Cisco and SAP teamed up on a container-based product that allows customers to run big data environments on premises and in hybrid clouds. The new product integrates SAP’s Data Hub and Cisco’s Container Platform.

Data Hub is SAP’s big data visualization and management tool. It allows users to see data from across their company’s entire data landscape, pulling it from sources like Hadoop, Amazon S3, and SAP HANA and ERP.

This removes silos that traditionally have made it difficult to manage data across these disparate environments, said Amit Satoor, senior director for SAP HANA and Data Management Platform marketing. “The data hub plays a very critical role of data orchestration across all of these things, whether you look at the application, the core technology, as well as the cloud environment,” Satoor said.

Container Platform, as the name implies, is Cisco’s container management play based on Kubernetes.

The new SAP Data Hub on Cisco Container Platform – available Nov. 1 – allows customers to run their Data Hub environments on premises or in hybrid clouds. It includes enterprise-grade Kubernetes support and it is compatible with non-containerized SAP workloads.

“multicloud is here,” said Dave Cope, senior director at Cisco's Cloud Platform and Solutions Group. “The transparency of moving and managing applications across this environment is something the industry has tackled through things like Kubernetes but the big stumbling block has been how do we create this transparency layer for data?”

Businesses can buy the jointly-developed product as software only or bundled on top of Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure. “This consumption model takes advantage of persistent storage, the solution can be supported by Cisco all the way from software to infrastructure, and it makes consumption really simple,” Cope said.

Cisco is also working on supporting additional Kubernetes-based SAP apps.

The new product plays into Cisco’s multicloud strategy of supporting whichever clouds its customers choose, Cope said, adding that Cisco supports 16 different public and private clouds.

“Cisco doesn’t have its own cloud,” he explained. “Cisco’s legacy of networking and connecting and securing disparate components has been a perfect parlay into multicloud, which is about being able to deploy and manage the entire lifecycle of existing and cloud-native workloads across any combination of environments. We don’t have to be in a position to try to push anybody to any one cloud.”