Hewlett-Packard this week unveiled a new converged infrastructure appliance designed specifically to power on-premise deployments of SAP’s HANA in-memory database. The announcement comes about a week after Huawei pulled the curtains back on an integrated system of its own that is also being marketed as a purpose built solution for the platform.

The HP ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA is based on the recently introduced ProLiant DL580 Generation 8 (Gen8) server, which features Intel’s latest Ivy Bridge-EX architecture, providing a total of 15 cores and 30 threads. According to an internal benchmark test, the machine can speed transaction processing in SQL Server 2014 by up to 30 times while increasing hardware reliability by as much as 30 percent.

On the storage side, the appliance packs 3PAR StoreServ arrays, with configurations ranging from two gigabytes to two terabytes in a single memory pool and up to 16 terabytes per scale-out deployment. It closes the circle on a statement Tom Joyce, the senior vice president and general manager of HP’s fast-growing converged infrastructure business, made on theCUBE at the company’s Discover conference last year.

“The buzzword is Big Data, but underneath that are a couple of different major use cases. SAP HANA is one,” Joyce said.  “We’ve got 47,000 SAP customers that are all trying to figure out ‘how can I get over to HANA.’ So we’re gonna build a solution, we got of that today, and we have a lot more coming.”

The new ConvergedSystem 500 is joined by a repurposed version of the HP Serviceguard clustering tool that has been optimized for use in HANA environments, enabling users to automate failover in order to more effectively protect their infrastructure against outages.

The new appliance and the complementary version of Serviceguard are part of the company’s ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA portfolio, which also includes Project Kraken, an in-memory system it developed in collaboration with the German BI giant to drive the adoption of the database. A prototype model featuring 16 Xeon E7 processors and 12 terabytes of memory was revealed at last year’s SAPPHIRE NOW conference.