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SAP on Google Cloud

Announcing the general availability of 6 and 12 TB VMs for SAP HANA instances on Google Cloud Platform

September 9, 2019
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Snehanshu Shah

Managing Director, SAP

Many of the world’s largest enterprises run their businesses on SAP. As these companies drive toward digital transformation and plan for the upgrade to S/4HANA, they are increasingly looking to the cloud to support their mission critical workloads. One of the main advantages of the cloud is its flexibility. Whether enterprises are undergoing substantial organic growth, expanding their portfolio, or contemplating a merger, they want the peace of mind that they have the room to grow and expand as needed. 

To help more enterprises scale and grow their SAP HANA workloads, today we’re expanding our support for larger SAP deployments through a new set of large-memory machine types. We’ve added two new machine types to our VM portfolio, enabling customers to deploy workloads that require up to 12 TB of memory in a single node (scale-up) configuration on Google Compute Engine. These VMs, built on the latest Intel Cascade Lake architecture, are certified by SAP for HANA and are generally available to customers starting today.  

"Our 9TB of SAP data is growing about 1TB per year. Moving to a 12TB virtualized environment with the help of Google Cloud is going to provide us with a better platform for growth as we look to optimize and scale. It's been a great partnership, I can't stress enough the excitement I have for where we're going to take this with Google in the future.” —Duy Trinh, SAP Center of Excellence, Cardinal Health

What 6 and 12 TB VMs on Google Cloud mean for SAP HANA customers
Google Cloud’s unique all-VM approach gives SAP customers the true flexibility to scale up and scale down their SAP HANA workload, without financial penalty. It also simplifies the operational/procurement process, increasing IT’s agility as it serves its business teams.  

Here’s more on what Google Cloud’s unique all-VM approach offers:

  • Flexibility—Upfront sizing is notoriously difficult; you either oversize and waste money, or undersize and risk not meeting business needs. Google Clouds certified large VM sizes give you the headroom for future needs.

  • Simplicity—It can take a lot of work to manage scale-out systems for upgrades, patching, performance, manual table placement, and more. With larger systems, you can simplify by consolidating into a single node. 

  • Implementation choice—Not all SAP workloads support scale-out deployments. For example, to avoid complexity, management and performance considerations, many businesses prefer to use larger (and fewer) nodes for analytics workloads. Larger certified VM sizes mean larger scale-up environments. Only Google Cloud offers these fully virtualized, without the constraints of  bare metal.

Google Cloud’s all VM infrastructure is not just about scalability. It also improves uptime of SAP environments through our VM Live Migration. This allows for infrastructure updates and patching on the fly, without painful reboots or other patching events that result in application interruption—capabilities not available on bare metal implementations. Lastly, Google Cloud complements VM infrastructure for SAP customers with lightning speed network performance, sub-millisecond latencies and robust security.  

To learn more about how we’re supporting SAP customers on Google Cloud, visit our SAP solutions page. You can also watch our recent Cloud on Air webinar to hear how Cardinal Health plans to deploy a 12TB SAP HANA instance on Google Cloud. Watch it here on demand.

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