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SAP AG has teamed up with several of the worlds biggest computer hardware manufacturers to make deploying and managing the companys enterprise applications faster and easier.
At SAPs Sapphire conference in New Orleans last week, Sun Microsystems Inc. and Fujitsu Computer Systems Corp. rolled out new offerings that bundled their respective servers with SAP software. Those announcements came two weeks after SAP outlined an expansion of its alliance with Dell Inc.
“At the end of the day, the thing we want to do is give customers choice,” said Henning Kagermann, CEO of SAP, at the time of the Dell announcement.
Sun, of Santa Clara, Calif., unveiled its Sun Infrastructure Solution for N1 Grid for SAP Solutions, which will be available June 1. The offering mixes hardware, software and services designed to enable SAP customers to drive down costs and improve the manageability of their server infrastructures. The goal is to move from dedicated servers running particular applications to an infrastructure where servers and storage devices can be pooled as a single resource and shared by the applications, said Sun officials.
The Sun Infrastructure Solution includes Suns N1 Grid technology, which enables the pooling of the resources, and Solaris, which includes N1 Grid Container technology and a cryptographic framework with process rights management.
There also is a reference architecture for SAP software that helps tune the applications for optimum performance on Solaris. In addition, Sun offers consultants help with planning, deployment and management.
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For its part, Fujitsu, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., in conjunction with storage provider Network Appliance Inc. announced its FlexFrame for MySAP Business Suite offering for North American customers. It follows the release of a similar offering in Europe last year.
FlexFrame for MySAP is designed to create a utility computing environment in SAP deployments. The modular technology utilizes Fujitsus Intel Corp.-based Primergy servers, clustering software and storage devices, as well as Novell Inc.s SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and SAPs NetWeaver integration technology.
Network Appliance, also of Sunnyvale, is contributing its NetApp filer storage device. The goal is to create an on-demand environment that officials said can reduce operating costs by as much as 30 percent.
Down the road, Fujitsu will roll out FlexFrame offerings for other software makers and will incorporate other operating systems, including Linux offerings from Red Hat Inc., Fujitsu said.
Meanwhile, Dell, of Round Rock, Texas, and SAP, of Walldorf, Germany, promised to link the support for Dell systems running SAP more closely, said Dell officials. If customers have questions, they can contact either company, and their respective support staffs can work together to solve the problem.
In addition, Dell, through its professional services unit, offers help to customers looking to migrate SAP applications from Unix-based systems to Dell hardware running Linux or Windows.