Companhia Siderurgica Nacional (CSN), one of the largest industrial groups in Brazil, has selected IBM Power Systems and Storage to run its SAP HANA® in-memory analytics applications. CSN is one of the largest exporters of iron ore in South America, and also develops and offers high value steel, mining, cement, logistics and energy products for the automotive and construction industries and manufacturers of household appliances and packaging.

“With the amount of data companies like ours are producing daily, it is critical that we have an IT infrastructure that enables us to run our analytics workloads efficiently,” said Fabio Faria, Chief Information Officer at CSN. “The stability and flexibility of IBM Power Systems and storage does just that by providing a reliable system for running SAP HANA and our SAP applications.”

The combination of IBM Power Systems E880 servers running SAP HANA and IBM Storwize V5000 storage systems will enable CSN to adapt its IT infrastructure to support the company’s anticipated growth. The Power Systems E880s being implemented at CSN provide memory spaces of up to 16TB on a platform designed for data analytics. The POWER8 processors in the Power Systems E880 boast four times the multithreading capability per core along with four times the memory bandwidth and cache per chip compared to x86 Haswell chips.

IBM and SAP will also increase support for SAP HANA running on IBM Power Systems via the latest support package stack 11 (SPS11) for the SAP HANA platform. The new enhancements ensure that Power Systems can bring its capabilities in flexibility, resiliency, and performance to the broad community using SAP HANA. New enhancements include:

• Virtualisation of SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems — Clients can now consolidate multiple production instances of SAP HANA onto smaller footprints virtualised with IBM PowerVM, which is available exclusively on IBM Power Systems. IBM Power Systems is the first and only platform generally available for deploying multiple production instances of SAP HANA on individual virtual machines, which can reduce the number of servers that are needed. Virtualisation can help organisations avoid the management complexity found on bare metal infrastructures and significantly enhance the efficiency of production deployments of SAP HANA
• SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems — IBM customers will be able to select from a wider range of application choices with the newly released availability of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems on which to run their SAP HANA-based ERP and analytics applications
• Business warehouse scaling with SAP HANA — Clients can also take advantage of scale-out architectures when deploying SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems. This expands deployment options for clients, enabling them to choose the infrastructure path that is most appropriate for their environments running SAP HANA.

“IBM’s Power Systems are uniquely suited to provide rapid access to critical business data stored with in-memory database technologies like SAP HANA,” said Vicente Moranta, Director And Business Line Executive at IBM, responsible for IBM Power Systems running SAP HANA. “With the addition of virtualisation through PowerVM, SAP Business Suite and scale-out architectures, IBM and SAP are providing a choice of different performance levels to meet today’s big data demands.”