Silicon Graphics International Corp. (SGI) has forged a new alliance with Dell Inc. that could have big ramifications for the server market. The deal will see Dell resell SGI’s high-end servers to customers adopting SAP HANA in-memory computing applications. Essentially, that means Dell is really going to sell is HANA appliances, which should make it far simpler and faster for enterprises to deploy SAP SE’s flagship in-memory database system.

Dell already sells two-and four socket servers that can run HANA, but it hasn’t bothered to invest at the higher end of the market (eight-socket servers and above). It no longer needs to worry about that though, because SGI CEO Jorge Titinger says the new partnership will allow Dell to compete with rival companies that sell everything from two-socket servers all the way up to 32-sockets.

Dell’s team up with SGI comes just a day after the company said it was partnering with Mirantis Inc. and Juniper Networks Inc. to sell pre-integrated hardware-software systems that come with the Mirantis OpenStack.

It seems as though the trend towards in-memory computing has entered a new phase. The first phase saw the adotion of new analytics applications that were used to boost data warehousing environments. Now, with SAP finally able to deliver its S/4Hana transaction processing applications based on its in-memory database tech, those at the high-end of the server market can also make the shift to HANA, Titinger told Data Center Knowledge.

“The systems that Dell is reselling are based on our scale-up architecture,” said Titinger. “Our other two server families are built around a scale-out architecture.”

In addition, Dell also gains broader access to the market beyond four-socket configurations.

“Companies running larger environments on SAP HANA need a simple way to use scale-up, single-node architectures,” said Jim Ganthier, Dell’s general manager of engineered solutions, in a statement announcing the partnership. SGI’s UV allows Dell “to meet the scale-up data, business and technical requirements” for SAP S/4HANA and other SAP analytics and applications, Ganthier added.

One of the main factors driving the convergence of HPC and enterprise workloads is a growing requirement to run real-time analytics and other business applications at extreme scale, argued SGI’s Titinger.

SGI began working with SAP on socket certification for HANA back in January 2014. As for those who criticize SGI’s lack of experience in the enterprise market, SGI points out it helped to develop HANA’s main file system, and so “it really is a natural progression for us,” said Brian Freed, SGI’s vice president for in-memory architecture.

SGI’s new partnership comes after it announced in April it had doubled the number of sockets for its UV appliance for SAP HANA. Back then, Freed noted that “HANA software continues to mature [and] the hardware is ready.”

The partners said the UV 300H can be deployed as a SAP-tailored datacenter integration configuration for “real-time operations at extreme scale,” or as an appliance.

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