Superdome X: Performance, Scalability, Reliability, and Flexibility for Modernizing SAP Environments

SAP's strategic road map leaves thousands of customers at a crossroads. Enterprise customers running traditional, mission-critical SAP applications on very solid databases, such as Oracle and DB2, and on high-RAS, high-performing, scale-up Unix platforms now face a very different future. Their current environment typically includes a host of complex, customized, highly interoperable SAP implementations running on a proprietary Unix system that has been managed, maintained, and optimized for many years. It probably helped grow the company to what it is today. But looking forward, they see an open source–driven ecosystem that has a distinct preference for standard x86 architecture, one designed to manage previously unimaginable amounts of data and numbers of transactions.

The very practical question these SAP customers are asking themselves is, "How do we bridge our proprietary past and our open source future without causing any disruption in our day-to-day operations? What platform will allow us to make this transition smoothly with the lowest risk?"

This white paper addresses the needs of SAP customers in the current business environment of increasing data volumes, transaction speeds, and RAS requirements, especially for those that currently run SAP on Unix and need to migrate to Linux with some urgency. The paper also discusses the merits of HPE's Superdome X for such a migration. As a high-performance, high-RAS, scale-up platform on x86, the Superdome X may be uniquely suitable for SAP customers that wish to migrate to a scale-up system on standard x86 architecture.