Home > Workload Solutions > SAP > Guides > SAP HANA HCI Guides > SAP HANA Deployments on Dell XC Family Systems Using Nutanix AOS and AHV > Introduction to SAP HANA
SAP HANA is an in-memory data platform that is deployable as an on-premises appliance or in the cloud. SAP HANA is ideally suited for performing real-time analytics and for developing and deploying real-time applications.
The data is kept in the RAM of one or multiple SAP HANA worker hosts and all database operations (reads, inserts, updates, or deletes) are performed in the main memory of the host. This feature differentiates SAP HANA from traditional databases, where only a part of the data is cached in RAM and the remaining data resides on disk. To ensure that the SAP HANA database can be restored to its most recent committed state, persistent storage is used to provide a fallback in the event of a failure.
SAP has certified SAP HANA on the following XC models:
Note: Only the XC940 and XC740xd models can be used in production for SAP HANA. Hybrid models and other XC family models are not supported for SAP HANA production systems but can be used in nonproduction environments.
XC Family systems support up to three SAP HANA production VMs on a four-socket XC940 node and one SAP HANA production VM on a two-socket XC740xd node. The minimum number of recommended nodes on an XC Family cluster for a production scenario is four nodes (three active nodes + one standby node). This configuration ensures the high availability of SAP HANA VMs if one node fails.
The following sections of this guide describe the recommended architecture for SAP HANA systems on XC Family devices.