Many years ago, an industry analyst told me, "Tim, IT executives like their ERP systems the same way they like their cars: big, fast, and German." From an infrastructure standpoint, SAP HANA is one of the most complex and demanding workloads you'll find in an enterprise data center. It grew up in a mainframe world, after all. And countless organizations continue to spend significant resources architecting -not to mention configuring, integrating, and managing -dedicated server, storage, and network systems to support it.

I've often said architecting your own solution is a thing of the past. It takes too much time, too many resources, and lots of money. It invariably increases operational complexity and risk. And, quite frankly, it's unnecessary.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions like HyperFlex were built for simplicity, but not at the expense of performance. HyperFlex has a ton of power under the hood, and it can be supercharged with Intel Optane SSDs to deliver 40x faster response times under load than NAND SSDs.

Barmherzige Bruder ?sterreich, which operates a number of hospitals and assisted living facilities in Europe, recently improved the performance and availability of SAP HANA with two HyperFlex clusters. Not only does their new platform provide the computing power needed for such a mission-critical workload, but it also came with built-in simplicity that is so important for a 12-person IT team.  
Although the clusters are distributed across two data centers for full redundancy, they are managed collectively and centrally using Cisco Intersight. The platform is tightly integrated with Barmherzige Bruder's Cisco ACI network. And it can be effortlessly extended to their other data centers without adding operational overhead.

"We've created a blueprint that can be easily replicated in other countries," said Christian Neubauer, IT manager at Barmherzige Bruder. "The prospect of having one configuration, one set of security and microsegmentation policies, and centralized management for all of our data centers across Europe is very compelling."

Far more compelling than a "DIY" approach, and perfect for a lean IT team supporting mission-critical workloads across multiple sites.

To learn more about Barmherzige Bruder's HCI platform for SAP HANA, read the full Barmherzige Bruder case study.

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