We recently worked with CenturyLink, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the United States, to optimize their virtual SAP HANA solutions. The outcome is below referenced success story, where CenturyLink describes how they use the VMware platform, to provide a customized private cloud for SAP applications, including SAP HANA in less than 28 days, with no compromise on performance.
A SAP infrastructure project duration of 28 days may not sound so fast, but remember, this is a for a completely customized SAP private cloud solution and not just some standard, simple SAP HANA instances running somewhere in the public cloud, as a test or development system. Regarding CenturyLink, customers can deploy new SAP workloads up to four times faster, compared to in-house implementations, where these deployments typically take over 100 days!
Deploying a complete SAP landscape includes several systems like SAP Solution Manger, SAP Gateways, load balancers, several applications servers and finally the SAP HANA database. All these systems need to get configured, patched up to the latest software release level and connected by maintaining highest security standards. All this will get done, if wished, by CenturyLink.
Beside faster time to market, CenturyLink can utilize templates and repeatable processes, which helps it easily standardize and scale its offering while managing costs, complexity, and risks. This all leads to CapEx savings of up to 60 percent and OpEx savings in a similar range for CenturyLink customers. For instance, as an SAP HEC partner, CenturyLink had to deploy without SAP HANA VMware vSphere virtualization, 20 physical server systems to support 20 independent SAP HANA systems in the past. Now they deploy a VMware cluster of 8 hosts to support these 20 SAP HANA instances, including HA, which is a HW reduction by 12 hosts or 60 percent. 60 percent less power and cooling costs, rack space savings and reduced HW maintenance costs are only the more comprehensible cost savings realized. Additionally, to this the easier operation of a virtual, software defined environment, are major, long-term, cost saving factors.
These are the reasons why CenturyLink wants to go one step further towards a fully software defined data-center and plans to implement a VMware Virtual SAN™ based hyper-converged infrastructure ready to run even the more demanding SAP workloads.
For more information please review the success story posted here:
