Last week’s EMC World 2014 event, held at The Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, was one of the two live broadcasts brought to you by SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE. In this interview, Steve Kenniston sat down with Bill Reid from EMC IT and Bob Goldsand from VMware to talk about the virtualization of SAP HANA.

The Next Step in EMC’s Evolution

Announced earlier that day, Reid discussed the news of EMC and VMware virtualizing SAP HANA. Reid explained the joint venture with VMware and SAP consists of production support for SAP HANA on the vSphere platform. For Reid, this is the next step in the evolution considering the past decade of virtualization at EMC IT, adding the facts that they had virtualized their data centers, live in SAP for about two years in a fully virtual stack.

Driving Factors : Virtualizing SAP HANA

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Kenniston then asked Goldsand what he’s seeing from EMC and other customers in terms of the driving factors behind virtualizing SAP HANA. Goldsand said they’ve received customer feedback that HANA really needs to be virtualized in order to take off. His team began initial performance evaluations about two year ago in an effort to prove to SAP customers that there was very little performance as well as functional impact with virtualizing HANA.

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• Adding Business Value to the Infrastructure

 Taking the conversation back to EMC and SAP HANA, Kenniston asked Reid to talk about the infrastructure. He described that, going back to their initial go-live in July 2012, EMC had 80 virtual machines supporting their SAP landscape, a large ECC instance supporting the ERP core components from SAP, SRM, FSCM and other SAP classic ERP modules. The entire infrastructure spans across two data centers and makeup over 500 virtual machines supporting about 10 SAP landscapes. He added that the outlier of SAP HANA allows them to add business value moving forward.

Reid went on to discuss the process of EMC’s upgrade around the SAP Business Planning and Consolidations (BPC) last year. When they went live, SAP came out with a new version that was considered too risky for the initial go-live, so it was postponed for about a year. Around the same time, EMC was engaged with VMware, who said that they’d be able to virtualize it. They built out two instances: one that was on the traditional OLTP data store and another that was on SAP HANA. When end users tested both, their feedback leaned towards the latter. The performance was 300x – 400x faster on the end memory compute, driving them to go live on that virtualized stack prior to SAP saying that they were out there.

SAP HANA Advice for Practitioners

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Kenniston then asked Goldsand to offer advice on SAP HANA for curious practitioners. Goldsand said that many of the best practices associated with virtualizing databases can directly be applied to HANA, so practitioners should just follow those guidelines. He added that, in junction with the day’s news of virtualizing HANA, they also came out with a best practices document and checklist.

• CapEx and OpEx

From a CapEx and OpEx perspective, Kenniston questioned Reid on what he’s seen, by being able to virtualize SAP HANA and how it’s impacted the organization. Reid responded that there’s a fairly substantial CapEx opportunity that you can invest in just for entry, considering the expensive license to get in the door, purchase of an appliance and then the utilization.

They looked at their clouds of capacity with compute network and storage, and then asked why they couldn’t leverage that same principle that they’ve been doing for the rest of the SAP stack, and carve out a HANA instance in the same. This was the CapEx reduction. They still have a physical appliance that was deployed a few years ago that was part of their initial SAP go-live.

“Moving forward, we want to use the cloud that we’ve got. We want to be able to carve up new HANA instance, and what we’ve been doing since then is we’ve been spending a lot of time on automating that build,” said Reid. He added they currently have the ability to build and deploy a new HANA instance through push-button automation in minutes. This automation offers huge savings in OpEx going forward.

• Monitoring at All Levels

Concluding the discussion on SAP HANA, Kenniston asked Goldsand if there was anything from VMware for special monitoring. Goldsand said that there isn’t any at the moment, as they are focused more on maintaining performance. However, they are looking at monitoring at all levels to provide monitoring from the virtualization layer, storage layer, the application tier and the database tier. The findings would be percolated up to dashboards, where you can run correlations and track performance.