Workloads like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft are Key to Digital Transformation

Early in 2019, we are seeing businesses fully-engaged in modernizing IT for this digital era. This presents the potential for a “Perfect Storm” (good movie, by the way) for IT. What I mean is simply this, disruption is happening throughout IT (applications and infrastructure) and customers turn to Dell EMC to help them navigate this journey.

Consider for a moment the transformations at SAP and Microsoft;

◆ Both organizations have invested in next-generation application and database platforms, embracing in-memory processing, real-time analytics, AI and machine learning.

◆ Couple that with end of support and maintenance plans for legacy SAP Business Suite and SQL Server 2008 – business and IT departments have decisions to make and work to do.

Let’s use SAP to illustrate the implications. IT departments need to plan and execute a roadmap to adopt SAP S/4HANA, SAP’s next-generation Intelligent ERP that is core to the business transformation.

Migrating to SAP HANA and S/4HANA while deploying the optimal infrastructure is easier said than done. CIOs and IT managers would love to simply redirect a chunk of their budgets to quickly enable next-generation SAP intelligent applications. But it’s really not that simple.

Listening to customers has inspired Dell EMC to invest in solutions designed to address common themes important to IT organizations looking to sustain classic SAP deployments while migrating to SAP HANA and S/4HANA.

Customers often face strained IT budgets and have to allocate valuable resources to spend time maintaining, monitoring and managing sprawling, complex SAP system landscapes.

Historically, IT has run SAP production and non-production systems on siloed infrastructure, whether by design — to protect production performance — or ad hoc as new projects get added.

Considering it is common to see four, six, or more SAP applications running – each with its own landscape of development, test and quality assurance – we built a solution designed for SAP landscape consolidation to reduce TCO while simplifying IT management and operations.

Additionally, with organizations looking to mainstream and scale SAP HANA and S/4HANA, it is imperative to run SAP HANA just like any other database in the data center. It has to be capable of leveraging preferred infrastructure, existing processes and tools for reduced TCO and risk.

Dell EMC invests in SAP HANA’s Certification Program for hardware designed to help customers’ fast track implementations with reduced risk.

Increasingly we have been participating in customer discussions emerging (and may I add – “game changing”) data-driven use cases powered from edge to core to cloud with SAP Leonardo using AI, machine learning, block-chain and big data.

We are busy in this area too!

We are enabling a data management framework to complement the SAP Data Hub in pipelining, orchestrating, storing and protecting all data types. To this end, we now have SAP HANA certification for Dell EMC Isilon scale-out NAS storage at the core and SAP Leonardo Edge certified Dell Edge gateways for collecting, aggregating and managing data at the edge.

We are also working with SAP and partners on industry and application use cases such transforming manufacturing with SAP S/4HANA and SAP HANA Blockchain Smart Contracts.

For organizations looking to run SAP in a cloud operating model, Dell EMC’s modern infrastructure provides strong integration with VMware, providing a cloud-enabled infrastructure foundation ready to enable a unified applications and IT management experience. Additionally, if you are looking to host SAP ERP, Business Suite and S/4 HANA off-premises in a cloud, consider Virtustream a premium certified provider of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud services.