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Managing data is a top priority for SAP customers. Insights gained from mission-critical data aid customers in their decision-making process, while also enabling them to respond to changes in business dynamics—two actions that have been crucial over the last 18 months, as organizations have needed to cope with COVID-19. According to ASUG Pulse of the SAP Customer 2021 research, 43% of the survey’s respondents indicated that dashboards and analytics are key areas of focus for their organizations in 2021. Yet, this is no small undertaking, no matter what kind of IT landscape an organization has. Analytics capabilities demand a significant amount of computing power, require more memory capabilities to function, and need to be protected from outside threats. Companies need to ensure that they can access their mission-critical data quickly and easily. Additionally, organizations need to take steps to ensure that their data is safe and secure.
SAP is working with several partners to optimize the performance, memory demands, and security functionalities of its solutions. A great example of this is the work Intel is doing with SAP to improve the data and analytics capabilities of SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA, particularly with the use of third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and Intel Optane Persistent Memory. These Intel solutions can improve the performance and security of an organization’s SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA landscape. Customers install the Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and Intel Optane Persistent Memory on their on-premises servers, or organizations can work with their hyperscale partners to power aspects of their business with these solutions.
Increasing Memory Capabilities
SAP and Intel have been working together to improve the memory of their customers’ IT ecosystems. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are important to many of the analytics capabilities that organizations are using to make sense of the data they are collecting. We will continue seeing increased use of AI and ML in the future. In the Pulse of the SAP Customer 2021 study, 60% of respondents said that AI and ML will have a significant effect on their organization’s efforts over the next two years. These effects can be addressed, but the analytics capabilities offered by SAP Business Warehouse are incredibly compute-heavy. Organizations will need to bolster and upgrade their server capabilities, support larger database sizes, and make the most out of their SAP investments.
Intel has been working with SAP to offer customers options for increasing and improving the memory capabilities in their SAP landscapes. They are also helping organizations process their data and leverage the advanced analytics capabilities offered by SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA more efficiently and effectively, especially as an organization’s data volume—and the necessity of larger memory databases—increases over time.
SAP customers leveraging Intel Optane Persistent Memory can dramatically increase the capacity of in-memory databases. This solution also increases the capabilities of SAP Business Warehouse by giving customers more access to data in-memory, which in turn allows users to process large amounts of data significantly faster when compared with disk-based solutions—while also increasing memory capacity per socket. Customers can further augment the memory capabilities of SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA by installing the third generation of Xeon Scalable processor-based servers into their ecosystems. SAP and Intel worked together to ensure that these processors increase the memory of an organization’s IT ecosystem.
Keep Your Data Safe
As more organizations begin migrating their IT landscapes to the cloud, data protection is steadily becoming a priority for SAP customers. Earlier this year, security researchers from Onapsis released an alert in conjunction with SAP, warning that outside actors could take control of an organization’s SAP systems if it had not updated to the latest security patches.
Keeping your organization’s data safe—both internal and customer data—is of the utmost importance, especially as bad actors find new ways to hack IT systems. This particular topic has been front of mind for both SAP and Intel as the two organizations have worked together to improve their customers’ SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA ecosystems.
With Intel Optane Persistent Memory, all data is encrypted using the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and requires a key to access the data. Since this uses hardware-based cipher key processing, the encryption is transparent to the application software, meaning that software code changes are not necessary when leveraging this solution. Additionally, Intel Xeon Scalable Processors feature the Intel AES New Instructions (Intel AES-NI) encryption algorithm, which builds on the AES by adding seven new instructions to improve security, thereby strengthening and improving AES. The Intel Xeon Scalable Processors also have built-in Intel Crypto Acceleration. This not only optimizes data security and privacy, but also improves the performance of encryption-intensive workloads such as SSL web serving, 5G infrastructure, VPNs, and firewalls.
These capabilities allow SAP and Intel customers to easily fortify their data and protect it from hackers. They can also help customers maintain their data, working in tandem in a customer’s SAP IT landscape. Intel Optane Persistent Memory and Intel Xeon Scalable Processors will help customers make the most out of their CPUs and servers. Additionally, Intel Optane Persistent Memory exists alongside system memory. Like DRAM memory, Intel Optane Persistent Memory can be directly accessed by the CPU. Yet, unlike usual DRAM memory, Intel Optane Persistent Memory is natively persistent. This helps customers easily access their data after a reboot.
Optimizing Your SAP Business Warehouse Landscapes
SAP customers are also always seeking ways to improve their IT landscapes and make them run faster and more efficiently. In addition to increasing memory capacity and heightening security and encryption capabilities, SAP and Intel have been collaborating to help their shared customers improve and optimize their SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA ecosystems. Together, Intel Optane Persistent Memory and Intel Xeon Scalable Processors not only accelerate the performance of SAP Business Warehouse, but also increase core performance (compared to prior-generation Intel processors), thereby improving the overall performance of a customer’s SAP system.
SAP customers that leverage these Intel solutions, such as the Intel Xeon Platinum 8380, can support up to 40 cores per processor. This often substantially improves performance when compared to the second generation of Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processor-based servers. Another feature at play is Intel Resource Director Technology (Intel RDT), which gives customers more flexibility in how they manage shared resources—such as last-level cache and memory bandwidth—that are being leveraged by applications. Intel Xeon Scalable Processors also use Intel Hyper-Threading technology, which lets customers use their cores more effectively by allowing multiple threads to run on each core. This technology can significantly improve the output of cores, which in turn can increase productivity and the number of simultaneous transactions. Together, these options give customers a more robust, efficient IT stack, positioning them to use their data faster in SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA.
Join SAP for its session, “SAP HANA: The Power of Real-Time Data at Your Fingertips,” at Intel Innovation digital on October 28, 2021. Register today.