In an effort to accelerate the deployment and delivery of database, analytics and application solutions, SAP AG and NetApp today announced they are deepening their collaboration with the intent to support next-generation solutions, including the SAP HANA platform and SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management software.

By complementing database solutions from SAP with NetApp's storage and data management solutions, the companies are looking to provide customers with a data infrastructure for SAP applications that can help drive competitive advantage and reduces cost of ownership.

Business needs and requirements change frequently and on short notice, forcing IT to become flexible enough to expand and contract IT and application services at a moment's notice. Small applications might need to grow quickly, while others need to scale down. Nonetheless, lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) and accelerating time to market remain business imperatives. Therefore, companies are looking for flexible and efficient IT delivery environments to meet business requirements.

"SAP is recognized worldwide for innovation and providing collaborative business solutions that help our customers compete and adapt to their fast-changing business needs," said Rob Enslin , president of SAP Global Customer Operations and member of Global Managing Board, SAP AG. "Expanding our partnership with NetApp provides our customers with increased scalability and data protection, while at the same time allowing for greater management of data growth and adaptability to our customers' changing on-demand needs."

Results of Deepened SAP and NetApp Strategic Partnership

By including the Cisco UCS with NetApp Storage solution for SAP HANA, which combines the innovative Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) with NetApp unified storage systems, Sap hopes to deliver scalability, simplified management, and high system availability to its users.

Fujitsu and NetApp have collaborated for more than a decade, and the relationship has resulted in the delivery of appliances for SAP HANA and converged infrastructure solutions such as FlexFrame Orchestrator for SAP HANA as well as traditional SAP application workloads. The solutions can provide increased service level agreements and flexibility at reduced cost.

With these technologies, NetApp is part of the solution that supports customers running classic SAP solutions as well as SAP HANA. The building-block-style architecture supports scalability and offers high availability for support of non-stop operations.

NetApp storage and data management solutions, including the Cisco and NetApp-developed FlexPod, complement SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management in the automation of routine administration tasks; reduction of costs, hardware resources and power; and simplification of landscape management of SAP solutions.

All NetApp solutions for SAP applications utilize an agile data infrastructure. Specifically, customers can reportedly deliver impact faster, achieve non-disruptive operations and scale their solution without limits and without complexity.

"Through our expanded relationship with SAP, businesses now have access to powerful integrated solutions that help to reduce total cost of operations and drive greater business agility," said Rob Salmon , executive vice president, Field Operations, NetApp. "NetApp storage solutions ease the deployment and management of landscapes running SAP solutions and accelerate the transition our customers are making to cloud-based agile data infrastructures."

Future Plans

SAP and NetApp plan to extend their collaboration into new areas, including SAP database solutions, further integrations around SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management and cloud-based system management automation, and optimizing performance and availability of data management solutions for SAP HANA.