By Manoj Suvarna - Director, Product Management, HP Converged Systems

In January 2013, HP and SAP together announced “Project Kraken” as a co-innovation effort between HP and SAP designed to leverage real-time transactional data to improve business processes and mitigate risks. This significant joint development effort is being engineered by HP and SAP in Walldorf, Germany and will accelerate the adoption of in-memory computing for large online transaction processing (OLTP) applications.

Today during Vishal Sikka’s SAPPHIRE NOW keynote speech, HP demonstrated the next major milestone of this joint initiative by unveiling a 12- terabyte system that will redefine ‘in-memory computing’.  HP is using our own IT department as the pilot for Kraken -- the largest system of its kind that significantly reduces the time required to analyze and process large amounts of data.  With this platform, transactions that in the past required hours will run in seconds. 

By Jodie Jordanger – HP Converged Systems Marketing

At SAP SAPPHIRENOW yesterday, Jim Snabe, SAP co-CEO told us at the keynote that SAP now has 1,500 customers on HANA which makes it their fastest growing software product EVER. 

Big news of the day was that SAP has now announced general availability of SAP Business Suite powered by HANA, and Jim thanked the 100 early adopters of Suite on HANA for making this possible. 

By Manoj Suvarna - Director, Product Management, HP Converged Systems

With SAP’s recent release of SAP Business Suite core applications powered by SAP HANA, customers can now realize a real-time business transformation, supported by an in-memory platform.   

In-memory platforms represent a huge technological shift in the way companies deal with data because it enables the processing of massive quantities of real-time data in the main memory of the server to provide immediate results from transactional and operational data.  This transformative innovation, however, would not be possible without the technology enablement and software innovation offered by companies like HPand SAP.    

SAP has officially certified HP 2 TB and 4 TB systems for Business Suite powered by SAP HANA based on the HP ProLiant DL980 server and these will shortly be available for customer orders.   For customers that wish to get started immediately, HP offers a range of single-node server configurations ranging in capacity from 128 GB to 1 TB RAM.

By Chris Daly - Senior Engineer, HP Enterprise Group

One of my favorite movies is Moneyball, the 2011 picture based on the book by Michael Lewis, which recalled the Oakland A’s 2002 & 2003 seasons.   The A’s were at a disadvantage compared to the big market teams, with a payroll of roughly $41M in 2002 as compared to the NY Yankees who spent well over $100M. 

After years of early playoff exits the A’s General Manager, Billy Beane, decided it was time to move in a different direction in how he managed the ballclub.  Counter to the traditional baseball strategy that relied on evaluating a few basic statistics like batting average, runs batted in (RBI’s) and bases stolen,  Beane’s new approach scoffed at conventional baseball wisdom, while earning the ridicule of his staff, the team coach and local press. 

With the help of a young Harvard Economist, Beane built an analytical system for measuring player performance that employed an alternative set of parameters and a more comprehensive system to assess the value of a player, which ultimately led him to securing high quality players at bargain basement prices.   

There were many subplots throughout this story (e.g. the startup vs the established, the victory of substance and logic over money, etc) but the most critical may have been the democratization of information that at least for a moment in time, created a more level playing field for the Oakland A’s.  

I won’t ruin the movie for you in case you have not seen it, but let’s just say Billy Beane changed Major League Baseball.

By Sanjai Marimadaiah – HP Converged Systems

For many customers, standard rack based 1U and 2U servers have been the only show in town when it comes to deploying Hadoop clusters. 

However, as the scale of Hadoop deployments increases this can present several challenges including server footprint outgrowing available floor space in the datacenter and high costs of cabling, right through to complex administration of all of the physical hardware.

HP has a solution for this in the form of our HP ProLiant SL4500 series, an ultra-dense server platform which with the help of our partners Cloudera, HortonWorks and MapR, we’ve now baked into a series of reference architectures for Hadoop.  These offerings deliver outstanding efficiencies in server real estate, storage density and systems administration, as well as providing stellar performance over and above standard server architectures.