Introducing Bare Metal Solution for SAP workloads

When customers run SAP workloads on Google Cloud, we know that scalability is a major concern. It's why SAP on Google Cloud offers some of the industry's most powerful SAP-certified infrastructure options: single-node 6TB and 12TB VMs optimized for S/4HANA OLTP workloads.

Some of our customers, however, run on-premises SAP environments that are far bigger than the biggest and most robust VMs. As you might expect, running SAP workloads at such massive scale can be an expensive, complex, and generally burdensome undertaking. But customers can see major operational benefits like greater scalability and lower cost of ownership if they move these mega-scale SAP workloads to a cloud environment. Performance is critical as well. See below for details on our record setting bare metal performance benchmark for SAP. 

Bare Metal Solution: a good fit for massive SAP workloads

Recently, we expanded Bare Metal Solution to include SAP-certified hardware options. Bare Metal Solution systems are dedicated, single-tenant systems designed specifically to run workloads that are too large or otherwise unsuitable for standard, virtualized environments. The Bare Metal Solution gives SAP customers great options for modernizing their biggest and most challenging workloads.

Bare Metal Solution supplies fully-managed hardware and supporting infrastructure offered as a subscription service. This includes storage and networking, as well as power, cooling, and other infrastructure within a secure, low latency datacenter. 

We handle the hardware, you handle the software

While Google Cloud manages the hardware and infrastructure for Bare Metal Solution, our customers maintain control over the software running on these systems. This includes full control over the operating systems and all of the software associated with their SAP environments and application workloads. Bare Metal Solution also provides automated onboarding and provisioning tools that simplify tasks such as operating system configuration and setup for backup and monitoring tools.

There are several ways our SAP customers see value when they migrate these mega-scale workloads to Bare Metal Solution. Many customers take advantage of low-latency connections with Google Cloud AI and machine learning tools, with BigQuery, and with private access to Google Cloud APIs and services. In addition, subscription-based pricing eliminates over-provisioning costs and requires no upfront capital investments. There are also no data ingress or egress charges between the Bare Metal Solution and other Google Cloud services in the same region.

Bare Metal Solution gives customers a choice of SAP-certified systems for running their workloads. Google Cloud and Intel collaborated to create a best in class architecture for SAP on bare metal that can provide fast insights, low latency, and high throughput. This includes general-purpose Intel® Xeon systems with up to 224 vCPUs and 3TB of memory. Additionally two machine types are certified specifically to run very large-scale HANA workloads using 12 and 16-socket Intel® 2nd gen Xeon Scalable processors configured with 18TB and 24TB of memory, respectively. 

Bare Metal Solution hits a new SAP benchmarking record

Customers require a high degree of performance and reliability from Google Cloud, which was a key principle in the design phase for Bare Metal Solution. The workloads running on these systems are absolutely critical for customers and it's no small feat to ensure consistent infrastructure performance and reliability at such massive scale.

That's why we're thrilled to share some recent news about a major Google Cloud team achievement: a new world record for system performance against a key SAP performance benchmark.

Many of our SAP customers are familiar with the SAP Standard Application Benchmarks. These benchmarks are an important tool for testing hardware and database performance of SAP applications, scalability, concurrency, power efficiency, multi-user behavior, and many other facets of enterprise application performance.

The Google Cloud team focused its benchmarking efforts on the SAP Sales & Distribution benchmark: a hardware-independent measure of system performance. The unit of measurement is the SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS); 100 SAPs is defined as the system performance required to process 2,000 business order line items in one hour.

To certify the solution, Google Cloud tested a 16-socket/24TB server using the Intel Cascade Lake processor against this critical and closely followed benchmark. We were thrilled with the result: the Bare Metal Solution server set a new world record for Intel processors, achieving 892,270 SAPS.

SAP benchmarking records are a genuine mark of achievement for the companies that earn them—as you can tell by looking at how many times new contenders have stepped up with new performance records over the past quarter century. This is our first contribution as a SAP benchmarking record holder, but we certainly hope it won't be the last as we work to deliver faster, more reliable and more innovative infrastructure for SAP customers.

Learn more about Bare Metal Solution on Google Cloud as well as our offerings for SAP customers.