Running SAP systems is our passion. Regardless of whether we consider cloud or on-premise installations, partner hardware builds the technical foundation for SAP environments and is the basis for joint customer success.
SAP infrastructure certification therefore optimizes the interplay between the latest SAP technology and newest partner infrastructure offerings, constituting a fundamental aspect of our promise for quality and stability for customers.
Our certification process addresses two areas: SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver. The portfolio of tests focuses on complementary aspects of running SAP systems and simulates different customer load situations as well as operational aspects such as a highly integrated support process between a customer’s hardware partner and SAP.
Having taken partner feedback into account, we now have jointly simplified the SAP HANA certification of new infrastructure offerings, allowing for a faster delivery to customers.
During the certification process, SAP and partners jointly simulate representative OLAP scenarios and an SD-driven SAP S/4HANA workload, as well as a selection of SAP HANA-specific regression tests. With a set of standardized tools, SAP can equally test and compare hardware offerings to help assure a stable quality for customers across different vendors. A passed certification is an additional quality gate for new infrastructure offerings.
What’s the Customer Benefit?
The SAP HANA hardware directory allows customers to easily find infrastructure offerings well-suited to their specific use case — in size, vendors, deployment models, and use case. All listed offerings are certified by SAP, which means they have successfully been tested by SAP together with hardware partners.
This gives customers the benefit of an optimal combination of their SAP software and the vendor’s hardware.
The latest adoptions in the SAP HANA certification process simplify and streamline SAP and partner activities toward more efficiency. As a result, we can provide the same quality in a shorter time, allowing customers to access new infrastructure offerings faster.
What’s the Partner Benefit?
Infrastructure technology is subject to constant and fast innovation. New CPU generations, larger systems, and challenging customer requirements all drive rapid innovation cycles. With SAP infrastructure certification, partners can be certain that customer SAP systems will run on their hardware with stability and optimized performance and throughput.
The simplified certification processes reduce the efforts of new certifications, particularly for cases where only one of the following components have been touched: CPU architecture, memory, storage, or operation system. This shortens the go-to-market timeframe as only a subset of the standard certification tests is required. Furthermore, the requirements for appliances have been loosened to open up space on the partner side for new innovations. Passing the certifications is an additional layer in the quality commitment of SAP partners to their customers in a sense of joint success.
What’s New?
To improve efficiency of the certifications process, the SAP HANA technology innovation network team has amended the certification requirements for SAP HANA in two major aspects.
Delta certifications for IaaS offerings:
Partners that already have a fully certified listed instance in the SAP HANA hardware directory face a limited set of required tests in the case where only one of the following components change: operating system, CPU type, memory, and storage. This helps reduce the efforts for SAP HANA certifications for cloud partners that provide a variety of infrastructure offerings with similar configuration.
Appliance certification:
An appliance is a fully configured instance, including network, storage, and SAP HANA preinstalled. Offering an SAP appliance as a partner is no longer a prerequisite for further certification projects.
What’s Next?
SAP continues to listen to partners and customers, with a focus on assuring that customers benefit from the joint efforts of the company and partners and to further strengthen the collaboration within the SAP partner framework.
Combining the quality of infrastructure providers with the power of SAP HANA is the core of our mission, which we are pursuing today and into the future.
Christian Cramer is chief operating officer of SAP HANA and Analytics at SAP.