SAP

SUSE Unveils Near-Zero Downtime for SAP Apps

John Grogan — Wed, 11 Oct 2017 15:54:19 +0000

Zero downtime is, of course, a mythical holy grail. According to IDC senior market analyst Prabhitha Sheethal Dcruz:

Zero downtime frequently translates to 99.999% uptime, which equates to 5.26 minutes of downtime per year. While short outages may be acceptable for non-critical workloads, the same is not true for business-critical and mission-critical workloads where the downtime stakes can be very high—consider a stock exchange where a single lost transaction may incur a significant financial cost or a medical system downtime that can cost lives.

So zero downtime is a lofty but difficult to achieve goal. SUSE recently announced a certified near-zero-downtime technology for workloads running in SAP software. According to Naji Almahmoud, SUSE vice president of Global Alliances:

SUSE is an expert at bringing together emerging, fast-paced open-source innovation and turning it into reliable enterprise-grade solutions. Customers running mission-critical workloads can now have more confidence as SUSE works closely with SAP to help ensure near-zero-downtime capabilities for its users.

SUSE, as you already likely know, is an open-source operating system and infrastructure provider for workloads running in SAP software. SUSE has further strengthened its offerings for users of SAP software with new support for high-availability and disaster-recovery solutions, such as:

SUSE support for takeover automation for scale-out clusters in SAP HANA: SUSE now provides automated takeover for users and applications, complementing the SAP HANA platform and data replication between SAP HANA nodes (scale-up) and clusters (scale-out). The SUSE offering is part of a leading platform for SAP solutions, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.
Certification for high-availability clusters and improved maintenance for SAP NetWeaver 7.40: SAP has certified SUSE technology to manage high-availability clusters running on the SAP NetWeaver technology platform. The certification, NW-HA-CLU 7.40, is available for x86-64 now, with support for Power (both Big Endian and Little Endian) coming in the next quarter. This makes possible transparent rolling updates of the SAP NetWeaver kernel. While support for SAP NetWeaver high availability has been available previously, SUSE now also supports SAP NetWeaver 7.40 and above, included in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.

For more information about SUSE support for SAP solutions and customer workloads, visit https://www.suse.com/products/sles-for-sap and https://www.suse.com/partners/alliance/sap.

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SUSE and SAP: Shared Roots Produce Fruit

John Grogan — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 15:15:43 +0000

by John Grogan

SUSE and SAP have been collaborating for 18 years now. SAP is ubiquitous in the enterprise environment, and SUSE is now powering its robust SAP Cloud Platform.

Last year's SUSECon was all about the enterprise. This year's SUSECon doubled down on last year's commitment to becoming a leading enterprise service provider by announcing, among other things, this latest SUSE/SAP collaboration that has SUSE OpenStack Cloud and SUSE Enterprise Storage as key elements of the SAP Cloud Platform. The fruit of this collaboration will provide robust, enterprise-grade infrastructure services for running applications that allow businesses to collect, manage, analyze and leverage information of all types to extend and connect to business systems.

SAP Cloud Platform is SAP's agile Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for digital transformation, with comprehensive application development services and capabilities that allow businesses to innovate new edge scenarios, ultimately helping them to adapt and advance continuously. It enables customers to achieve business agility, create a truly integrated and optimized enterprise, and accelerate digital transformation across the business without the requirement of maintaining or investing in on-premises infrastructure.

SUSE OpenStack Cloud is an automated cloud computing platform that helps enable organizations to deploy rapidly and manage easily highly available, mixed-hypervisor private clouds. The latest version is based on the OpenStack Newton release. SUSE Enterprise Storage is an intelligent software-defined storage management solution, powered by Ceph technology. It enables IT to transform enterprise storage infrastructure to adapt to changing business and data demands seamlessly by delivering cost-efficient, highly scalable and resilient storage using commodity off-the-shelf servers and disk drives.

"Customers expect extremely high levels of reliability, scalability and performance, and SUSE has worked closely with SAP to help ensure that SUSE OpenStack Cloud and SUSE Enterprise Storage with SAP Cloud Platform deliver exactly that", said Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE chief technology officer. He continued:

Our shared roots run deep, as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications has long been a leading platform for SAP solutions on Linux. Today, SUSE also collaborates with SAP within the Cloud Foundry Foundation and shares a vision for the convergence of Kubernetes, containers and Cloud Foundry technologies. Through it all, SUSE's mission is to continue to be the best platform and open-source technology provider for running SAP applications, services and workloads.

Björn Goerke, chief technology officer and president, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP SE, commented:

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FinTech and SAP HANA

Ted Schmidt — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 12:39:10 +0000

by Ted Schmidt

During the past few years, FinTech has emerged as a startup realm that is growing astronomically. In 2015, the EU alone experienced a growth of investment in FinTech of more than 215%, according to a report by Accenture. This new and disruptive technology scene is not only introducing new sectors, such as mobile payments and crowdsourcing, but it is completely disrupting legacy sectors, such as funds transfers and loans, areas traditionally held by big banks.

Although it may be more convenient to split the dinner check with a friend on your mobile device or to receive funding for a new venture in a matter of weeks versus the more traditional months it might take to secure a bank loan, when 40% of the London workforce is composed of financial and technology services, what are the implications of this emerging and highly disruptive technology?

To start, small-to-medium enterprises now can offer financial services at a much smaller price than ever before, which creates a virtual cornucopia of opportunities. Since throttling access to financial data is not a viable, long-term strategy for banks, they ultimately will be forced into making a choice of whether to buy these startups or build their own in-house solutions to compete. Either way, massive amounts of data are being generated, and big banks need to figure out a way to manage both customer and regulatory demands.

Given these challenges, a model for big banks planning for a competitive future, Commerzbank, one of the largest banks in Germany, recently launched a FinTech incubator, which was the first of its kind in continental Europe. Not only does the incubator offer capital to FinTech startups, but it also offers access to Commerzbank customers (private and corporate), venture capital, banking expertise and IT infrastructure.

Along these same lines of innovative thinking, Commerzbank recently implemented SAP HANA to help accelerate its closing processes and ensure regulatory compliance. With the bulk of its balance sheet now running on SAP Bank Analyzer and SAP Accounting for Financial Instruments (both running on SAP HANA), Commerzbank has digitized all its lines of business, including investment, commercial and retail banking, and at the same time is able to close its books much faster.

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