HDS, SAP Partner On Appliance-Like Offering

HDS unveiled a new partnership this week under which SAP's High-Performance Analytical Appliance, or HANA for short, is certified and optimized to run on HDS's converged infrastructure solution which integrates storage and blade servers.

The result is an appliance-like offering that makes it easy for customers to analyze large volumes of data using the SAP HANA platform, said Mike Walkey, senior vice president of global partners and alliances at HDS.

"This is a converged, trusted, and certified offering available for rapid support of the HANA environment," Walkey said. "It's pre-configured, and shipped as an appliance offering."

SAP HANA analyzes data in real time when attached to IT systems such as ERP and CRM applications and data warehouse systems, and also aids in data-intensive tasks related to planning, forecasting and simulation.

The new HDS-SAP HANA relationship brings the two vendors into competition with Oracle, which has been combining its software and the hardware it received with last year's acquisition of Sun Microsystems into a series of special-purpose appliances.

The most recent addition to Oracle's appliance family, the Exalytics Intelligence Machine, which Oracle unveiled last month, incorporates the TimesTen in-memory database Oracle acquired in 2005. It competes directly with SAP HANA.

Walkey declined to say whether HDS, in conjunction with SAP HANA, is directly competing with the Oracle Exalytics, but instead emphasized his company's "open" approach to offering the SAP HANA analytics technology.

"We have an open approach," he said. "We support the complete solution. But customers have the option to choose open components to use with HANA."

In addition to its SAP HANA partnership, HDS also partners with Microsoft for converged solutions featuring that company's Hyper-V and Exchange 2000 solutions.