Cisco UCS with NetApp Storage for SAP HANA Solution

Editor's Notes

• #3: AgendaHi, my name is <name> and I’m here today to talk to you about how the Cisco UCS solution with NetApp storage for SAP HANA can help create infrastructure that support real-time business operation.I’ll start by talking about some of the business concerns that may be troubling you, and how SAP HANA and Cisco CUS can help you address those areas of your business and IT infrastructure. Next, I’ll explain why traditional approaches to real-time business fall short, and how Cisco and NetApp technologies come together in a high-performance, scalable solution that can help your business.Because business continuity is of the utmost concern, I’ll explain the disaster tolerance capabilities of the solution and how they work to help your business run in the event of an outage or disaster.Finally, I’ll describe how we can help you build the infrastructure you need with comprehensive service offerings.
• #4: TheCisco Unified Computing System, or Cisco UCS is the first truly unified data center platform that combines industry-standard, intelligent Intel Xeon processor-based servers with unified management, networking and storage access into The system is a smart infrastructure that is automatically configured through integrated, model-based management to simplify and speed deployment of enterprise-class applications and services running in bare-metal, virtualized, and cloud-computing environments. Cisco servers, combined with a simplified, unified architecture, drive better IT productivity and superior price/performance for lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Only Cisco servers integrate with Cisco UCS, and only Cisco integrates rack and blade servers into a single unified system.Building on Cisco’s strength in enterprise networking, Cisco Unified Computing System is integrated with a standards-based, high-bandwidth, low-latency, virtualization-aware unified fabric. The system is wired once to support the desired bandwidth and carries all Internet protocol, storage, interprocess communication, and virtual machine traffic with security isolation, visibility, and control equivalent to physical networks. The system’s 10GB Ethernet network meets the bandwidth demands of today’s multicore processors, eliminates costly redundancy, and increases workload agility, reliability, and performance.Cisco UCShelps organizations go beyond efficiency: it helps them become more effective through technologies that breed simplicity rather than complexity. The result is flexible, agile, high-performance, self-integrating information technology that reduces staff costs, increases uptime through automation, with faster return on investment.
• #5: Fastest Growing Product in the MarketAt Cisco, we didn’t create just another server, we designed an evolutionary system that integrates networking and management and isflexible and scalable enough to handle any workload.We aimed to create the ideal, programmable platform for virtualized and cloud environments, and to help solve many of the very real challenges customers face. People said we wouldn’t succeed—we did.Today, Cisco UCS is the fastest growing product on the market. In just a short time, there are more than 23,000 unique Cisco UCS customers. Today, Cisco has the #2 worldwide market share in x86 blade servers. More than 44 ISVs write to the Cisco UCS API, and this number continues to grow. Tens of thousands of applications are supported on the system, so you can have confidence that the applications you depend on can be supported.Cisco UCS was designed with system and business performance in mind. As of September 2013, Cisco UCS has achieved 79 world records on performance benchmarks. The system has also received numerous industry awards and certifications.It’s also readily available, with more than 3,400 channel partners providing businesses with easy access to the technology.Let’s turn to how this innovative system can help your business succeed.
• #6: Cisco UCS Power SAP HANACisco UCS powers SAP HANA, delivering a broad range of advantages to your business.Reduces cost while increasing manageability. The unified infrastructure inherent in the solution dramatically reduces the number of physical components required. The solution effectively uses limited space, power, and cooling by deploying less infrastructure to perform the same, or even more, work. For example, the unified fabric built into Cisco UCS results in fewer network interface cards (NICs), host bus adapters (HBAs), cables, and upstream switch ports and eliminates the need for parallel Fibre Channel or management networks.Scales out effectively. With Cisco UCS, you can easily add more compute and storage building blocks as demand rises. Your IT department can start with the compute and storage infrastructure needed today, and to scale easily by adding more compute and storage blocks as demand rises. Because the Cisco UCS compute and NetApp storage building blocks integrate into the unified system, they do not require additional supporting infrastructure or expert knowledge. The system simply, quickly, and cost effectively presents more compute power and storage capacity to SAP HANA applications.Accelerates time to results. When your company needs to make important business decisions, the performance of analytic and business intelligence systems is critical. SAP HANA innovation, combined with the balanced resources of Cisco UCS, delivers rapid analysis and reporting at less cost. Your IT department can use more servers and distribute data loading and analysis tasks to take advantage of massively parallel processing. The balanced resources of Cisco UCS—processing power, I/O bandwidth, and memory capacity—help ensure your IT department gets more performance from your SAP HANA implementation.Offers visibility. End-to-end management provides visibility and enables the monitoring and automated remediation of physical servers, storage, and network.
• #7: Next, I’d like to turn to the issue of disaster tolerance, and how the Cisco and NetApp solution helps ensure business continuity.
• #8: SAP HANA: A New Kind of ArchitectureWith SAP HANA, the database and its transaction log reside in memory. While this results in accelerated operation, you are probably wondering what happens when there is a failure, and whether the data in memory is lost. The short answer is: don’t worry. The transaction log tracks all changes made to the in-memory database. When a transaction is committed, or when the transaction log becomes full, the log is written to persistent storage on the NetApp storage device(s).By creating a save point, the system ensures the entire in-memory database image is stored to disk. This copy can be read in the event of a failure to restart the application and environment. Save points occur regularly, every five minutes by default, to ensure database consistency.Let’s take a look at how this saved information is used during a failover situation.
• #9: High Availability for SAP HANASpeaker: This slide is animated and walks you through the steps of a controlled failover of the SAP HANA database.Additional things to note:During this process, a standby node takes over the persistence of a failed node.The entire process is controlled by the SAP HANA Nameserver, which also triggers calls to the block API.Pay close attention to the color scheme and point out to customers that the SCSI-3 PGR reservation ensures that only the node that has written the reservation to the disk has exclusive access to the persistent storage (data and log).
• #10: Regular Operation with Cisco UCSThis slide depicts the layout of solution components during normal operation.The production environment is on the left, with its components highlighted in blue. Standby NetApp storage is on the right, in a second system, with its components highlighted in green.The remainder of the second system is used for non-production activities, such as QA and development.Let’s take a look at how the system responds to a failure condition or other disruptive event.
• #11: Disaster Operations with Cisco UCSLet’s assume some sort of failure—power loss or a catastrophic event—disrupts access to the production system (on the left).In this case, some of the non-production system are taken offline and brought back online as active SAP HANA nodes and storage. (Note these systems went from purple to blue.) The standby NetApp storage nodes are activated (green). Any remaining resources are left available to non-production environments (purple).What makes this continuous data availability possible is the architecture and rapid provisioning capability of Cisco UCS aong with NetAppMetroCluster software. The combination of array-based clustering and synchronous mirroring supports continuous availability and zero data loss, and provides transparent recovery from failures so critical applications run uninterrupted. Eliminating repetitive change management activities reduces the risk of human error and administrative overhead. Racks in two locations create a single, geographically distributed cluster that writes data synchronously to both units. Since the storage is located in both locations, one system can take over in the event the other site becomes unavailable. This provides both disaster recovery and continuous availability with zero data loss, keeping SAP HANA running in the event of unplanned outages from operator error, site failures, network outages and natural disasters. The cluster enables non-disruptive upgrades so that data analysis can continue 24x7 with no need for planned downtime. In addition, mirroring at the storage layer increases read throughput up to 80 percent, reducing startup time for the HANA database and the time needed to failover an active SAP HANA node to a standby node.
• #12: Disaster Tolerance ConfigurationIn the solution, production SAP HANA storage is replicated to a dedicated storage system on the second side of the solution, Additional storage for non-production systems also resides in this location. Keeping operations clean and streamlined, production service profiles only communicate with production storage; non-production service profiles only communicate with non-production storage.You may be wondering how long it takes to switch over to a second data center. Here are the approximate time intervals for each stage of the process:Shutdown of the non-production systems:Hard Shutdown = 1 minuteGraceful shutdown (HANA, OS) = 2 to 15 minutes,where 1 min is calculated for the operating system and the rest of the time is allocated to SAP HANAImport and activate the production configuration and boot the operating system:Option 1: backup non-production systems, delete the non-production environment(s), and import the production environment = 10 to 15 minutesOption 2: activate a pre-configured production environment = 5 minutesBoot all operating system instances = 3 minutes
• #13: NetAppSnapShot Backup and RecoveryNetApp storage systems offer simple data protection strategies that help lower administrative and infrastructure costs.Integrated data protection capabilities make it easy to back up, recover, and clone SAP HANA databases and applications.Key capabilities:Snapshot copies are space efficient and near instantaneousRestore and recovery actions are fast and granularThin replication makes disaster recovery copiesDisk-to-disk (D2D) and disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) features offer simple backup and recovery management for applications
• #14: SAP HANA Disaster Recovery with NetApp StorageThe solution uses NetAppMetroCluster software for support disaster recovery efforts.The software combines clustering and synchronous mirroring to ensure SAP HANA data is up to date and continuously available.Failover capabilities minimize application interruption.Synchronous mirroring immediately duplicates SAP HANA transactions, ensuring all copies are up to date. With database copies always consistent, the solution can activate the secondary site (labeled Passive SAP HANA Database on the slide) very quickly.
• #15: How Cisco Can HelpCisco offers several services that can help you with your deployment.
• #17: Cisco RMS for SAP HANA ApplianceCisco provides unparalleled solution-level support to help you focus on running your business, rather than focusing on infrastructure issues. It provides a single point of contact to initiate and manage support. You get priority access to Cisco solution experts qualified to troubleshoot and drive resolution of all field issues, including the third-party products in the SAP HANA solution. Cisco will coordinate issue resolution between Cisco and solution technology partner support teams.
• #18: Plan Services for SAP HANACisco offers services that can help you formulate astrategy and create detailed plans for implementing your SAP HANA solution.Assessment Service for SAP HANA focuses on discovery and assessment of your existing environment to justify the business and technical requirements for migrating to SAP HANA. The service confirms your priorities, return-on-investment (ROI) requirements, and migration time frames.Planning and Design Service for SAP HANA provides an architecture and data analytics assessment and proof of concept (PoC) to help you prepare for a sound implementation.
• #19: Implementation Services for SAP HANACisco offers services that can help you with assembly, installation, and data load for your SAP HANA deployment. These services provide an unmatched level of service assurance.Assembly Service for SAP HANA includes the assembly of the hardware and software required for the SAP HANA solution. Cisco experts or partners verify all hardware components based on a certified bill of materials, install third-party hardware and software, make sure of the proper powering of the chassis and all components, and validate the correct installation of all software and hardware components. This service is mandatory.Installation Service for SAP HANA installs the solution into your network, connecting it to source systems, and pointing it to the proper data source(s). The service includes a pre-installation interview, site planning survey, and design review. Installation validation helps ensure that the system configuration has passed initial startup tests, and the installed SAP HANA solution is ready for data load and SAP HANA software configuration. This service is mandatory.Data Load Service for SAP HANA is an optional service enabling SAP rapid deployment solutions (RDSs) with data extraction, transformation, and load (ETL). The service includes extracting data from outside sources, transforming it to fit operational needs, and loading the data into the database or warehouse for a fully operational solution