Data Center

Top 5 Reasons to Adopt PowerOne for SAP S/4HANA

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As the head of our Business Applications Solutions engineering team for Dell EMC, I make it a point to talk with our customers about moving to SAP S/4HANA.

Many of our customers have migrated at least one of their SAP systems to SAP S/4HANA, but it’s usually limited to the set of system roles like sandbox, test, or dev. So, what’s keeping them from tackling mission-critical workloads that help run the business, like Finance, HR and Manufacturing?

Two things: complexity and risk. Every one of our customers has plans for modernizing their IT infrastructure, but they don’t always know how to get there. When it comes to mission-critical apps, most of our customers are also evaluating hybrid cloud options.

We recently announced Dell EMC PowerOne, a new autonomous infrastructure system designed to simplify and automate IT operations across Dell EMC compute, storage, and networking. This all-in-one system has a built-in automation engine designed to be the automation control plane that delivers VMware infrastructure and removes the burden of building, maintaining, and supporting the infrastructure. This will allow our customers to focus on their business.

In simple terms, PowerOne gets customers up and running faster, automating thousands of tasks (like deploying, expanding and repurposing resources) and doing it all through an integrated GUI or a single API. As I considered this level of infrastructure automation and its ability to truly manage the entire system as Infrastructure as Code, I realized that PowerOne provides an SAP-certified best-of-breed performance platform for SAP landscape consolidation. This platform helps you prepare and chart a clear migration path for SAP applications to HANA and to S4/HANA.

Here’s five examples of what you can achieve and why with PowerOne:

  • Modernize the core. Move from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA while upgrading to the PowerOne all-in-one system with automation to easily configure and deploy your infrastructure.
    • PowerOne delivers compute, networking, and storage in a converged infrastructure solution to reduce the time it takes to adopt a modern SAP infrastructure for both physical and virtual environments.
    • Businesses running SAP on industry-standard VMware vSphere can spin up VMware clusters in just a few clicks. Consider cloning a system and migrating it into a new cluster without taxing a specialist or going through your ticketing system.
    • With this in place, SAP Admins can more easily manage and expand the SAP infrastructure by using standardized API integration at the PowerOne system level.
  • Fast track your implementation with SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI). All PowerOne components are SAP HANA certified, including Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, PowerSwitch networking, and PowerMax storage.
    • Dell EMC PowerEdge servers use the latest Intel processors to maximize application performance and SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS) values, which are proven by the many “best-of” published SAP sales and distribution (SD) two-tier benchmark results.
    • The highly intelligent PowerMax array is designed to meet the storage capacity and performance requirements of an all-flash enterprise data center. It delivers advanced storage technologies, featuring many data services and provides mission critical availability with SRDF for your SAP productions systems. PowerMax offers great scalability and can support up to 162 HANA productions nodes. PowerMax service levels can protect production performance from other workloads, allowing SAP customers to separate applications and databases based on performance requirements and business criticality.
  • Lower TCO for SAP landscapes. PowerOne provides massive SAP landscape consolidation opportunities for all your SAP instances, both production and non-production, as well as other workloads. It delivers consistent performance at scale for highly virtualized SAP landscapes and effortlessly handles high random reads and writes. You can take advantage of the new flexible consumption options available with Dell Technologies On Demand.
  • Get a jump start with hybrid-cloud. PowerOne is available as a validated design for the Dell Technologies Cloud, so you can begin to simplify your cloud experience. In the future, it will be integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation.
  • Simplify and protect SAP landscapes. Make SAP maintenance easier by automating the management of SAP systems and their copies and refreshes using Dell EMC’s integration software, Enterprise Storage Integrator, with SAP’s Management GUI, SAP Landscape Management, ESI for SAP LaMa. You can automate the copy and refresh process and create backups faster with smaller data footprints for large SAP landscapes.

When managing the move to SAP S/4HANA, IT organizations want the best time to value available on the market. Adopting PowerOne modernizes the core and sets you up for a future transition to the cloud.

For a more detailed look at PowerOne visit Dell EMC PowerOne Autonomous Infrastructure and ESG First Look.

Also check out all of our SAP Solution documentation, blogs, and demos here. We will be posting more content related to SAP on PowerOne as we build out our solutions in the lab.

About the Author: Dawn Levinson

Dawn Levinson is the Director of Business Applications, Solutions Engineering at Dell EMC with more than 20 years’ experience in high tech and the storage industry. Dawn helps customers get the most from their SAP, Microsoft and Oracle databases and applications as they deploy Dell EMC’s latest data storage, converged and hyper-converged infrastructures. She leads a team of engineers who thrive on exploiting the latest technologies to bring the best solutions to market. Passionate about helping other young women in technology, Dawn is a member of Dell Technologies’ Women in Tech, Women In Action group.