In a recent survey, Gartner highlights that 73% of organisations worldwide plan to invest in big data in the next two years. The study also pointed out that the percentage of organisations that have no plans for big data investment also fell from 31% in 2013 to 24% this year.
When it comes to the volume, variety and velocity aspects of big data, volume received most of the focus. Volume is also the easiest to deal with by increasing storage and compute capacity. On the other hand, data variety is far more challenging.
To stay ahead of the trend, SAP, BMMsoft, HP, NetApp and Red Hat, worked together to get ready for this shift in future data. Based on SAP HANA, SAP IQ 16 and BMMsoft EDMT running on HP DL980 servers under Red Hat Enterprise Linux with multiple petabytes (PB) of NetApp E5460 storage systems, connected through fibre switches, the world’s largest data warehouse, with a size greater than 12PB, was created culminating in a Guinness Book of World Records setting entry.
The previous record for a 3PB data warehouse was set in 2012 by IBM DB2. Thus, achieving this new Guinness Book record as the world’s largest data warehouse is clearly a milestone for SAP, BMMsoft, RedHat, HP and NetApp.
NetApp E5460 storage systems, part of the NetApp E-Series product line designed for delivering leading bandwidth performance for data-intensive applications, was chosen as the preferred storage platform for its ability to handle large data volumes, enormous throughput requirements, a load speed of 34.3TB/hour, maintain high speed during data refresh and bulk delete operation, and support high availability at the same time.
Twenty E-Series E5460 storage arrays with dual controllers, dual 8 Gbps fibre channel each, and 10 disk expansions were deployed in this world record test. In total 1,800 3TB SATA drives equivalent to 5,400 TB raw storage capacity were used. Dynamic Disk Pools (DDP) provided strong data protection and ease of management while still resulting in extremely high throughput.
In this world record test, running the NetApp E-Series storage arrays proved to be the top performance enterprise storage systems for SAP deployments, ready for big data and customers’ future external storage requirements.