SAP doesn’t seem to think that its High-Performance Analytics Appliance (HANA) is the only way to take advantage of faster memory.
Violin Memory, a provider of Flash memory storage systems, announced today that SAP has certified the Sybase relational database so that it can run on servers connected to Flash memory arrays from Violin Memory.
According to Andy Mattes, senior vice president of global strategic partnerships at Violin Memory, Flash memory technology is driving a wave of consolidation across the enterprise as IT organizations leverage the performance of Flash to reduce the number of servers and storage systems they need to deploy and manage.
Obviously, when it comes to in-memory computing, HANA is SAP’s primary priority. But ever since SAP acquired the Sybase relational database in 2010 the company has been trying to get SAP application customers to switch from either Oracle or IBM DB2 to Sybase.
By certifying SAP applications and Sybase databases on Flash memory products from Violin Memory, SAP is trying to get customers to not only make that switch, but do it in a way that substantially reduces the total cost of the IT infrastructure environment.
There are, of course, multiple ways to accomplish the same goal using a variety of Flash memory technologies. The only thing at this point holding back the shift to using Flash memory for primary storage would be inertia in the form of naturally conservative storage administrators, which is why certification of Flash memory products by application vendors has suddenly become a significant issue.
