SAP is now hosting the IBM’s latest Power System server in it’s own Data farms which is going to be part of the HANA Enterprise Cloud. This is meant to introduce a newer form of hosting options for enterprises who runs modern ERP systems with quite large databases on the Power Platform.

SAP has been offering this service way back since 2005 as Power Platform and has now ported HANA to power the Power Architecture since 2015. Also IBM estimated last year that about 20 and 25 percent of the HAN workloads were working on the Power platform alongside other servers based on the Intel’s architecture.

The HANA system is made to be robust and scale for larger databases in two-ways which includes Scale-up, on a single server with shared memory or scale-out on a cluster of smaller servers but with shared storage. Using the latter requires that data are partitioned or broken into various parts in order to fit right into much smaller servers altogether.

Now the IBM’s E980 server offers a much larger scale-up virtualized server for the HANA in the industry at a big storage space of 24TB. Considering the fact that some Intel-based architectures such as the Microsoft’s Azure cloud can equal that spec means IBM and a host other companies offers systems with higher headline capacities which are scale-out systems.

All the systems powered by IBM including the Power9, it’s latest processor generation are all the successors of the AS/400 midrange computers which were introduced back in the year 1988.

One of Power9’s attractions is that it can still run legacy apps almost unchanged on the IBM i operating system in one logical partition (LPAR) or virtual machine, with another partition running IBM’s AIX flavor of Unix or a Linux distribution such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This mean that an enterprise can have a single IBM Power Server running the SAO HANA on Linux all in one LPAR with the legacy application right on IBM although it won’t be a possibility considering the state of the HANA Enterprise Cloud as IBM Power servers there will run on Linux.

The IBM servers built around the IBM’s Power9 processor are available in the IBM Cloud, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure through Skytap, a company that migrates legacy application to the cloud but SAP shops will only be able to host their development environments on those.

In order to better support production, the SAP has to certify the cloud while the only one being certified is the IBM Power Systems which is its own SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud according to IBM Vice President of Offering Management Vicente Moranta.