SAP and OpenShift: A focus on non-HANA databases in the cloud

[richard_hirsch]

A little-noticed press release appeared last week that described a new cooperation between SAP and the open-source Paas - OpenShift.

”Red Hat’s extensive partner ecosystem plays a critical role in enabling customer success. We are pleased to expand our collaboration with SAP to bring solutions in support of SAP database offerings to the full OpenShift portfolio. With OpenShift cartridges, we are bringing developers choice via a broad selection of solutions that are complementary to OpenShift. Now, with cartridges for SAP ASE, SAP IQ and SAP SQL Anywhere solutions, OpenShift developers can take advantage of some of the industry’s leading database offerings on our PaaS.” [SOURCE]

I found various aspects of this press release interesting:

• All three databases mentioned in the press release are originally from Sybase.  Since there are descriptions on how to build cartridges (here is a blog on building the cartridge for  Sybase ASE) , I thought it was strange that the obvious choice for a SAP database cartridge - HANA - was missing. This absence is especially curious since there is already a HANA broker for a different open source PaaS -CloudFoundry.
• You might expect a cloud-related announcement to be heavily promoted by the SAP Cloud team with quotes in the press release, etc (Although Matthias Steiner did tweet about the announcement.)  The SAP spokesperson in the RedHat press release was from the SAP Database Go to Market group. There is also no corresponding press release from SAP on the agreement.
• SAP’s PaaS - the HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) - currently doesn’t support the databases described in the agreement with RedHat concerning OpenShift.  Perhaps, the use cases for these databases in a PaaS don’t fit well with the scenarios presently supported by HCP but I’d be curious to know more regarding such gaps.
• This agreement, however, provides cloud developers with the ability to use these databases since such developers aren’t able to use these databases in the HCP.