Thanks for reading our first blog, which has an introductory notion. Going forward, this is your place for finding the latest and greatest information and resources on cloud for mission critical enterprise class applications across three broad categories: 

• Enterprise cloud use cases based on leading companies and practices in the space -> marked with a GREEN label
• Share technical best practices on specific cloud services topics and use cases, for example compute and storage -> marked with a BLUE label
• And of course, information on our Ocean9 cloud solutions for the enterprise as well as our team's experiences -> marked with an ORANGE label

Who is Ocean9?

Despite the name, we are not a new sunscreen or surf brand. - Ocean[9] stands for Data Oceans and we are a provider of enterprise class dedicated cloud services for Big Data in the Cloud. - Think Operating System for Big Data: Why would every company have to figure out how to run a Big Data solution in the cloud by themselves while this is a common goal and requirement across countless businesses?

Our first offering

Big Data and Cloud are exciting and fast growing spaces. Not a good place to start boiling the ocean (no pun intended ;). Hence, the Ocean9 team has focused all their energy into a first offering that leverages the team's extensive past experience in a particular space: Running SAP solutions on Amazon Web Services. Within this exciting domain, our initial offering is the Ocean9 Dedicated Cloud Service for SAP HANA on AWS.

What makes Ocean9 different? 

Not many people know this, but running SAP on AWS is nothing new. In fact, it has been around for several years! Nevertheless, there is only a small set of packaged solutions available in the market, one of them being SAP HANA One by SAP themselves. HANA One is a good solution ideally geared for getting started with SAP HANA (full disclosure, I used to help market when working at SAP). One of its limitations however is the maximum RAM size of 244GB; in a coming blog, I will present a complete comparison between HANA One, Ocean9 for HANA and other relevant solutions .

A quick flashback: Founders history

While working at SAP, the two founders of Ocean9, Frank Stienhans our CTO and myself, were possibly the very first to run SAP solution on AWS at scale. In 2008, Frank and team launched a highly automated SAP system provisioning tool called Titanium for SAP pre-sales use. Later, Titanium was productized and is now called SAP Cloud Appliance Library, or CAL. And in 2012, Frank and I joined forces to launch the first unattended online HANA demo in 24x7 mode. The so called HANA Test Drives were a huge success,  delivered more than 100k online demos in the first year plus the inspiration to launch HANA on AWS: SAP HANA One was born. - A related "history" blog by Frank is coming soon.

Ocean9: Built on experience!

With the Ocean9 for SAP HANA on AWS we are bringing all these experiences together to offer the following:

• Enterprise class SAP HANA systems on AWS at a fraction of the cost and effort it would take to build this on-premise or to Do-it-yourself on AWS.
• Business speed and agility combined with solid oversight and governance over cloud resources to avoid cloud sprawl and control cost.
• Push button automation with full guidance and transparency across all provisioned AWS cloud services.

In summary, think single push button to provision any size SAP HANA system in 15 minutes. Want to scale-up or down, voila, 4 minutes later you can have it. And how about a cluster across 2, 3 or even 1 AWS Availability Zones? (Yes, single zone makes sense … we will explain). Again, a one push button operation and 25 min later it is done and ready for use!

Compare that to the pre-cloud world where setting up redundant data centers is a significant investment in time, money and effort.

Please come back, we will make it worth your time

Our objective is to provide a mix of cloud (AWS) technical information, customer use and show cases around SAP and cloud as well as insight into our own product. I will also start tinkering on the blog to create a comment section for your feedback and proposals. And lastly, we invite the community to contribute themselves and I will setup the proper tools to do so. In the meantime, please get in touch with us via our contact form or just email me at swenconrad(at)ocean9(dot)io.

Some of the future topics we already have on our editorial calendar are below. Blog publishing frequency will be more or less weekly.

• The history of SAP on AWS
• Detailed look at SAP HANA on AWS
• Real-time pricing tool for AWS cloud resources
• The new X1 instance type from AWS. - Why are am excited about X1

Thanks for reading and I hope to see you back soon!

Best,

Swen Conrad, CEO Ocean9