With SP7 for SAP HANA, TDI is Generally Available!!!

SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration is Generally Available!!!

These are great news, but let me update you on some other details.

• In the presentation you already have reference to other TDI areas like: Network and Virtualization;
• TDI for network as started on ramp-up in December;
• HW verification tool for SAP HANA will become a part of the “Going Live Checks” and “Early Watch Alerts” standard reports.

As a side comment, I’m currently involved in a TDI engagement, and is being quite simple:

• It was the customer specifically to ask the server vendor and the storage vendor to work together to setup a TDI environment, as he was aware of the deployment options and this was the one that provided him greater flexibility and fitted the best his current datacenter practices;
• There was an initial alignment meeting between the server vendor and the storage vendor, that was very short and concrete: the HANA sizing guidelines for storage in a TDI scenario are very strict as they are based on "SAP defined certification criteria", and so the only discussion point was regarding the number of HBAs needed in each of the servers, and on who would take care of the SAN configuration;
• On the storage vendor side, the recommendations out of the "SAP Certification process" were strictly followed. Regarding HBAs, as the server vendor configuration did not have fiber channel cards, it was suggested to consider 2 x FC 8GB ports per 1 TB node. The strorage vendor also provided recommendations on how to configure multipath IO and other details, which the server vendor highly appreciated;
• In terms of services, on the storage side was the basic services to get the storage configured and available according to the SAP HANA TDI certification guidelines, and additional days were quoted to troubleshoot any eventual problem;
• The server vendor took over both the server installation, configuration, and the SAP HANA installation and configuration (all performed on the customer site).

The conclusion to take here is, that if every part understands the “what and how”, the TDI process is very streamlined, and using the certified storage and servers for TDI, the end installation will automatically also be certified.

SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration, in the end means the acquisition process that all customers have been used for many years for SAP Netweaver based installations. No rocket science. Just a different workload pattern that must be considered, and very strict certification guidelines that SAP imposes and must be followed.

The news on SAP HANA TDI in SP7 can be found here: http://www.saphana.com/docs/DOC-4292

The EMC recommendations for SAP HANA TDI configurations with the EMC VMAX storage array, can be found here: https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-31784