The announcement was made at SAP’s TechEd conference which ran in Vienna, Austria last week.
The solution will pull together IBM’s BladeCenter and TotalStorage DS4300 Solution and the high-performance analytics capability that was introduced into SAP’s NetWeaver BI platform earlier this year to boost the query performance across SAP’s new line of analytic applications which debuted at its Sapphire user conference in May.
Earlier this year SAP teamed up with Hewlett-Packard Co and Intel Corp to deliver the high performance analytic capability; it leverages HP’s ProLiant servers and StorageWorks storage area network systems and Intel’s 64-bit Xeon processors.
IBM says it is now working closely with SAP to deliver pre-packaged configurations for server and storage capacity that also includes all the necessary software components – such as a special version of IBM’s DB2 Universal Database optimized for SAP software.
IDC claims that IBM BladeCenter holds 40% of revenue share of the blade server market, which makes it a leader.
The joint high-performance analytics packaged solution is currently being tested in IBM and SAP labs. Neither company offered a general release date.
The solution will benefit customers running SAP NetWeaver BI and SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW).
The difference between these two products is subtle and confusing. According to a Web log post by Kathleen Beavers, product manager for SAP NetWeaver, on SAP’s Developer Network site, BW remains a core product within SAP BI, providing the ability to control, monitor and maintain all processes connected with data staging and processing.
In the beginning we had SAP BW which was later bundled into other SAP components, like Workplace and Enterprise Portal, to form a licensed product that was named mySAP BI to distinguish it from the underling BW components, Beavers wrote.
Following the development of NetWeaver, we determined that the BI component should be part of this platform and we decided to retain the Business Intelligence as the name of the underlying component since it includes data warehouse management [tasks], business modeling, business content, OLAP analysis, data mining, reporting and planning functions.
SAP has been sharply focused improving the query performance and data scalability of its BI solution this year. The company also recently partnered with Sand Technology Inc to embed Sand’s highly-scalable Searchable Archive technology into SAP NetWeaver BI.
