This chapter provides an overview of SAP HANA, IBM Elastic Storage Server, and the preferred software levels. Although this IBM Redpaper publication describes SAP HANA with IBM Elastic Storage Server (ESS), IBM Spectrum Scale supports other deployment modes for SAP HANA, which are based on storage rich server (using IBM Spectrum Scale File Placement Optimizer (FPO) based deployment) or over traditional storage area network (SAN)-based Block Storage.

This chapter includes the following topics:

A typical SAP HANA environment consists of the HANA nodes, which are mostly machines with a large amount of memory, at least one network for TCP/IP communication, and optionally (but commonly) a SAN to the storage servers or disk back ends.

With IBM Spectrum Scale, IBM ESS as the disk back end, and IBM POWER8® server technology, the design landscape can be made to be flexible. With IBM PowerVM® virtualization on the server side and the advantages of the IBM Spectrum Scale file system on the storage side, nearly endless scaling can be achieved.

IBM Spectrum Scale introduces various features and scaling options for IOPS and bandwidth without requiring architectural changes to the environment, as are required in other conventional storage designs.

At the time of writing, SAP and IBM support running up to eight HANA database instances for production purposes on a physical power machine in parallel with any other combination of further non-production SAP DB virtual machines. You also can add and operate any number of SAP application servers on the same physical hardware.

IBM Spectrum Scale as a file system adds high bandwidth, data replication, and parallel access without the need for a complex SAN infrastructure.

The flexible combination of these components allows side awareness and high availability to the landscape. A high-level overview of the IBM SAP HANA solution stack is shown in Figure 1-1.

The IBM ESS is a modern implementation of software-defined storage that is built on IBM Spectrum Scale. This technology combines the CPU and I/O capability of the IBM POWER8 architecture and matches it with 2U and 4U storage enclosures. This architecture permits the IBM Spectrum Scale RAID software capability to actively manage all RAID functionality that was accomplished by a hardware disk controller.

Newly developed RAID techniques from IBM use this CPU and I/O power to help overcome the limitations of current disk drive technology. They also simplify your transition to a multitier storage architecture by employing solid-state flash technology and robotic tape libraries.

ESS is designed for performance. Storing petabytes of data is meaningless unless it can be accessed and analyzed quickly. Sustained streaming performance of data can reach 20 GBps and more in each building block, growing as more blocks are added to a configuration.

By combining the superior data movement capability of IBM Power Systems™ servers with the enhanced I/O subsystem that was introduced in the POWER8 processor and adding the disk management capability of the Power server driven Native RAID technology, a complete storage solution can be deployed without traditional storage controllers acting as a bottleneck to overall system performance.

With support for multiple 10 GbE, 40 GbE, and 100 GbE and multiple InfiniBand ports speeds of up to 100 Gb per second (EDR speed), Elastic Storage Servers provides the architecture to deliver improved data throughput.

An ESS building block consists of a pair of Power 822 servers (which are also known as gssIO server or head nodes), and at least one storage enclosure. In addition, SAS, NL-SAS, and SSD disk types are available and independent of various disk enclosure types. Different disk sizes are also available.

All available model combinations at the time of writing are shown in Figure 1-2. Other hardware vendors and disk enclosures, flash technologies, and disk models are planned to be added in the future.

In addition to the models that are shown in Figure 1-2, the hardware configuration of the head nodes is flexible with regard to selecting network adapters and the amount of memory. Three PCI slots are reserved for SAS adapters and one PCI slot is configured by default with a 4-Port 10/100/1000 Ethernet Card for deployment. Three other PCIe3 slots are available to configure, with any combination of Dual Port 10 GbE, Dual Port 40 GbE, or Dual Port InfiniBand PCI adapters.

For more information about updates to the 100 GbE or EDR InfiniBand adapter that are based on Mellanox ConnectX-4 cards, see the Elastic Storage Server (ESS) topic of IBM Knowledge Center.

Power Servers include IBM PowerVM, which provides a secure and scalable server virtualization environment for Linux applications that are built on the advanced RAS features and leading performance of the IBM Power platform. It is maintained as part of the Power server’s firmware.

Although the operating system has flexibility of running virtual machines (VMs), which are sometimes called LPARs, we use SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for our SAP HANA scenario. In early function, performance, and verification tests, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP4 BE was used. Meanwhile, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 for running SAP applications on power was released.

For more information about the latest software releases, see the SUSE website.

For more information about deploying IBM Spectrum Scale in the VMs (IBM provides the self-extracting software package), see the IBM Spectrum Scale Frequently Asked Questions and Answers topic at IBM Knowledge Center.

As delivered, the ESS storage server nodes include Linux (RHEL), IBM Spectrum Scale, and IBM Spectrum Scale RAID installed and ready for final configuration (network, file system parameters, and so on).

The software minimum requirements are listed in Table 1-1.