SGI continued its drive into the enterprise by signing Cisco Systems as a reseller of its shared-memory, single node UV 300H server line. The new deal, announced yesterday in a company blog, mirrors a similar reseller arrangement struck with Dell roughly one year ago. Back in February, SGI signed an OEM agreement with Hewlett Packard Enterprise for use of its UV 300H technology.
The aggressive channel expansion moves, reseller and OEM, are part of SGI’s forceful pivot into the enterprise particularly at the high end. Like many, SGI has high expectations for SAP HANA and the in-memory computing market generally.
“We see this as a $B-plus market in infrastructure,” and which is also being reflected in sap’s growth and their success with HANA,” said Bill Dunmire, senior director of product management and marketing, HPDA solutions, SGI. Roughly a year ago, SGI formed the high performance data analytics business (HPDA) to capitalize on the opportunity. Its HPC business still dominates, but greater growth potential is seen in HPDA.
Reaching the larger market will require a bigger ‘sales’ force. Asked about other reseller agreements on the near-term horizon, Dunmire noted, “What I can say is we’re very channel focused and so as channel opportunities present themselves we’ll look at them.” Cisco, which already has 4- and 8- socket SAP HANA offerings, is now able to offer up to 20-socket, single-mode SAP HANA solutions to its larger enterprise customers.
Snapshot of the product details in the deal:
- SGI UV 300H is a model of the SGI UV 300 supercomputer and purpose-built for SAP HANA.
- SGI UV 300H is SAP-certified under general availability as a single-node system with 4 to 20 sockets and one to 15 Terabytes of cache-coherent shared memory using the Intel Xeon processor E7 v3 family, and up to 20 Terabytes using the Intel Xeon processor E7 v4 family. Utilizing a modular chassis architecture that scales up in 4-socket increments, this system is designed to scale to 32 sockets and 32 Terabytes of shared memory and is awaiting further certification by SAP.
- Featuring 7th generation SGI NUMAlink technology, and pre-installed with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA (for the Intel Xeon processor E7 v3 family only), SGI UV 300H can be deployed as a fully pre-configured appliance or SAP HANA tailored datacenter integration (TDI) solution.
SGI’s reseller agreement with Cisco Systems enables Cisco channel partners to provide a single-node solution for SAP Business Suite, SAP Bank Analyzer, SAP S/4HANA Finance, and other SAP S/4HANA applications on SAP HANA with near limitless scale and mission-critical reliability.
Dunmire said SGI was the first to deliver the new Broadwell E7 v4 processor in an SAP Hana offering and that the ability to scale to 20TB is another first. SGI UV 300H solutions sold through Cisco channel partners come with SGI’s 24×7 support and on-site system installation.
“What SAP did with Broadwell is they increased their memory to processor ratio so what we did was not only have Broadwell certified (by SAP) but we also certified 64GB DIMS because we wanted to take advantage of the higher memory to processor ratio.”
The OEM licensing agreement with HPE allows it to use SGI’s UV 300 technology, including certified SAP HANA certified, but just at the 8-socket level.