Making the Intelligent Enterprise Real with Dell Technologies and SAP

The 2019 SAPPHIRE NOW theme, “Bringing the Intelligent Enterprise to Life” combined with a more detailed event description “this event delivers a practical path for companies to become an intelligent enterprise driving meaningful business outcomes that delight customers and support organization growth” is a perfect encapsulation of what Dell Technologies delivers for customers taking this journey with SAP.

My comments reflect only a small, but important, discussion of the key areas where Dell Technologies can drive technology, performance and financial value for customers operating SAP landscapes today or those interested in the transformational value of SAP landscapes.

The first step in the journey is reducing TCO and simplifying IT for SAP 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. The result is well understood – higher TCO with strained IT budgets and valuable resources allocated to spending time maintaining, monitoring and managing SAP system landscapes.

Dell EMC solutions provide a modern infrastructure foundation designed to invigorate legacy SAP ERP with reduced cost and ready to power the Intelligent Enterprise with S/4 HANA.

An emerging area of great interest for simplifying IT operations is running SAP HANA on software defined infrastructure.

Today we have great news! Our SAP HANA certified hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) portfolio has grown to include VxFlex to run SAP HANA in production.

VxFlex creates a server-based SAN by combining virtualization software, known as VxFlex OS, with Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and unified management to deliver flexible, scalable performance, and capacity on demand for SAP HANA.

The SAP HANA certification encompasses the HCI architecture with VMware vSphere hypervisor and VxFlex OS software defined storage. The certification supports VxFlex systems configured with Intel Xeon SP (Skylake) CPU based PowerEdge servers, including the dual-socket R640 and R740xd and the four-socket R840.

Now let’s take a turn and look at the business – it is all about fueling innovation with intelligence and visibility to actionable data.

Emerging data-driven use cases mean combining SAP HANA business data with external big data, machine learning and AI to fuel intelligent application and business processes. This results in a proliferation of data being aggregated, pipelined, managed and stored from the edge to the core.

Realizing a comprehensive IT framework to orchestrate data management across distributed complex IT landscapes on scale-out secure infrastructure is a key foundation, Dell EMC has partnered with SAP for one of the broadest portfolios of SAP certified infrastructure for SAP HANA and SAP Leonardo IoT.

For managing diverse data sources and applications at the “core”

We know that SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA  is foundational for intelligent enterprise applications at the core (check certified infrastructure here), but not all data is stored in SAP HANA. What about big data located outside SAP HANA?

Dell EMC and SAP have you covered;

• SAP Data Hub provides governance and orchestration for data refinement and enrichment by pipelining complex data operations.
• For storing IoT and big data outside SAP HANA, Dell EMC Isilon scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) provides a secure scale-out platform to build a data lake and persist enterprise files of all sizes that scale from terabytes to petabytes in a single cluster.

What about accelerating decision making at the edge?

Not all IoT data will be processed at the core data center in SAP HANA. IoT edge computing will include SAP applications and use cases supporting decisions that need to be made locally with smaller subsets of aggregated data being transmitted to the core.

Dell Technologies and SAP have you covered;

• SAP Edge Services extends the Intelligent Enterprise to the Edge with capabilities for uninterrupted high-performance business processes, optimized data processing – locally or at the digital core, and real-time decision-making and agile responses.
• Dell Technologies sharply reduces time to value with decreased TCO of these Edge capabilities through pre-installation on our SAP certified Edge gateways, bundled with VMware Pulse management for optimized operations.

So now that we have introduced Dell EMC’s IT foundation from the edge to the core, the next step in this journey is deploying compelling use cases with our partners!

One of most recent use case studies was develop in cooperation with Camelot ITLab (booth #444) and Intel (booth #1700), showing how blockchain technology is solving a huge challenge in the consumer goods industry: constantly keeping compliant with legally required labeling of regulated compounds, while leveraging a complex, global supply chain.

Again, this was a small sample of the value that Dell Technologies can bring to customers on their SAP journey.  Join us at @ DellTech Booth 2230 to see a theatre session with Dell EMC Global System Integrator (GSI) partners for Energy & Utilities, Retail and Energy Management.  Also check out the Dell EMC portfolio of solutions, meet with our experts and see just how Dell Technologies and SAP are “Bringing the Intelligent Enterprise to Life.”

Exploring the Global Data Protection Index

Digital Transformation has been a rallying cry of CXOs over the past few years, and global disruption, due to digitization, has yielded many examples of industry powerhouses becoming a footnote in history. It should come as no surprise then, that a major trend emerged in the most recent Vanson Bourne Global Data Protection Index commissioned by Dell EMC – data is almost unanimously understood to have value and 75 percent of respondents are either already monetizing it or are investing in tools that will help them monetize it in the future.

As data becomes more valuable to an organization, there is a corresponding move to collect more of it and keep it for longer. The concept of Data Capital has become ingrained in every industry, as organizations find that using data to power applications and gain new insights from analytics, sets them apart from the competition. This results in a point of friction, as the creation, acquisition and protection of data are somewhat at odds. Data protection challenges range from financial (affordability of backing it up) to logistical (delivering performance and coverage). These played a significant role in the limited improvement of data protection maturity in companies we surveyed. Simply put, what worked to protect 1.5PB of data a few short years ago, won’t work for the almost 10PB of data respondents averaged in the latest study.

Not surprisingly, such growth has also created a myriad of challenges for organizations with availability and data retention. More than three-quarters (76 percent) of respondents have experienced disruption of some kind in the last 12 months. To make matters worse, these service level events are coming about through all manner of sources, making it nearly impossible to eliminate risk entirely. From infrastructure failures and ransomware attacks to data corruption and user error, or even cloud provider issue, it’s time to realize we cannot eliminate the cause of a service level event. We can, however, mitigate the damage it causes by having an effective data protection strategy and solutions in place.

The stakes are higher than ever

When looking at events that resulted in a disruption, we separated these events into two categories — downtime and data loss. Across these two areas, respondents noted substantial impacts from events.

• 41 percent experienced downtime with an average estimated cost of $527,000
• 28 percent suffered data loss that resulted in an average estimated loss of $996,000

One of the most surprising results revealed that those who scored higher in the data protection index were more vulnerable to substantial losses in the event of an outage or data loss.

This magnified impact was likely due to the increased importance data plays in their business but shows just how essential it is to get data protection right. Read more about disruption and creating a strategy to protect essential data.

Improving protection in three steps

Subscribe value to data and protect it accordingly – Globally, 81 percent of survey respondents say they treat data differently based on its value. As data continues to grow exponentially, it is essential to leverage a variety of data protection strategies across continuous availability, replication, backup, archives, etc. creating an effective data protection solution that can scale.

Consolidate vendors to lower risk – Across the board, respondents who used multiple vendors increased the likelihood of something going wrong. Organizations with only a single data protection vendor were twice as likely to indicate they had not experienced a disruption in the last 12 months, with 40 percent reporting they had no adverse issues.

Protect more in the cloud – Automatic backup to the cloud was the most frequently included technology as part of a comprehensive data protection strategy with 43 percent of respondents indicating they were using it. This is critical to leverage moving forward, both to defer costs of traditional data protection, as well as to provide coverage within cloud environments themselves.

Wrapping up

Ultimately, the report paints a picture of organizations trying to keep up with the data deluge, it’s increased value to the organization, and new advanced workloads that strain existing data protection solutions. We’ve entered a new age where protecting data has morphed into the need to apply advanced data management strategies to keep it both safe and available at all times. Data Protection can no longer be bolted on as a simple insurance policy, but should be a primary design consideration for any workload that the organization is prioritizing. Over the coming months, we will continue to highlight new technologies and strategies to use in meeting the ever-increasing needs in this space.