Microsoft has announced that its Azure cloud platform will offer expanded support for products from SAP, including the popular HANA in-memory database.

A version of the software called HANA One has been available on AWS since 2011, and Azure has offered a developer edition of HANA since 2014. Now, Microsoft has promised customers the ability to run “the largest SAP HANA production workloads of any hyper-scale public cloud provider”. To this end, the company will be launching new, larger instances with up to 3TB of memory each.

Technical specifications of the nodes were revealed at the annual Sapphire Now conference in Orlando, Florida. At the same event, Huawei announced that its FusionSphere virtualization platform will also support HANA.

SAP HANA + Microsoft Azure
– SAP HANA + Microsoft Azure

A lot more memory

HANA (from High-Performance Analytic Appliance) is a relational database that achieves high transaction processing speeds by relying on main system memory instead of traditional storage. It went on sale in 2010 and has since emerged as one of SAP’s flagship products.

In the third quarter of 2016, Microsoft will launch new Azure instances developed specifically for HANA, capable of supporting up to 3TB of memory and up to 12TB of storage each. Single nodes will be especially suitable for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) with tools like S4/HANA.

Meanwhile multi-node deployments will scale all the way to 32TB of memory, making them perfect for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) applications like SAP BW. According g to Microsoft, these are the most powerful public cloud instances ever certified by SAP.

As part of the partnership, SAP HANA One images will also be available in the Azure Marketplace. Additionally, SAP’s Ariba, Concur, Fieldglass, and SuccessFactors applications will be integrated with Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud services.

“We believe the IT industry will be shaped by breakthrough partnerships that unlock new productivity for customers beyond the boundaries of traditional platforms and applications,” said Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP.

“SAP and Microsoft are working together to create an end-user experience built on unprecedented insight, convenience and agility. The certification of Microsoft Azure infrastructure services for SAP HANA along with the new integration between Microsoft Office 365 and cloud solutions from SAP are emblematic of this major paradigm shift for the enterprise.”