built in secure HPE facilities to the most stringent codes and conformance requirements of Country of Origin USA. We are further expanding and securing our supply chain with the launch of the HPE Trusted Supply Chain initiative option which is now available with HPE ProLiant Gen10 Plus v2 servers with AMD EPYC processors.

Putting security at the heart of our products is our priority at HPE. To expand on that commitment, we have extended secure capabilities from within the several HPE ProLiant servers, to the physical hardening of the silicon level. This helps protect the server from tampering and any unauthorized activity from the time it is manufactured, during distribution and shipping, and throughout its lifecycle – even after it’s made it into a customer’s hands. This helps our current supply chain processes and procedures address regulatory standards for cybersecurity, such as the National Defense Authorization Act. The HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus v2 can now be manufactured in secure HPE facilities for customers and industries that may require servers that have the United States as the country of origin.

AMD EPYC processors provide leadership performance for computing challenges but also help keep data secure. With the modern “ZEN” architecture, AMD takes a unique approach to help to keep your data safe. AMD Infinity Guard provides a unique and robust set of security features, including Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Secure Memory Encryption (SME), that help complement industry ecosystem partners at the software and system levels. These processors are designed to be resistant to today’s sophisticated attacks, and help protect your sensitive data, avoid downtime, and reduce resource drain.

Increasing supply chain resiliency and server security

The HPE Trusted Supply Chain initiative responds to customers’ increasing concerns about supply chain security by assigning vetted U.S. HPE employees to the manufacturing process, lowering the risk for any unauthorized or rogue firmware or components to be inserted into our compute products.

And we even take it further than that by hardening our products, produced through the HPE Trusted Supply Chain, with a series of HPE-exclusive security features. These security features are an extension to our built-in and award-winning feature, the HPE-exclusive Silicon Root of Trust technology, which protects over 4 million lines of firmware from malware or ransomware and provides protection to millions of HPE computing products around the world.

Each of our security capabilities and processes further lock down the server and ensures the product is secure, not only during the supply chain process but also during run-time operations.

The HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus v2 will ship with these five security features activated at the U.S. factory:

Placing servers in high-security mode. Our servers always ship to customers in production mode, but the HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus v2 will also be placed into a high-security mode at the HPE factory in the U.S. This feature, invoked through iLO commands, reduces the attack surface for cyber attackers, making it more difficult to insert compromised code or malware into the server firmware. This mode locks down the host and requires specific authentication through encryption before any user can log into the server. Naturally, this makes it much more difficult for cyber criminals to gain access to our HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus v2.

Enabling the UEFI Secure Boot feature. For customers who ask HPE to load their operating system at the factory, we enable the UEFI Secure Boot, which connects the HPE Silicon Root of Trust to the OS. An industry-recognized feature, affixing the UEFI firmware to the boot loader ensures the genuine and authenticated OS is initialized. If the customer chooses to load the OS on their own, this feature may be engaged once the HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus v2 is delivered to the end-user location. Anti-virus software cannot detect hackers or an intrusion until the OS is fully running. Some astute bad actors try to compromise the OS before its anti-virus tools have a chance to start. The HPE UEFI Secure Boot ensures that doesn’t happen.

Ensuring the HPE Server Configuration Lock. This takes cryptographic measurements, or images, of all the HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus v2 firmware, hardware components, and options and creates a log inside the server. If any firmware, hardware, or options are altered, an immediate alert at boot-up is registered. Enabling this feature at the HPE factory essentially prevents all tampering or compromise to the server composition, no matter how slight. This feature uses a password, created by HPE, to lock down the server configuration at the factory. That password is then transmitted securely to the customer, who will unlock the server once it arrives. For customers who need to create some additional configuration to the server, perhaps through a reseller or partner, that password can unlock and then relock the server before it ships to the final destination. Thus, HPE is providing the ultimate security – along with flexibility for customers – simultaneously.

Commissioning the HPE Chassis Intrusion Detection device. This mechanism protects the HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus v2 from physical intrusion. Complementing and reinforcing the protection from the Server Configuration Lock, the Chassis Intrusion Detection Device registers an alert if the top of the server chassis is removed. Like an electronic deadbolt on your door, it logs an audit alert in the iLO firmware, even if the server does not have power. If any cyber attacker or unauthorized personnel ever open the server chassis, our customers will know someone has potentially been tampering with the server.

Authorizing specialized delivery services: These services include a dedicated truck and driver, if requested, to safely transport and deliver the HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus v2 – right from the HPE factory to the end-user location. As an additional service, delivery options available to customers are the express service and the premier service. Through these options, customers may also request that HPE deliver, set up, and operationalize our HPE products in their data center. Once again, HPE offers high levels of security without sacrificing the flexibility customers need in their diverse and sometimes remote IT locations.

Federal government, state and local agencies, healthcare, and financial services industries

Cybersecurity concerns generally transcend all market segments. No one wants to be the next government agency or company to have a breach as we’ve seen all too often in the past. We believe our new HPE Trusted Supply Chain initiative will be particularly for agencies or customers who are on the leading edge of cybersecurity protective requirements in federal, financial, and healthcare markets.

The HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus v2 with the Trusted Supply Chain initiative option is perfect for our highest security-conscious customers. Many of those users are in the government sector and currently must comply with numerous regulations like the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) and the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), along with National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The financial services industry is also under numerous requirements for safeguarding the privacy of personal and monetary information of their clients. Finally, the healthcare industry has strict certification requirements, like HIPAA, requiring absolute patient information protection.

The HPE Trusted Supply Chain initiative not only builds security from the ground up, it also enables HPE to manufacture and deliver products securely through our supply chain, directly to our customer locations.

As always, HPE is extending its leadership

HPE is, once again, out in front when it comes to protecting our customers. Watching the prevailing trends of supply chain issues, we’ve taken security of production and supply chain to a new level.

There is also always the concern about keeping products secure and importing from off-shore locations. HPE is taking a leadership position in addressing all these issues, with additional high-security features installed right at the factory. Of course, all the current HPE products undergo the strictest standards for cybersecurity protection throughout our supply chain process. As cyberattacks escalate in today’s uncertain environment, HPE is extending our product offering by adding the ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus v2 servers with AMD EPYC processors to our Trusted Supply Chain initiative.

Protecting and keeping our customers safe from cyber attackers has always been one of our highest priorities at HPE. For more information on our secure products, please check out:

Hewlett Packard Enterprise becomes the only major server manufacturer to ship the world’s most secure industry-standard servers with U.S. Country of Origin
HPE ProLiant Gen 10 Servers- Choose the Most Secure Server on the Planet
AMD Infinity Guard features vary by EPYC Processor generations. Infinity Guard security features must be enabled by server OEMs and/or Cloud Service Providers to operate. Check with your OEM or provider to confirm support of these features. Learn more about Infinity Guard.
Trust never sleeps: Why hardware roots of trust are essential for security
HPE Compute Security

Christina Austin Tiner is a veteran marketing leader in the Information Technology industry, having contributed to the server business for over 20 years. She has served in a variety of roles that include worldwide product management for Compaq and HP, director of product management for the Apollo line of HPC platforms, director of product management for Dell PowerEdge C servers, and group manager for the worldwide product marketing team responsible for the ProLiant enterprise rack server portfolio.

She is currently the AMD Alliance Marketing Manager for HPE.

Compute Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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116 HPE server performance world records can’t be wrong!

Kelly Luna — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 16:10:24 +0000

HPE Competitive Benchmarking server results on Intel leaderboard and sustaining records help customers to stay competitive in today’s market.

Today’s market can be described as volatile at best, and many companies need to stay competitive by knowing how their particular servers or future deployments perform compared to others on key workloads. The answer to this need: industry-standard server benchmarking. HPE servers currently hold 116 benchmark world records that includes 34 performance benchmark leadership results on the Intel leaderboard plus 83 sustaining leadership records, including AMD server results. HPE servers prove that they provide customers the best performance, scalability, virtualization, and energy efficiency to continue meeting market demands. For detailed information on HPE world records, see the HPE Server Performance Benchmark Newsletter.

HPE servers make their mark on Intel leader board with Intel Xeon Scalable processors

The Intel performance leader board includes HPE servers with innovative Intel Xeon 2^nd and 3^rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors. One of our newest solutions, the HPE Superdome Flex 280 server, won most of the leader board #1 records.

Ready for your small or medium-size enterprise, the Superdome Flex 280 is designed to handle SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server user demand while delivering real-time analytics. You can comb through massive IoT and AI datasets at the edge or in the core. And you are able to tackle complex problems holistically as a standalone HPC workhorse or within petascale clusters. More information about the Superdome Flex 280 can be found at the release blog – hpe.com/t5/Servers-Systems-The-Right/HPE-s-new-as-a-service-building-block-for-digital-transformation/ba-p/7111328

Other HPE server world records on the Intel leader board include HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10, HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen10, HPE Superdome Flex, HPE Synergy 480 Gen10, HPE Synergy 660 Gen10, all featuring 2^nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. These results fill out the remainder of the HPE section of the Intel leader board proving that HPE can provide customers with all-encompassing solutions.

The customer value of server benchmarking

You want to keep competitive with the market and what your customers need, and performance benchmarking supports that. Server benchmarking shows the objective performance measurement of the product, and can be used as a comparison to similar products. Benchmarking is also often useful for sizing in purchase planning. Results can help showcase your company’s product qualities and total cost of ownership.

HPE runs many types of benchmarks to evaluate its servers. The diverse categories of performance and efficiency indicators leads to results that show you:

How fast a system can complete any action in a certain time period. Improving performance will allow your business to stay competitive in the market.
Scalability that specifies how a system can handle load increases without impacting performance. Better performance ensures that a system is versatile enough to handle low and high loads.
Performance, scalability, and power consumption of virtualization solutions.
Energy efficiency that calculates power management.
Competitive results that quantify the comparison of a business to others.
Cost efficiency
Showing strengths and weaknesses of your business servers.
Scalability revenues

The listed measurements are important as they can show how your business is efficient, competitive, and able to grow without any adverse effects. A scalable system can adapt to your company’s growth and provide longevity of your purchase. This is especially important for small- and medium-sized businesses. Your organization wants to continue to remain competitive in today’s uncertain market. You need to be confident that your current or planned server installations offer superior performance.

Benchmark types

The latest Intel leader board contains a plethora of benchmarks that includes a wide variety of performance, scalability, and energy efficiency metrics. The following are the benchmarks used to attain world leadership for HPE servers on the Intel leader board:

Big data analytics

TPC Benchmark*H (TPC-H): Decision support system with ad-hoc queries–Is configured to represent the workloads of different-sized businesses. Shows query execution speed and cost of the system at different database sizes

Cloud and virtualization

SPECvirt_sc^® 2013: Virtualized server consolidation–Shows capability of enterprise-class virtual machines using four workloads on real-world traffic: a web server, a Java application server, an IMPAP server, and a batch server.

Server-side Java

SPECpower_ssj^® 2008: single- and multi-node servers’ energy efficiency–Displays power management and energy-efficiency
SPECjbb^® 2015: pure and critical throughput under SLAs–For customers who run worldwide companies, it shows handling point-of-sale requests, online purchases, and data-mining operations.

Compute-intensive metrics

SPEC CPU 2017–Customers can see the server’s capability and speed in running applications related to real-world problems of R&D environments or highly specialized scientific and technical fields.

OLAP

SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) Edition for SAP HANA^® standard application benchmark: In-memory benchmark for next-generation real-time data warehousing–Shows the performance of delivery of simple, open, flexible, and highly scalable solutions for in-memory computing.

SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

SAP^® Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark, two-tier: ERP OLTP benchmark–Indicates the number of users, response times, and the amount of fully business processed line items per hour (SAPS) to help customers determine sizing requirements

Shared-memory parallel processing

SPEC OMP^®2012–For compute-intensive applications, the benchmark includes 14 scientific and engineering codes. Customers can measure parallel processing performance on a given system.

Bottom line

Competitive benchmarking is a valuable tool for companies who want to be ahead of the game in today’s market. HPE provides benchmark server results that lead the way.