1. Innovation and Insight
Virtustream Cloud Service for
SAP HANA: Reference Architecture
Joseph Santos
Global Director, Technology Alliances
SAP Labs, LLC
Michael Hoch
Senior Vice President, Cloud Advisory Services
Virtustream, Inc.
White paper

2. Innovation and Insight
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Table of contents
2 Executive summary
3 Introduction
3 SAP and Virtustream
3 Virtustream credentials
4 Virtustream Cloud Service for SAP HANA
5 Cloud-based deployment for real-time business
6 A cloud computing partner like no other
6 Enterprise-grade public, virtual private and
hybrid cloud services
6 Virtustream: Ranked as a top cloud service provider
7 SAP HANA: reference architecture
7 High-performance analytic appliance on Cisco UCS
8 Scale-out offerings with Cisco UCS B-Series
Blade Servers
9 Cisco – NetApp 12TB Configuration for SAP HANA
10 NetApp FAS8040 Storage System
10 Infrastructure management
11 Macro-hypervisor
11 In summary
Executive summary
Virtustream Cloud Service for SAP HANA®
provides fast, cost-effective access to SAP-certified
environments running the SAP HANA platform,
hosted in SAP-certified data centers, with all the
benefits of Virtustream’s Infrastructure-as-a Services
(IaaS) managed by its Cloud Management Platform
(CMP) software, xStream™
. Existing and new
customers running the SAP®
ERP application are
using Virtustream Cloud Service for SAP HANA to
run full production environments, and experiencing
performance improvements better than 90%.
The Virtustream Enterprise-Class Cloud provides a
secure, highly available IaaS for full heterogeneous
environments, including SAP and non-SAP
application groups, SAP HANA, and other databases.
For the SAP HANA portions, customers have the
option of virtual SAP HANA, SAP-certified appliances,
or customized solutions using SAP HANA tailored
data center integration, depending on the deployment
requirements.
Virtustream and SAP have jointly developed a
reference architecture for SAP HANA that includes
the Virtustream Cloud Management Platform software,
xStream, the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS),
and NetApp FAS System Storage. It is a model for
deploying complex heterogeneous IT environments,
either from a cloud service provider like Virtustream or
on premise in a customer’s data center.

3. Accelerate your journey to the cloudInnovation and Insight
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Introduction
Today’s businesses require continuous innovation for survival.
Yet in many instances, IT is overwhelmed with managing
the complexity of their current IT landscapes. Because of
this, businesses often perceive IT as a bottleneck to growth
and start looking to other avenues to meet their constantly
changing needs. In today’s dynamic market, a revenue
opportunity today may not be there tomorrow. Often these
opportunities are lost, as IT is unable to quickly respond to
the urgent need. The delay might be due to focus shifts from
enabling strategic business processes to technology support
and maintenance, or the time taken and budget needed to
acquire and develop on-premise IT solutions.
It is no surprise, then, that industry analysts report that up
to 75% of new IT expenditures will be for cloud or hybrid
systems by 2016. In today’s reality, in a world of accelerated
change, business needs will drive the cloud agenda.
But deploying mission-critical apps in the cloud requires
specialized skills, knowledge, and experience. A lack of these
competencies creates unacceptable risk in a mission-critical
environment.
For deploying SAP HANA in the cloud, Virtustream Cloud
Services for SAP HANA is the answer: to accelerate the
deployment, reduce the risk, and optimize the investment
and resources.
SAP and Virtustream
SAP and Virtustream have a long-standing relationship and
a long history of innovation for SAP applications in the cloud
and SAP HANA in the cloud. Virtustream deployed the first
production SAP customer in a multi-tenant cloud and the first
production SAP ERP running on SAP HANA in the cloud.
Virtustream was among the first cloud service providers
to become a member of the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud
partner program for select certified SAP partners. Recently,
the enterprise-class cloud software and services provider
announced an extension of its Cloud Service for SAP HANA
to offer customers fully virtualized SAP HANA for production
landscapes on its IaaS platform
Virtustream credentials
• More than 120 SAP customers running production SAP
software in Virtustream Enterprise-Class Cloud
• First production SAP customer in a multi-tenant cloud
• First production SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC)
running on SAP HANA in the cloud
• Member of SAP Cloud Technology Advisory Board
• Member of SAP Cloud Benchmarking Group
• SAP-certified cloud services provider
• SAP-certified provider of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud
services
• SAP-certified provider of hosting services
• SAP-certified provider of the SAP Business One®
Cloud
solution
Virtustream Cloud Service for SAP HANA allows customers
to deploy SAP HANA faster, at lower cost, and with less risk
than a traditional on-premise deployment. Customers can
now use the agility of the cloud for SAP HANA to deliver
innovation back to the business faster than ever before.

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Virtustream Cloud Service for SAP HANA
Virtustream Cloud Service for SAP HANA provides fast, cost-
effective access to SAP HANA environments, both virtual SAP
HANA and physical SAP-certified appliances, in SAP-certified
data centers, managed by the Cloud Management Platform
(CMP) software, xStream™
. (See Figures 1 and 2.) Existing
and new customers on SAP ERP are using Virtustream Cloud
Service for SAP HANA to run full production environments
and experiencing performance improvements better
than 90%. For the SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW)
application powered by SAP HANA, customers with both
migration and greenfield uses have seen 600x improvements
in performance. Virtustream Cloud Service for SAP HANA
includes an option for subscription-based services, including
the software and infrastructure services, at a low monthly fee,
with the long-proven benefits of a true, consumption-based
cloud. The benefits include:
• SAP-certified landscapes hosted within Virtustream’s SAP-
certified data centers
• Virtual environments running SAP HANA for fast,
consumption-based deployments under 1TB in size
• Configured and available multi-TB environments deployed
on Virtustream Infrastructure-as-a Service
• Management by Virtustream Cloud Management Platform
(CMP) software, xStream
• Support by Virtustream’s broad portfolio of professional
services aimed at ensuring a successful deployment,
adoption, and exploitation of cloud computing
• Cloud strategy services to minimize costs and reduce risk
–– Migration and optimization services for the SAP HANA
database
–– Cloud monitoring, management, and optimization
services to reduce operating and support costs
–– A complete suite of cloud-staging, hosting, network,
and colocation services
–– Certified consultants experienced with SAP HANA in
production
Figure 1: Virtustream – Bringing Cloud Value to SAP Customers

5. Accelerate your journey to the cloudInnovation and Insight
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Cloud-based deployment for real-time business
Virtustream Cloud Service for SAP HANA can be rapidly
provisioned, with initial deployments designed, configured,
and ready in days or weeks, and additional landscapes
provisioned in hours or days.
This offering allows SAP customers to run their mission-
critical SAP HANA database and SAP applications in a
private managed cloud environment by bringing their existing
SAP on-premise licenses to Virtustream’s data center and
converting the SAP perpetual licenses to cloud services
licenses.
Capitalizing on the shift to the cloud, customers are changing
the way they consume world-class SAP solutions. With
SAP solutions in the cloud, customers reduce their capital
expenditure; lower the total cost of ownership with a flexible,
scalable infrastructure; and experience the power of SAP
software in weeks, not months.
Virtustream Cloud Services for SAP HANA is where a
trusted partner like Virtustream offers exponential value over
traditional models for delivering IT services. Customers can
leverage the proven industry-leading SAP enterprise software
portfolio combined with the improved economics of the
Virtustream Cloud Platform. The result is faster time to value,
lower cost, and full elasticity, while remaining secure and
resilient, to realize the benefits of unparalleled expertise and
hosting in a private multi-tenant cloud.
Most enterprises and government agencies today use a
broad mix of applications: SAP and non-SAP. Virtustream
enables both legacy applications and modern applications to
gain the benefits of cloud computing by providing granular
application-level service-level agreeements (SLAs) for
applications in these mixed environments.
Figure 2: Virtustream Cloud Service for SAP HANA – Architectural View

6. Innovation and Insight
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A cloud computing partner like no other
Virtustream is a cloud computing partner like no other
for enterprises running SAP software in the cloud, with a
rare breadth and depth of experience, knowledge, and
credentials. SAP itself is an investor in Virtustream, as well as
a customer, supplier, and partner. Its extensive professional
services offerings are available to help ensure the successful
migration of your SAP instance: SAP ERP, the SAP Customer
Relationship Management application, analytics solutions,
SAP Landscape Virtualization Management software, virtual
appliance factory, SAP HANA, and SAP Business One Cloud.
Enterprise-grade public, virtual private, and
hybrid cloud services
The Virtustream Enterprise-Class Cloud is an IaaS cloud
computing solution offering the reliability, security,
compliance, and performance of a dedicated private cloud,
combined with the flexibility, scalability, and economic
benefits of a public multi-tenant cloud. Virtustream’s
Enterprise-Class Cloud enables users to run complex,
mission-critical SAP applications and database as well
as legacy applications, including Oracle, Microsoft, and
hundreds more with full cloud benefits, and without rewriting
applications. Within the Virtustream Enterprise-Class Cloud,
SLAs are delivered for both application performance and
availability, in addition to providing a foundation for meeting
national and industry-level security, compliance, and auditing
requirements.
Virtustream: Ranked as top cloud services provider
Cloud Spectator and the Cloud Advisory Council published
the results of a study on “IaaS Performance and Value
Analysis” comparing the top 14 public cloud infrastructure
providers on October 15, 2013.
The study reports the performance information of 14 of the
largest IaaS providers in the United States. While many of the
providers serve clients globally with data centers worldwide,
Cloud Spectator and the Cloud Advisory Council conducted
this study exclusively in each provider’s U.S. data center.
Running across a period of 10 consecutive days, this report
details performance results on each provider’s system,
including component-level tests measuring CPU, disk, RAM,
and internal network.
Figure 3: IaaS Performance and Value Analysis,
Source: Cloud Spectator, LLC 2013

7. Accelerate your journey to the cloudInnovation and Insight
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Performance data is related with cost of servers to acquire
a price–performance value index, which is used to compare
value among providers based on the results. This index is
called the CloudSpecs Score.
Figure 3 lists an overview of the top providers from each
comparison. Only the top three within each category are
listed. The “Performance Leaders” category exclusively ranks
IaaS providers from best to worst performance results. The
CloudSpecs Leaders category ranks providers based on
their CloudSpecs price–performance index, with a relational
integer from 1 to 100 (100 is the highest score) used to
compare each provider’s value.
For general system performance, Virtustream received the
highest value score in the CloudSpecs Leaders segment. With
performance exclusively, Tier 3 ranks first. The IaaS offerings
of HP Cloud, SoftLayer, Tier 3, and Virtustream consistently
rank as both Performance Leaders and CloudSpecs Leaders
throughout the study. A combination of effective pricing and
strong performance places those providers within the top tier
of these categories.
SAP HANA: reference architecture
Virtustream and SAP have jointly developed a reference
architecture for SAP HANA that includes Virtustream xStream
Cloud Management Platform software. It is a model for
deploying complex heterogeneous IT environments, either
hosted by Virtustream as a cloud service provider or on
premise in a customer’s data center.
The infrastructure specified in the reference architecture is
based on:
• Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) utilizing B460 M4
High-Performance Blade Servers and Cisco Nexus 5000
Multiprotocol Switches
• NetApp FAS 8040 Storage System
High-performance analytic appliance on Cisco UCS
Cisco has developed a full portfolio of solutions for SAP HANA
based on the Cisco Unified Computing System™
(Cisco UCS®
).
The portfolio ranges from small-scale solutions supporting
128GB of memory to large-scale solutions supporting up to
16TB of usable memory with 16 nodes. Depending on the
compression factors, validated Cisco®
appliance solutions can
support databases of up to 112TB.
Cisco UCS is a single unified system entirely programmable
through unified, model-based management that dramatically
simplifies and accelerates the deployment of enterprise-class
applications and services. All Cisco UCS appliances are
intelligent infrastructure that can be managed through an
embedded, single management plane across multiple Cisco
UCS rack and blade servers, radically simplifying operations
and reducing costs.

8. Innovation and Insight
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Scale-out offerings with Cisco UCS B-Series Blade
Servers
The scale-out appliance is uniquely scalable. It allows
customers to easily adapt to the growing demands of their
individual environments by incrementally adding Cisco
B460 M4 High-Performance Blade Servers with four Intel®
Xeon®
processors E7-4890 v2 (2.8 GHz) and up to 1TB
usable memory each, as needed. For every four Cisco UCS
blade servers, the persistency layer is provided by NetApp
FAS8040HA storage system.
The basic configuration of the Cisco scale-out offering
consists of redundant Cisco Fabric Interconnects with
embedded infrastructure management, a Cisco UCS C220
M3 High-Density Rack Server to handle management
functions and to host SAP HANA studio, a Cisco 2911
Integrated Services Router (ISR) for secure remote
management, and one enclosure with support for up to four
Cisco UCS B460 M4 blade servers. The basic configuration
can easily be scaled through the addition of extension
bundles, each providing another blade enclosure for up to
four more Cisco UCS B460 M4 blade servers each and the
corresponding storage from NetApp.
All Cisco UCS servers are interconnected with a low-latency,
10Gbps Ethernet fabric, which supports both IP and
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) connections through
redundant Cisco Fabric Interconnects. The Cisco Fabric
Interconnect,
with embedded management, is the core of Cisco UCS and
reduces both the number of network hops and network
latency – critical to SAP HANA performance.
Cisco UCS and the storage devices are connected to a
pair of Cisco Nexus®
5500 platform multiprotocol switches.
The Cisco Nexus 5548UP Switch offers 48 unified ports
that can function as 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports with FCoE
capabilities, Gigabit Ethernet ports, or native 48Gbps Fibre
Channel (depending on the inserted optics) ports. The Cisco
Nexus 5548UP Switch has a low-latency cut-through design
that provides predictable, consistent traffic performance
regardless of packet size, traffic pattern, or enabled features
on 10-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces with latency of less than 2
microseconds for switched traffic and 4.8 microseconds for
routed traffic.
Additional scalability, with the same features, can be
accomplished with the Cisco Nexus 5596UP Switch, which
can provide a density of 96 unified ports in two rack units
(2RUs). The Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders
work in conjunction with a Cisco Nexus 5500 platform
parent switch to deliver cost-effective and highly scalable
100/1000-Megabit Ethernet and 10-Gigabit Ethernet. The
fabric extender is essentially an extension of the parent Cisco
Nexus switch fabric. Logically, it behaves like a remote line
card, with the fabric extender and the parent Cisco Nexus
switch together forming a distributed modular system with a
single point of management.

9. Accelerate your journey to the cloudInnovation and Insight
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Figure 4: Cisco – NetApp 12TB Configuration
Component Details
Cisco Unified Computing System Components
Cisco UCS 6296UP Fabric Interconnect 2
Cisco UCS B460 M4 Blade Server 12
Number of CPUs 48 Intel Xeon E7-4890 v2 processors 2.8-GHz
Total CPU cores 720
Total RAM 12TB
Ethernet uplink bandwidth 8 x 10-Gigabit Ethernet
Number of blade chassis 6 Cisco UCS 5108
Fabric (Two Cisco Nexus 5548UP Switches)–Port counts in use
10-Gigabit Ethernet ports 8 x 10-Gigabit Ethernet
NetApp FAS 8040 Storage Array
RAM 64GB
NVRAM 16GB
Number of SAS drives 120: 5 x 24 600GB each
Number of disk shelves 5
Total storage 60TB+
10-Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth 8 x 10-Gigabit Ethernet
Cisco – NetApp 12TB Configuration for SAP HANA

10. Innovation and InsightInnovation and Insight
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NetApp FAS8040 Storage System
Powered by NetApp®
Data ONTAP®
and optimized for scale-
out, the FAS8000 series unifies SAN and NAS storage
infrastructure. With proven data management capabilities, the
FAS8000 has the flexibility to keep up with changing business
needs while delivering on core IT requirements.
The FAS8000 features a multiprocessor Intel®
chip set and
leverages high-performance memory modules, NVRAM to
accelerate and optimize writes, and an I/O-tuned PCIe gen3
architecture that maximizes application throughput.
The FAS8000 Series benefits customers by allowing them to:
• Run SAN and NAS workloads simultaneously with unified
scale-out storage
• Scale to nearly 70PB and include existing storage with
FlexArray
• Reduce latency and speed operations using hybrid
storage with up to almost half a PB of flash or all-flash
configurations
• Experience 99.999% availability, plus nondisruptive
operations that eliminate planned downtime
• Deliver up to 2x the price–performance of the previous
generation
• Future-proof storage with innovative hardware, full cloud
integration, and the number-one storage OS
Cisco Unified Computing System with NetApp Storage for
SAP HANA (Figure 4) is a defined set of hardware and
software that serves as an integrated infrastructure stack. The
solution supports only the SAP HANA application stack based
on NetApp FAS storage system, the Cisco Nexus switch
platform, and the Cisco UCS in a single package.
Infrastructure management
Virtustream delivers infrastructure management and more
through xStream™
, the Virtustream Cloud Management Platform
software for private, public, and hybrid clouds, which enables
customers to move existing mission-critical and production
applications to the cloud. Powered by Virtustream µVM™
(Micro VM) technology, xStream™
delivers enterprise-grade
security and compliance, performance SLAs, multi-tenant
efficiency, and consumption-based charging for both legacy and
Web-scale applications.
The core cloud innovation that differentiates Virtustream
is the μVM. Today virtualized data centers and clouds are
provisioned using virtual machines. Customers select a virtual
machine size that matches the maximum possible demands
of their application (whether compute, storage, or network). As
enterprise applications consume varying levels of resources over
the course of their operation and over time, this means that the
virtual machines (VMs) include significant wasted headroom
that is unused most of the time.
Figure 5: Virtustream xStream Cloud Management Platform software

11. Accelerate your journey to the cloudInnovation and Insight
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Macro-hypervisor
Virtustream has a patent protected technology, the μVM – a
cloud element much smaller than a VM. A set of μVMs are
combined together as a dynamic container enabling the
applications to be spread across multiple μVMs. As the
applications breathe, more or less μVMs are dynamically
allocated by the xStream management system. This dynamic
allocation allows the VM headroom to be saved, often
bringing up to 30% reductions in both virtual and physical
assets required. In addition, the set of μVMs are all managed
as a single set with a common set of security policies,
network policies, and virtualization policies – greatly reducing
the work to operate the system. xStream also provides
comprehensive enterprise-class SLAs at application level
through Virtustream patented technology.
The xStream management platform with μVM technology
is run as a “macro-hypervisor” over existing hypervisors:
VMware ESXi, Red Hat KVM, open source KVM, PowerVM,
Virtustream KVM, and others. The μVM technology enables
up to 30% economic savings over existing virtualization
and also enables customers to mix and match hypervisors,
selecting the optimal approach for their mix of applications
– whether VMware, Red Hat–supported KVM, or even open
source hypervisors.
Both xStream™
cloud software and the Virtustream Enterprise-
Class IaaS Cloud deliver secure, highly efficient cloud
solutions, backed by performance SLAs, for mission-critical
applications (SAP and non-SAP) to run in public, private, and
hybrid clouds today.
In summary
Virtustream is the enterprise-class cloud software and service
provider trusted by enterprises worldwide to migrate and run
their mission-critical applications in the cloud.
For enterprises, service providers, and government
agencies, Virtustream xStream™
Cloud Management Platform
(CMP) software and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
meet the security, compliance, performance, efficiency,
and consumption-based billing requirements of complex
production applications in the cloud – whether private, public,
or hybrid.
For more information:
www.sap.com/hana
www.virtustream.com/solutions

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