Getting HANA into cloud production

SAP’s HANA, which has grown from its initial position as an in-memory big data analytics engine to be the base platform for most of the company’s applications as they move into the cloud, is now spreading out to become the prime tool of SAPs partner channel.

Cloud software and services provider, Virtustream, has now extended its SAP HANA Managed Service to offer customers fully virtualised version for production landscapes on its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform.

“We look forward to assisting our enterprise customers to realize the enormous benefits of SAP HANA when running their organization’s SAP applications on the Virtustream cloud, for greater resource efficiency and infrastructure cost savings.”

Virtustream claims to provides the most comprehensive SAP cloud services worldwide, supporting the migration and operation of full SAP production (and non-production / test and development) environments in the cloud, dedicated HANA services, and offering virtual HANA for non-production environments.

Now its customers can use the company’s xStream Enterprise Cloud platform running on HANA. This provides them with better SLAs, multi-tenant efficiency, rapid deployment, utility-based billing, hardware cost avoidance, built-in disaster recovery, high availability, and greatly simplified provisioning and operation.

In addition, all Virtustream customers are protected by the company’s security and compliance tools and processes to ensure proper protection of data in a cloud environment. Virtustream’s cloud complies with HIPAA. PCI, FISMA, ISO 2700, SSAE, and SOX standards, while supporting many more.

SAP and Virtustream have a longstanding relationship, with SAP being a trusted partner and investor. Virtustream has more than 100 SAP clients running production SAP on the Virtustream cloud or using its software in private clouds, including well-known brands such as Domino Foods, Veyance Technologies and Morris Communications.

Virtustream’s underlying Micro-VM technology makes it possible for IT expenses to be efficiently reduced, offering consumption-based pricing and eliminating upfront capital expenditure while improving overall performance of the applications. As a result, customers are able to move to any production and mission-critical enterprise applications to the cloud without re-engineering and combine on-site and cloud-based operations as required.

The company was among the first cloud service providers to join “Powered by HANA Service Provider Partner” program, and as part of the participation in the program, Virtustream and SAP have jointly developed an SAP HANA Reference Architecture. This Cloud Reference Architecture, which includes Virtustream’s xStream cloud management software, is a model for deploying complex heterogeneous IT environments, either from a cloud service provider like Virtustream or on-premise in a customer’s data centre.