NEC High-Performance Appliance for SAP HANA

Built upon NEC’s converged infrastructure certified by SAP and in association with leading SAP partners, NEC’s SAP HANA solutions deliver the infrastructure, services and assurance to clients to realize optimal SAP HANA products and services quickly and easily without complexity.

NEC delivers SAP HANA as a key platform to realize a world where people can reach all the information they need or want and to discover something new and worthwhile from the massive amount of data produced daily.

The NEC High-Performance Appliance for SAP HANA incorporates the truly innovative in-memory computing technology of SAP and the truly dependable hardware platform of NEC, which has kept the No.1 market share in PC- servers in the Japan market for 18 years.

In the beginning of 2014, NEC launched the 6th generation of Intel architecture based, scalable enterprise server, Express5800/ A2040b, which succeeds the previously very successful lineup of NEC HANA appliances. It is designed to optimize performance, scalability and reliability for mission critical workloads.

This enterprise server uses the Intel Xeon processor E7 v2 product family and will be available starting from the middle of 2014 as appliance certified for SAP HANA in different sizes. The HANA appliance entry model starts with 128GB of RAM and 2 CPU sockets, scaling up through different sizes to a 4-way 2TB RAM top of the line model. Scale out conflgurations up to 16 nodes with multiple aggregated 10 GB internode links will be available later.

All the NEC SAP HANA appliances include the EXPRESSSCOPE® Engine SP3 integrated into the server, which provides superior remote control and  system management capabilities.

Why Express5800 is the ideal platform for SAP HANA

It is important to choose highly-reliable server platform in order to stabilize SAP systems supporting mission-critical business tasks twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

High-performance Express5800/A2040b Scalable Enterprise  Servers, which leverage NEC’s long heritage in the development of a supercomputer and mainframe technologies to achieve highly reliable and flexible system expandability, are leveraged as the platform for SAP HANA. The flagship NEC Express5800/A2040b model has the capabilities to mount up to 4CPUs and 4TB RAM within a single 4U chassis.

One noteworthy hardware feature is its EXPRESSSCOPE ® Engine SP3, a uniquely developed device by NEC based on our experience in UNIX servers, enables to monitor and control Express5800/A2040b with a remote and centralized interface regardless of the power status of servers. It significantly increases maintainability and reduces downtime of SAP HANA.

Support Infrastructure

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications — is a fine-tuned and supported operating system based on fully open source technology towards  the nature of SAP application’s workload and its system life cycle. Its priority support provides unlimited 24hx7d technical support from SUSE, and its extended support offers additional 18 months for package maintenance. It also maximizes system uptime with highly-selected package-updates; only packages that affect SAP system shall be upgraded.

NEC High-Performance Appliance for SAP HANA uses  SUSE  Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, including its priority support. NEC has a lot of experience providing mission-critical grade support on Linux systems, and has contributed various kinds of open source community, including Linux kernel development. Through the long-standing partnership with SUSE, NEC provides mission-critical class support for SAP  HANA.

Additional software supported

NEC ESMPRO ServerManager — is a server management software that provides administrators a centralized view to manage or monitor distributed multiple nodes.

It leverages the EXPRESSSCOPE® Engine SP3  of  Express5800/A2040b servers and an installed ESMPRO Agent on the system to collect the run-time information of both hardware and software; which enables administrators to identify issues quickly if and when something should happen.

Support and Additional Services

Through the longstanding partnership with SAP and SUSE, NEC will offer mission-critical grade support service from hardware to applications, for the global market.

NEC was one of the first distributors of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) solutions in Japan market, which is the front-end tool for visualization and analytics for SAP HANA, and NEC has experience supporting more than 500 installations with the help of our sales, support and consulting organizations.

In addition, NEC has established an evaluation team of SAP HANA to make the latest technology commercially available as soon as possible.