HP is expanding its Big Data analytics appliance alliance with SAP, moving SAP's HANA in-memory database widgetry to its BladeSystem.

Used to query multiple types of SAP and non-SAP data sources in near-real-time or batch, HANA hasn't been on blades before - unless you count Hitachi's.

HP is king of the blades but more importantly 47% of SAP's applications run on HP hardware and this stuff is going to be targeted at SAP's installed base.

The new scale-out addition to the HP AppSystem for SAP HANA portfolio includes the HP X9300 IBRIX Network Storage System - expected in time to be the dominant storage type for HANA - with the HP P6500 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), part of HP's Converged Infrastructure. IBM prefers local storage, plus replication for HANA.

The certified HP implementation pushes HANA past its former boundaries. It can, the pair said, run SAP's Business Suite software as well as the NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) component, which should be a poke in the eye to Oracle.

HP's modular ProLiant BL680 G7 blade servers, which can scale to 640 cores and 8TG of memory - admittedly the small end of Big Data - support up to eight times the capacity of the single-node solutions HP has previously supplied, saving on real estate in scaling as well power and cooling.

The tiered storage system can hold a maximum of 16PB of data and EVA is supposed to be easier to manage than the competition.

HP and SAP are both going to offer potential customers decision support and business and financial benefit analyses to justify purchases whose cost can run from a few hundred thousand into the millions.

All the usual handholding will be available.

The pair figures the hardware will support HANA as it moves into transaction processing and data warehousing next year.

SAP has been thinking about fielding its own appliances not only in the context of data centers but also of its Business byDesign cloud offering, which will run on HANA. It is currently in the process of getting ISVs such as Tibco and Tableau to support HANA.