Breaking speed records with HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200

HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200 delivers leading SAP HANA performance. Read how HPE, SAP and Intel co-innovation, plus next-gen technologies, resulted in record-breaking benchmark results.

Setting out to become a leader in your field is only a small part of actually getting there. The real work is in continuously testing, improving, and expanding your capabilities. If you run mission critical SAP® workloads, you know business demands and datasets never stop growing. Only with infrastructure that’s ready to harness vast data and accelerate insights can you achieve your biggest goals.

HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200, our newest and most capable mission critical server, is the new leader in SAP performance and scalability. The platform delivers world-record OLAP performance with powerful 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors in the SAP BW edition for SAP HANA® standard application benchmark. It  powers SAP-certified solutions with up to 16 sockets and up to 32 TB of ultra-fast DDR5 shared memory.

IDC has also awarded HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200 its highest availability level rating, AL-4, denoting fault tolerance that guarantees continuous processing under almost any circumstance.[i]

It’s no coincidence that one of the platform’s co-innovation lead engineers, based at SAP headquarters, is also a leader in another field. Ricardo Adarraga is a champion speed skier, holding the Spanish speed-ski record of 240 km per hour.

“Being a speed skier or a performance engineer is probably two sides of the same thing,” Adarraga explains in a recent interview introducing HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200. “You’re always trying to tune this little detail, to understand what is going on, and get the maximum performance.”

In this post, we’re looking at the tuning and technologies that set this new platform apart in SAP performance.

World record performance

HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200 has set multiple records in the SAP BW edition for SAP HANA® standard application benchmark version 3.

First 32 TB benchmark on a scale-up system

HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200 has published the first and only 32TB benchmark on a scale-up system processing a massive 55.9B initial records.

First 24 TB benchmark on a scale-up system with the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Platinum processors

Compared to the 24TB benchmark on a scale-up system using the 3^rd Gen Intel Xeon processors set, HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200 delivered:

• 2x faster runtime of last data set
• 2x higher query executions per hour
• 40%+ lower runtime of complex query phase[ii]

Both benchmarks used in this comparison had a total of 24TB of memory, processing 41.6 billion initial records.

The test system was configured with 12 x 4th Gen Intel Xeon Platinum processors, providing 720 cores in total, with a text SAP HANA database holding 41.6 billion initial records.

The scale-up advantage

A key difference between HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200 and the nearest competitor is in system architecture.

The second-placed solution is a scale-out system made up of four servers, each with eight processors for a total of 32. That means twice as many processors to buy, four times as many servers to power, house and manage, all adding up to weaker performance overall.

Scale-up mission-critical servers from HPE, powered by Intel, provide significant architectural advantages when you need high performance for critical workloads:

• Management is simpler because you have just one system to work with.
• Performance is higher because data does not need to be transported between connected servers.
• Efficiency is higher and typically results in lower per-core software licensing costs.

HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200 offers large scalability in a single system, with room to grow up to 16 sockets in 4-socket increments and expand shared memory from 128 GB up to 32 TB.

HPE, SAP, and Intel co-innovation

Scale-up architecture is a key element of the platform’s record-breaking performance, alongside modern components such as 4^th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, DDR5 memory that offers two times more bandwidth than DDR4, and ultra-fast PCIe 5.0 interconnects.

But HPE’s collaboration with SAP and Intel engineers, who have worked tirelessly to optimize SAP S/4HANA performance on the platform, should not be overlooked.

“It’s very important, the cooperation between the HPE engineers that designed the system, the SAP engineers, the Intel engineers,” says Adarraga. “We use the benchmarks not only to show how good we are. We use the benchmarks to stress the system and see where the bottlenecks are, what needs to be improved. Nobody can beat that.”

Learn more

It’s not by chance that HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200 offers record-breaking, SAP-certified solutions at the largest scale. Working with SAP and Intel, we’ve fine-tuned and improved many features from the HPE Superdome Flex family of servers while introducing a host of new-generation technologies.

If you need modern, mission critical infrastructure to power your own transformation and lead in your field, click below to learn more about HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200.

• Watch the video with HPE engineer Ricardo Adarraga

Read the benchmark and performance guide

• Learn more about scale-up servers at hpe.com/superdome