Why SAP HANA Resilience Matters as Much as Scale

SAP environments are built to support the business as it grows. Hitachi Vantara’s Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One) Block High End is certified by SAP to support up to 1,008 SAP HANA nodes. That certification gives organizations a validated benchmark for the scale the platform can support, providing greater confidence as they consolidate, modernize and grow large SAP environments.

But scale is only part of what mission-critical SAP systems require. The harder question is whether the underlying infrastructure can keep the business running when something goes wrong, whether due to a hardware failure, a software issue or a cyberattack.

Growth Changes the Risk Equation

As SAP environments expand, they often support more users, applications, data and business processes. That makes scale important, but it also raises the impact of downtime. The more the business depends on a platform, the less room there is for disruption.

Hitachi Vantara’s latest research underscores that pressure. Fifty-nine percent of U.S. and Canadian business and IT leaders said a critical data loss would be catastrophic. As organizations consolidate and expand their SAP environments, the consequences of disruption can grow with them. Scale, then, is not only about supporting more workloads. It is about doing so without compromising availability or business continuity.

As part of the broader VSP One data platform, VSP One Block High End combines simplified data management with the availability and resilience needed for large, mission-critical enterprise environments.

Resilience Has to Be Built Into the Foundation

Patching, identity controls and application security remain essential. Infrastructure resilience does not replace any of them. It adds another layer of protection by helping organizations maintain access to critical data and recover more predictably when disruption occurs.

That need is becoming more urgent. Recent Check Point Research found a 48% year-over-year increase in extorted ransomware victims, underscoring the growing pressure organizations face to protect critical systems and recover quickly when disruptions occur. For organizations running mission-critical SAP systems, that is another reminder that prevention is only part of the strategy. Availability and recovery also need to be planned in advance.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recommends that organizations identify the systems most critical to daily operations, maintain and test backups, and establish restoration priorities before an incident happens. Those principles are particularly important for SAP environments because recovery is not simply about bringing storage back online. The business also needs confidence that the right systems and data can return in the right order.

VSP One Block High End is designed for that level of reliability. Built for mission-critical workloads within the VSP One portfolio, it offers up to 99.999999% availability and is backed by Hitachi Vantara’s 100% Data Availability Guarantee. It also supports active-active, multi-data-center replication and recovery capabilities designed to help organizations maintain access to the data supporting critical SAP applications and reduce disruption.

Infrastructure cannot eliminate cyber risk. What it can provide is a more reliable path to maintain access to critical data and recover when an incident occurs.

Reliability Is a Business Outcome

For SAP teams, reliability is sometimes treated as a technical specification. In practice, it is a business outcome. It helps finance teams close the books, supply chains keep moving and customer-facing services remain available. When those systems stop, the impact can spread well beyond IT.

That is why scale, security and recovery need to be considered together. A platform may support substantial growth, but organizations should also ask whether it can remain available through planned changes and unexpected events, and whether recovery has been tested under realistic conditions.

Three questions can help frame that discussion:

• Can the environment grow without a disruptive redesign?
• Can it keep critical SAP workloads available through failures, upgrades and other interruptions?
• Can teams restore the data needed to resume operations within the timeframe the business requires?

The SAP HANA certification helps answer the first question. Hitachi Vantara’s availability, replication and recovery capabilities are designed to help address the other two by supporting the broader requirements for reliability and resilience.

Plan for Growth and Disruption

SAP modernization should create room for what comes next, not introduce a new point of risk.

That means choosing infrastructure that can support larger environments while helping the business remain operational through upgrades, outages and cyber incidents.

Scale will always matter. For mission-critical SAP environments, its full value is realized when it comes with the reliability and resilience needed to keep the business moving.

Learn more about Hitachi Vantara solutions for SAP HANA and why organizations choose Hitachi Vantara for SAP.