GCP – Achieve peak SAP S/4HANA performance with Compute Engine X4 machines

Enterprise workloads like SAP S/4HANA present unique challenges when migrating to a public cloud, making the choice of a cloud provider critically important. As an in-memory database for large SAP deployments, SAP HANA can have massive memory and CPU processing requirements, and that can just be the beginning of the challenges. Businesses are generating, processing, and making business decisions on more data than ever before, and they require increasingly complex data analysis, algorithms, and reporting. SAP provides the real-time operational and historical analytics and insights businesses need to make informed decisions quickly. However, this requires machines that can process and analyze large volumes of data in real time, demanding high levels of memory and compute power. 

To meet these demands, we recently introduced X4 machine types. The Compute Engine X4 machine family is purpose-built to handle the demanding requirements of SAP HANA Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) workloads. These machines deliver strong performance, scalability, and reliability, empowering businesses to unlock the full potential of their SAP S/4HANA, SAP Business Suite (ECC) on SAP HANA deployments, and SAP’s Industry Solutions. X4 is also built to support OLAP workloads such as SAP BW/4HANA and SAP BW on HANA.

Uncompromising performance in a scalable solution

As businesses grow, whether organically or via acquisitions, they often risk hitting CPU and memory limitations of their SAP HANA system. This forces them to upgrade to larger scale-up machines earlier or using multiple machines in a scale-out configuration. Scaling out is a complex custom process that requires application data redesign and approvals from SAP, as well as being costly from an operational and resource perspective. In addition, the planned downtime required for these migration operations can be unacceptable for organizations that rely on SAP for mission-critical operations.

X4 solves these challenges by allowing businesses to grow further in scale-up mode before hitting performance bottlenecks. X4 is available in 16TB, 24TB, and 32TB memory configurations and 960, 1440, 1920 vCPU cores respectively with “standard sizing” SAP certification for both SAP HANA OLTP and OLAP capable of running the most demanding enterprise SAP HANA workloads. X4 machines also boast scale-out OLTP certifications for up to four nodes the size of the servers, for a total of 128 terabytes for S/4HANA use cases — larger than any other cloud provider’s. The X4 16TB machines achieved an SAP Benchmark IaaS SAPS result that is over 8% higher than the closest IaaS cloud’s. (Source: SAP note 2456432 – Logon required). 

As the only cloud IaaS provider offering a 32TB SAP-certified machine, Google Cloud helps ensure that your SAP HANA environment grows seamlessly with your business needs while providing a cost-effective and simple cloud-native experience. Here’s how:

• Industry-leading compute and storage: The Google Cloud X4 machine family gains its power and scale through a combination of powerful hardware and software optimizations. Integration with Google Cloud Hyperdisk provides high performance, scalability, and resilient block storage. Hyperdisk provides dedicated, dynamically tunable read/write operations per second (IOPS) and throughput with each volume up to 5GB per second, delivering substantially higher performance compared to the previous generation of Persistent Disk. This level of performance is crucial for applications that require rapid data access, like databases, real-time analytics, and reduces SAP HANA rehydration times. Additionally, X4 machines run on one of the world’s largest privately managed networks, offering low-latency performance. 

• High availability and reliability: Minimizing downtime for mission-critical SAP applications is a top priority for customers. X4 machines have an industry-leading 99.95% Compute Engine Memory-Optimized Single Instance SLA. Paired with Hyperdisk, X4 enables rapid SAP HANA rehydration capabilities (<45 min full rehydration for 32TB) that minimize application business process downtime, so your mission-critical SAP applications stay up and running. 

• Performance-boosting innovation: Titanium is a hardware- and software-based technology designed to significantly enhance workload performance, efficiency, and security while also simplifying management by automating many infrastructure-level tasks. Titanium shifts networking and storage functions away from the machine’s CPU to specialized hardware, allowing the machine’s CPU to focus on running SAP HANA applications. Titanium’s tight integration with Google Cloud’s Hyperdisk block storage service allows for best-in-class storage I/O performance (up to 400k IOPS per instance), surpassing what’s typically possible with traditional architectures. 

• Enhanced security and compliance: X4 machines inherit Google Cloud’s robust security features, including encryption of data in transit and at rest as well as compliance with industry standards and regulations with support for Google Cloud’s Assured Workloads. Titanium enhances security feature performance by offloading security-sensitive tasks like encryption and key management to dedicated hardware with enhanced protections. This helps improve the security posture of workloads, reduces the risk of vulnerabilities, and enables customers to meet their compliance and regulatory requirements.

• Simplified cloud-native experience: X4 machines offer the benefits of a cloud-native architecture for SAP S/4 HANA, integrating seamlessly with Google Cloud’s ecosystem and providing access to a wide range of cloud services. Compute Engine also offers a seamless migration experience for X4. You can easily migrate your SAP instance from M2 servers (up to 12 terabytes) to X4. The migration process from other servers or on-prem environments to X4 is the same as the standard process for migrating to any other Google Cloud server. 

• A choice of service model: When migrating to Google Cloud, SAP customers have two choices. You can choose a direct (BYOL) deployment model, or you can take advantage of RISE with SAP, which brings solutions and expertise from SAP and technology ecosystem partners into one single-contract subscription offering.

  “In the past few years, our SAP HANA systems have seen significant data growth with an increasing need for higher performance. With the 24TB X4 machines and Hyperdisk storage, we have been able to raise the ceiling for our future data growth and are also looking to see improvements in our performance. Added to this, Google’s X4 machines are cloud native, giving us opportunities to automate system management and operations.” – Shawn Lund, US Chief Technology Officer, Deloitte

Google Cloud’s X4 machines represent a significant advancement in SAP HANA infrastructure, offering high performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency. By integrating with Google Cloud’s powerful ecosystem and providing a cloud-native experience, X4 machines empower businesses to unlock the full potential of their SAP S/4HANA deployments and drive digital transformation. 

Learn more about X4 machines and RISE with SAP on Google Cloud. View SAP Datasphere for Google BigQuery on Google Cloud Marketplace.