HPE Compute – Connect Worldwide

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.

To the edge and back: taking on-premises for a ride

HPE Compute — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 19:42:51 +0000

HPE provides solutions making your small office easy to deploy and manage, on-premises, at the edge or in the cloud. See how Mark Simpkins (HPE) blurs the lines by taking on-premises for a ride—to the edge and back.

Spaceborne Computer-2: One edge leads to another

I remember reading the headline last year: “Hewlett Packard Enterprise drives innovation at the extreme edge on the International Space Station with 24 completed experiments”. Wow, we really put our servers (HPE ProLiant DL360 and HPE Edgeline Converged EL4000) into what was described as one of the “harsher edge environments”: space. That was an epic understatement! Cosmic radiation, gamma rays, x-rays, solar flares, neutrinos, extreme cold certainly all sound extremely harsh to me. “The solution also demonstrates potential ways astronauts can increase self-sufficiency when processing data directly on the space station, in real-time, bypassing longer latency and wait times that occur when relying on sending raw data to Earth to be processed, analyzed, and sent back to space,” said HPE in the press release. This got my neurons firing more than my daily cups of decaf coffee and chicory root. We like to say that HPE ProLiant is compute engineered for your hybrid world, and the ISS proved an extreme edge use case. However, can HPE ProLiant prove to be engineered for “my” hybrid world, for my personal edge(s)?

Blurring the lines between on-premises and the edge

I love useful technology. I am a licensed amateur radio operator (FCC call sign K7VXN); build my own computers (currently 12-core/128GB memory with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPU); have my own home lab with three HPE ProLiants, two Aruba Instant On AP12 access points and two switches, and various Raspberry Pi projects. I also have picked up a couple hobbies in drones, beekeeping and a certain retro German camping vehicle. I wanted to bring all these together in a unique solution, both to have fun and to showcase that with HPE the edge is where you take it. My solution “recipe” took form with equipment I had on hand.

HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus with Intel® Xeon® E-2224 3.4GHz, 32GB DDR4, two SSDs and a couple HDDs, HPE iLO module
Instant On AP11 Wireless Access Point
1990 Volkswagen Vanagon
Solar batteries, solar panels and solar controller
Laptop
A drone or two

I used the HPE Power Advisor tool to check my power requirements could be met with solar, then just took everything on the road to an isolated location and began playing.

Everything worked just fine. I had secure enterprise-level compute and wireless connectivity among my drone, compute and storage. Whether this is considered on-premises or edge is really a matter of semantics. While this was a proof-of-concept for me, I see several viable use cases without even thinking too hard: drone photogrammetry, secure mobile data collection, mobile 3D printing capabilities, beehive tracking (I am also a beekeeper looking to expand my apiary to remote locations), search and rescue operations, et al. Being able to power all this with renewable energy is a boon. I can transfer data collected wirelessly and “on-premises” as necessary. Although it’s not a space station, this does provide an interesting example of how the “extreme edge” can be found on Earth.

Compute where your apps and data live

The HPE Spaceborne Computer-2 model which proved so successful is also applicable here on Earth in other more mundane, yet important, situational workloads such as those I have earlier alluded to. Similar use cases surely abound for those who delight in solving edge and on-premises compute issues in their own lives, be it hobby or work, with the proven enterprise-grade infrastructure embraced by so many customers. HPE ProLiant completes your hybrid environment wherever it lives—spanning edge to cloud—with an intuitive cloud operating experience, trusted security by design, and optimized performance for your workloads to drive your business forward. Where will you take HPE ProLiant? Let us know in the comments section below, and learn more about compute engineered for your hybrid world.

Mark Simpkins

Mark is the marketing manager for the Small and Midsized Segment here at HPE. He blogs on topics of interest that can help our SMB servers and solutions customers and partners.

HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Manager: A game-changer in core to edge server management

HPE Compute — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 19:19:47 +0000

For decades, datacenters represented the center for all enterprise data collection and processing, as well as the infrastructure to make it possible. But with the advent of ever-faster connectivity and the need to move data and processing power closer to end-customers, enterprises today are deploying infrastructure across an ever-widening footprint, from edge to cloud.

There are times, even on busy days, when you have a minute to pause and reflect.

This morning I’m sitting in my home office, as I’ve done for the past two years. There is no traveling for meetings, yet work continues as normal, with projects to complete and timelines to meet. In my reflection, I think about what it takes to make working from my home office possible: I have tools that provide a global, online reach across the company, our partners, and customers. I’m lucky in that this set up allows me to do my work from anywhere.

Not everyone is that lucky and so I wake up every day obsessed with solving problems for our customers. In response, my team and I have developed cloud services for the HPE compute portfolio with a focus on making the lives of those who support HPE compute products better, easier, and seamless.

A global opportunity to evolve

For decades, datacenters represented the center of mass for all enterprise data collection and processing, as well as the infrastructure to make it possible. But with the advent of ever-faster connectivity and the need to move data and processing power closer to end-customers, enterprises today are deploying infrastructure across an ever-widening footprint, from edge to cloud. This trend is a key driver of our company strategy, with the HPE GreenLake Edge-to-Cloud Platform hosting a collection of software as a service solutions, including the new HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Manager.

In order to evolve the way we work, we must have tools that provide new capabilities and improved customer experiences. Our daily struggles often come as a result of siloed environments, time-sucking manual tasks, security and compliance challenges, and poor visibility into usage and costs. With HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Manager we are changing all of that with a platform that provides a cloud experience – with a global reach – to manage everything, including batch deploy with a click, order with ease, and spinning up new services quickly according to project requirements.

Compute Ops Manager is the first cloud-native, SaaS solution for managing HPE ProLiant servers anywhere they reside, from edge to cloud. Unlike most other server management solutions that require customers to install and manage the management solution, often very close to the servers they manage, the new Compute Ops Manager solution is built and managed by HPE and can reach customer servers wherever they are located. This approach saves IT resources (time and money) while providing a global view of all customer servers – regardless of where they are physically located.

Better oversight, improved automation

In speaking with several of our early-access customers, I hear many of the same concerns when it comes to managing servers at the edge. They need better oversight to know when things are going well, and a notification process when they are not. They need robust yet simple firmware management. And they need improved automation, since “the edge” can expand and get very large and cumbersome to manage. These customers continue to relay stories of how Compute Ops Manager is a game-changer in server management and automating and simplifying common tasks like firmware management and global observability. Customers also expressed appreciation for the simple subscription-based payment model that provides the flexibility they need in planning and deployment.

We’re excited to introduce the newest HPE GreenLake offering – HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Manager – and we’ll continue to provide updates on new features, customer stories, and in-depth reviews of our new cloud-based management solution.

Watch this space for more to come – and for more background information in the meantime, please check out:

• Video demo: Modernizing the compute management experience
• Blog: How HPE is helping reimagine your compute management experience
• Infographic: Discover a revolutionary approach to compute management infographic
• Website: HPE GreenLake for Compute

Matt Haines

Vice President and General Manage

Matt is currently the Vice President and General Manager of the Compute Cloud Services business. His group is responsible for product management and engineering development of all HPE Compute aaS offerings, including HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Manager and HPE GreenLake for Compute Bare Metal. Matt is also responsible for software product management covering the entire Compute manageability portfolio and leads the HPE OneView engineering organization. Prior to his current role, Matt was an engineering leader for HPE, Cray, Time Warner Cable, and HP. Matt holds a PhD. in Computer Science and an MBA in Finance and Entrepreneurship.