SAP has certified PowerStore storage for SAP HANA for using the FC protocol and the SAP fcClient storage connector. For information about the host and network requirements for the FC connectivity protocol, see Network design considerations.
Determining the proper array model, the number and type of front-end I/O modules, and the disk configuration for an SAP HANA TDI deployment requires the following information:
- Number of SAP HANA nodes to be deployed on the array
- Capacity requirements of the SAP HANA nodes
An SAP HANA node can be either a single (scale-up) SAP HANA server or an SAP HANA worker node that is part of an SAP HANA multihost cluster. Multiple SAP HANA nodes can be connected to a PowerStore storage array if the number of nodes does not exceed the recommended maximum number of SAP HANA nodes, as specified in Table 2.
For more information, see SAP HANA capacity requirements.
As part of the SAP HANA certification, we performed extensive testing to determine the scalability of the PowerStore product family, using the SAP HANA-HWC-ES-1.1 certification scenario. The following table shows the number of SAP HANA nodes that are supported on a specified PowerStore array model or cluster. These numbers represent the recommended maximum number of SAP HANA production nodes that can be connected to the PowerStore system while still meeting the SAP performance KPIs.
Table 2. SAP HANA scalability (number of nodes) per appliance and cluster
Appliances per cluster |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
Number of SAP HANA nodes |
6 |
12 |
18 |
24 |
8 |
16 |
24 |
32 |
12 |
24 |
36 |
48 |
14 |
28 |
42 |
56 |
16 |
32 |
48 |
64 |
The first row in the table shows the number of PowerStore appliances in the PowerStore cluster. Each appliance has two active/active storage nodes and each node has two four-port front-end (FE) I/O modules. A PowerStore cluster can have up to four appliances.
The second row shows the number of production SAP HANA nodes that can be deployed on the specified configuration using SAN FC connectivity. SAP HANA standby nodes in a scale-out cluster are not counted for scalability because they do not have a storage persistence.
Achieving these numbers in a customer environment requires:
- FC network with 16 or 32 Gb/s link speed on all components
- Two four-port I/O modules (16 or 32 Gb/s) per PowerStore node
Note: Two I/O modules with 16 FE ports per PowerStore node are required when the maximum number of SAP HANA nodes is connected. A single I/O module with eight FE ports per PowerStore node would be acceptable for 50 percent of the maximum number of SAP HANA nodes.
- 16 dedicated FE ports for SAP HANA, with SAP HANA nodes equally balanced across the FE ports
- Capacity for the SAP HANA persistence allocated on PowerStore volumes or file systems with the “Volume Performance Policy” set to high
- Host connections configured as described in SAP HANA host configuration and setup
