SAP AG and VMware has released the SAP HANA platform on VMware vSphere 5.5 for production use in order to help customers to innovate, simplify and move towards a software-defined data center architecture.

The combination of SAP HANA and VMware vSphere 5.5 will empower customers to innovate and simplify their data centers because of higher service levels and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

SAP HANA has been able to emerge as a leader because of its IT simplicity approach and by allowing breakthrough innovations for business, said Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG. "Together with VMware, we are enabling customers to operate their SAP HANA-based mission-critical applications in virtual environments with confidence and to accelerate their journey to software-defined data centers and ultimately
to the cloud", said Leukert.

It is real achievement for the company to see its customers evolving their IT infrastructure from physical environments to software-defined data center architecture. They are now looking forward for solutions that provide agility, high availability, elasticity and efficiency, said Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware. Moreover, they want control for their most mission-critical and demanding in-production enterprise environments.

He added that the partnership between the SAP and VMware is really transformative. It is really a great achievement to have such a significant partnership and being able to address the needs of customers by certifying SAP HANA for production use on VMware vSphere 5.5.

SAP HANA support of VMware vSphere 5.5's virtualized environment will be very helpful for customers implementing a data center virtualization strategy to simplify and streamline data center operation.

SAP HANA on vSphere has been released on certified SAP HANA appliances and on SAP HANA tailored data center integration application. Support is being provided for up to 1TB and 32 physical cores (64 virtual cores) per VMware vSphere instance.