For many organizations, managing large SAP HANA workloads has been difficult or impossible, due in part to lack of very large SAP HANA managed cloud options. This means clients have been forced to run multiple HANA environments, often making significant investments in their IT infrastructure to support large and concurrent workloads.

To help clients address this, IBM is introducing a new SAP-certified IBM Cloud managed application service for SAP HANA workloads. Through this integrated approach of hardware and software, IBM is the first to offer this level of cloud support for massive workloads of up to 24 TB by using IBM Power Systems and IBM Storage. This means that even the largest customers have the capacity they need to reap the benefits of HANA’s in-memory analytics on the cloud.

Power systems have already been established as a highly differentiated and successful SAP HANA platform. With 99.999 percent uptime, as noted by the ITIC study, and extreme performance enabled through large memory capacity, IBM is delivering flexible, scalable large HANA database capacity with the power benefits clients currently enjoy on-premises. Research firm Frost and Sullivan surveyed over 250 CIOs and their direct reports and found 76 percent of respondents who use managed cloud services stated managed cloud services “improve security and compliance reporting” for SAP workloads.

Prior solutions often lack the ability to scale to meet the client’s needs and require substantial customization, which could drive up costs. With today’s news, IBM is providing a single solution for HANA in various scalable sizes as a cloud managed service (from 12 TB to 24 TB). The solution also meets the large-scale memory requirements, with highly available flash-based storage in the IBM Storwize family.

This service could have a substantial impact on a broad range of industries, including insurance. Take, for instance, accurately managing rates for the people they insure. Insurance companies often run data modeling, which includes evaluating every person they insure to create a model that reflects today’s market pricing, underwriting and risk selection. This standard solution is designed so that these types of actions can be completed much faster and more cost effectively and include:

• Integrated solution of IBM hardware, software, services and IBM Managed Cloud delivery.
• The largest cloud-based HANA databases in the market.
• Highly available Storwize flash family to augment large in-memory database requirements.

By providing companies with access to massive SAP workloads on IBM Cloud, organizations can expand their SAP HANA portfolio without having to concern themselves with making substantial investments in their infrastructure. Instead, they can focus on what’s most important to their success.

This blog originally appeared on IT Biz Advisor