Copyright Copyright © 2012 Epistemy Press LLC. All All rights reserved. No part of this publ ication may be reproduced, s tored in a retrieval retrieval s ystem or transmi tted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher. For reproduction or quotation permission, please send a written request to
[email protected] . Epistemy Press LLC makes no warranties or representations with respect to the content and specifically disclaims any implied warranties or guarantees of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. Epistemy Press LLC assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions that may appear in the publication. The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge SAP’s kind permission to use its trademarks in this publication. This publication contains references to the products of SAP AG. SAP, the SAP Logo, R/3, SAP NetWeaver, SAP HANA and other SAP products and services mentioned herein are trademarks or registered tradema rks of SAP SAP AG AG in Germany and in se veral other countries all over the the world. Busi ness Objects and the Busi ness Objects logo, Busines sObjects, Crystal Crystal Reports, Crystal Decisions, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius and other Business Objects products and services mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects in the United States and/or other countries. countries. All other products products me ntioned in this bo ok are registered or unregis tered trademarks of their respective respective companie s. SAP SAP AG AG is neither the author nor the publisher of this pub lication and is n ot responsi ble for its content, and SAP Group shall not be lia ble for errors or omis sions with respect to the materials. This material outlines SAP’s general product direction and should not be relied on in making a purchase decision. This material is not subject to your license agreement or any other agreemen t with SAP. SAP SAP has no o bligation to pursu e any course of busines s outlined i n this m aterial or to develop develop or releas e any functionality functionality mentioned in this docum ent. This This m aterial and SAP’s strategy and poss ible future developments are s ubject to change and m ay be changed by SAP SAP at any time time for any reason wi thout notice. This document is provided without a warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. SAP assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions in this document. ISBN: 978-0-9856008-0-8
Copyright Copyright © 2012 Epistemy Press LLC. All All rights reserved. No part of this publ ication may be reproduced, s tored in a retrieval retrieval s ystem or transmi tted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher. For reproduction or quotation permission, please send a written request to
[email protected] . Epistemy Press LLC makes no warranties or representations with respect to the content and specifically disclaims any implied warranties or guarantees of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. Epistemy Press LLC assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions that may appear in the publication. The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge SAP’s kind permission to use its trademarks in this publication. This publication contains references to the products of SAP AG. SAP, the SAP Logo, R/3, SAP NetWeaver, SAP HANA and other SAP products and services mentioned herein are trademarks or registered tradema rks of SAP SAP AG AG in Germany and in se veral other countries all over the the world. Busi ness Objects and the Busi ness Objects logo, Busines sObjects, Crystal Crystal Reports, Crystal Decisions, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius and other Business Objects products and services mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects in the United States and/or other countries. countries. All other products products me ntioned in this bo ok are registered or unregis tered trademarks of their respective respective companie s. SAP SAP AG AG is neither the author nor the publisher of this pub lication and is n ot responsi ble for its content, and SAP Group shall not be lia ble for errors or omis sions with respect to the materials. This material outlines SAP’s general product direction and should not be relied on in making a purchase decision. This material is not subject to your license agreement or any other agreemen t with SAP. SAP SAP has no o bligation to pursu e any course of busines s outlined i n this m aterial or to develop develop or releas e any functionality functionality mentioned in this docum ent. This This m aterial and SAP’s strategy and poss ible future developments are s ubject to change and m ay be changed by SAP SAP at any time time for any reason wi thout notice. This document is provided without a warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. SAP assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions in this document. ISBN: 978-0-9856008-0-8
About the Cover Image
he cover image is a European “No Speed Limit” sign. If you’ve ever driven on the Autobahn in Germany, this sign will immediately bring a smile to Tyour your face because b ecause you can step on the accelerator acce lerator and drive as fast as you want to or as fast fas t as your car can go (which ever comes first). In terms of SAP HANA, we selected this image because SAP HANA allows your company to run at top speed with no artificial limit to how fast it can go. If you ever go visit SAP headquarters in Germany, you’ll see this sign about 2 miles south of the Frankfurt airport on the A5 — and there’s no speed limit on your way to visit SAP.
Note from the Author
this book is about the shift to “real-time” business, it’s fitting that we’ve been writing this book in “real-time” and will be delivering it in “realSince time”. Basically, that means that we can’t wait around for everything in the SAP HANA world to settle down and solidify before writing each chapter and expect everyone to hold their breath until the entire book is finished and ready to print. And trust me, SAP HANA is moving extremely fast right now and you could be holding your breath for quite a while waiting for that day. Just like SAP HANA is disrupting the status quo in the database world and breaking lots of ossified rules of the game, we’ll be doing much the same with this book. Who says you have to wait till the whole book is written to release it? Who says you have to charge $$ for an extremely valuable book? Who says it has to be printed on paper with ink and sold in a bookstore? We’ve decided to break all those traditional publishing rules and release the first chapters now (May 2012) and then release the remaining chapters as they are completed, with quite a few of the technical chapters coming out near the SAP TechEd 2012 events in the fall. Since this is a “digital-only” book, it’s important that readers keep connected to learn about the release of new chapters and content updates. That’s pretty easy: Follow the book on twitter @EpistemyPress and @jeff_word, sign up for the email updates from the saphanabook.com website when you register to download the ebook and keep watching experiencesaphana.com.
Table of Contents
1 SAP HANA Overview 2 SAP HANA Architecture 3 SAP HANA Business Cases & ROI Model 4 SAP HANA Applications 5 SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on SAP 6 Data Provisioning with SAP HANA 7 Data Modeling with SAP HANA 8 Application Development with SAP HANA 9 SAP HANA Administration & Operations 10 SAP HANA Hardware 11 SAP HANA Projects & Implementation 12 SAP HANA Resources
Acknowledgments
we’re at the beginning of this journey, many people have already been phenomenally helpful in the scoping, content preparation and Although reviewing of this book. Their support has been invaluable and many more people will be involved as the book progresses. Many thanks to all of you for your support and collaboration. — Jeff SAP Colleagues Margaret Anderson, Puneet Suppal, Uddhav Gupta, Storm Archer, Scott Shepard, Balaji Krishna, Daniel Rutschman, Ben Gruber, Bhuvan Wadhwa, Lothar Henkes, Adolf Brosig, Thomas Zureck, Lucas Kiesow, Prasad Ilapani, Wolfram Kleis, Gunther Liebich, Ralf Czekalla, Michael Erhardt, Roland Kramer, Arne Arnold, Markus Fath, Johannes Beigel, Ron Silberstein, Kijoon Lee, Oliver Mainka, Si-Mohamed Said, Amit Sinha, Mike Eacrett, Andrea Neff, Jason Lovinger, Michael Rey, Gigi Read, David Hull, Nadav Helfman, Lori Vanourek, Bill Lawler, Scott Leatherman, Wolfram Kleis, Tom Kurtz, Jay Foard, Sebastian Speck SAP Mentors Thomas Jung (SAP), Harald Reiter (Deloitte), Vitaliy Rudnytskiy (HP), John Appleby (Bluefin), Tammy Powlas (Fairfax Water), Vijay Vijayasankar (IBM), Craig Cmehil (SAP), Alvaro Tejada (SAP) SAP Partners Lane Goode (HP), Tag Robertson (IBM), Rick Speyer (Cisco), Andrea Voigt (Fujitsu), Nathan Saunders (Dell), KaiGai Kohei (NEC), Chris March (Hitachi) Production Robert Weiss (Development Editor) Roland Schild (Libreka) Michelle DeFilippo (1106 Design)
How to use this book “May you live in interesting times”
book is designed to provide an introduction to SAP HANA to a wide range of readers, from C-level executives down to entry-level coders. As This such, its content is necessarily broad and not-too-technical. This book should be the first thing everyone reads about SAP HANA, but will provide easy links to Level 2 technical content to continue learning about the various sub-topics in more detail. The content is structured so that everyone can begin with the introduction chapter and then skip to the subsequent chapters that most interest them. Business people will likely skip to the applications and business case chapters while techies will jump ahead to the application development and hardware chapters. In fact, it would probably be odd if anyone actually read this book from beginning to end (but go ahead if you want to). Although a great deal of this book focuses on “living in a world without compromises” from a technology and business perspective, we’ve unfortunately had to make a few compromises in the scope and depth of the content in order to reach the widest possible audience. If we hadn’t, this would be a 10,000-page encyclopedia that only a few hundred people would ever read. We’ve tried to make this book as easy to read as possible to ensure that every reader can understand the concepts and get comfortable with the big picture of SAP HANA. We’ve also tried to cover as many of the high-level concepts as possible and provide copious links to deeper technical resources for easy access. Hopefully, you will enjoy reading the chapters and find it quite easy to “punch out” to additional technical information as you go reg ardless of your level of technical knowledge or business focus. The knowledge you will find in this book is the first step on the journey to becoming a real-time enterprise, but in many ways, it is just the “tip of the iceberg”. We’re working on several Level 2 technical books on SAP HANA and are committed to providing as much technical and business content as possible through the Experience SAP HANA website and other channels. Please refer to the last chapter to get a listing of additional free information sources on SAP HANA. Given the massive strategic impact of SAP HANA on the medium and long-term IT architectures of its customers, SAP felt that every customer and ecosystem partner should have free access to the essential information they will need to understand SAP HANA and evaluate its impact on their future landscape. SAP sponsored the writing of this book and has funded its publication as a free ebook to ensure that everyone can easily access this knowledge. SAP HANA is a rapidly evolving product and its level of importance to SAP customers will continue to increase exponentially over the next several years. We will attempt to provide updated editions of this book on a semi-annual basis to ensure that you can easily access the most up-to-date knowledge on SAP HANA. Please continue to visit the SAP HANA Essentials website to download updated and revised editions when they are released (typically in May and November of each year). You can also follow @EpistemyPress on Twitter for updates.
Foreword By Vishal Sikka, Ph.D. Executive Board Member, SAP AG magazine picked “The Protester” as its person of the year for 2011 , recognition of individuals who spoke up around the world — from the Arab Time countries to Wall Street, from India to Greece — individuals whose voices were amplified and aggregated by modern technology and its unprecedented power to connect and empower us. Twitter and Facebook, now approaching 800 million users (more than 10% of humanity), are often viewed as the harbinger of social networking. But social networking is not new. A recent issue of the Economist described Martin Luther’s use of social networking, especially the Gutenberg press, to start the Protestant Reformation. During the American Revolution, Thomas Paine published his Common Sense manifesto on a derivation of the Gutenberg press. Within a single year, it reached almost a million of the 1.5 million residents of the 13 American colonies — about two-thirds of the populace, and helped seed democracy and America’s birth. I believe that information technologies, especially well-designed, purposeful ones, empower and renew us and serve to amplify our reach and our abilities. The ensuing connectedness dissolves away intermediary layers of inefficiency and indirection. Some of the most visible recent examples of this dissolving of layers are the transformations we have seen in music, movies and books. Physical books and the bookstores they inhabited have been rapidly disappearing, as have physical compact discs, phonograph records, videotapes and the stores that housed them. Yet there is more music than ever before, more books and more movies. Their content got separated from their containers and got housed in more convenient, more modular vessels, which better tie into our lives, in more consumable ways. In the process, layers of inefficiency got dissolved. By putting 3000 songs in our pockets, the iPod liberated our music from the housings that confined it. The iPhone has a high-definition camera within it, along with a bunch of services for sharing, distributing and publishing pictures, even editing them — services that used to be inside darkrooms and studios. 3D printing is an even more dramatic example of this transformation. The capabilities and services provided by workshops and factories are now embodied within a printer that can print things like tools and accessories, food and musical instruments. A remarkable musical flute was printed recently at MIT, its sound indistinguishable from that produced by factory-built flutes of yesterday. I see layers of inefficiency dissolving all around us. An empowered populace gets more connected, and uses this connectivity to bypass the intermediaries and get straight at the things it seeks, connecting and acting in real-time — whether it is to stage uprisings or rent apartments, plan travel or author books, edit pictures or consume apps by the millions. And yet enterprises have been far too slow to benefit from such renewal and simplification that is pervading other parts of our lives. The IT industry has focused on too much repackaging and reassembly of existing layers into new bundles, ostensibly to lower the costs of integrated systems. In reality, this re-bundling increases the clutter that already exists i n enterprise landscapes. It is time for a rethink. At SAP, we have been engaged in such rethinking, or intellectual renewal, as our chairman and co-founder Hasso Plattner challenged me, for the last several years, and our customers are starting to see its results. This renewal of SAP’s architecture, and consequently that of our customers, is driven by an in-memory product called SAP HANA which, together with mobility, cloud computing, and our principle of delivering innovation without disruption, is helping to radically simplify enterprise computing and dramatically improve the performance of businesses without disruption. SAP HANA achieves this simplification by taking advantage of tremendous advances in hardware over the last two decades. Today’s machines can bring large amounts of main-memory, and lots of multi-core CPUs to bear on massively parallel processing of information very inexpensively. SAP HANA was designed from the ground-up to leverage this, and the business consequences are radical. At Yodobashi, a large Japanese retailer, the calculation of incentives for loyalty customers used to take 3 days of data processing, once a month. With SAP HANA, this happens now in 2 seconds — a performance improvement of over 100,000 times . But even more important is the opportunity to rethink business processes. The incentive for a customer can be calculated on the fly, while the customer is in a store, based on the purchases she is about to make. The empowered store-manager can determine these at the point of sale, as the transaction unfolds. With SAP HANA, batch processing is converting to real time, and business processes are being rethought. Customers like Colgate-Palmolive , the Essar Group, Provimi, Charmer Sunbelt, Nongfu Spring, our own SAP IT and many others, have seen performance improvements of thousands to tens of thousands times. SAP HANA brings these benefits non-disruptively, without forcing a modification of existing systems. And in Fall 2011, we delivered SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA, a complete removal of the traditional database underneath, delivering fundamental improvements in performance and si mplification, without disruption. SAP HANA provides a single in-memory database foundation for managing transactional as well as analytical data processing. Thus a complex
, . also integrates text processing with managing structured data, in a single system. And it scales simply with addition of more processors or more blades. Thus various types of applications, across a company’s lines of businesses, and across application types, can all be run off a single, elastically-scalable hardware infrastructure: a grand dissolving of the layers of complexity in enterprise landscapes. SAP HANA hardware is built by various leading hardware vendors from industry standard commodity components, and can be delivered as appliances, private or public clouds. While this architecture is vastly disruptive to a traditional relational database architecture, to our customers it brings fundamental innovation without disruption. Looking ahead, I expect that we will see lots of amazing improvements similar to Yodobashi’s. Even more exciting, are the unprecedented applications that are now within our reach. By my estimate, a cloud of approximately 1000 servers of 80-cores and 2 terabytes of memory each, can enable more than 1 billion people on the planet to interactively explore their energy consumption based on real-time information from their energy meters and appliances, and take control of their energy management. The management and optimization of their finances, healthcare, insurance, communications, entertainment and other activities, can similarly be made truly dynamic. Banks can manage risks in real-time, oil companies can better explore energy sources, mining vast amounts of data as needed. Airlines and heavy machinery makers can do predictive maintenance on their machines, and healthcare companies can analyze vast amounts of genome data in real time. One of our customers in Japan is working on using SAP HANA to analyze genome data for hundreds of patients each day, something that was impossible before SAP HANA. Another customer is using SAP HANA to determine optimal routes for taxicabs. The possibilities are endless. Just as the iPod put our entire music libraries in our pockets, SAP HANA, combined with mobility and cloud-based delivery, enables us to take our entire business with us in our pocket. Empowering us to take actions in real time, based on our instincts as well as our analysis. To re-think our solutions to solving existing problems — and to help businesses imagine and deliver solutions for previously unsolved problems. And it is this empowerment and renewal, driven by purposeful technologies, that continually brings us all forward. Dr. Vishal Sikka is a member of the Executive Board of SAP AG and heads the technology and innovation areas.
Chapter 1
SAP HANA Overview “Significant shifts in m arket share and fortunes occur not because compani es try to play the game better than the competition but because they change the rules of the gam e” — Constantinos Markides 1
industry has a certain set of “rules” that govern the way the companies in that industry operate. The rules might be adjusted from time to time as Every the industry matures, but the general rules stay basically the same — unless some massive disruption occurs that changes the rules or even the entire game. SAP HANA is one of those massively disruptive innovations for the enterprise IT industry. To understand this point, consider that you’re probably reading this book on an e-reader, which is a massively disruptive innovation for the positively ancient publishing industry. The book industry has operated under the same basic rules since Gutenberg mechanized the production of books in 1440. There were a few subsequent innovations within the industry, primarily in the distribution chain, but the basic processes of writing a book, printing it, and reading it remained largely unchanged for several hundred years. That is — until Amazon and Apple came along and digitized the production, distribution, and consumption of books. These companies are also starting to revolutionize the writing of books by providing new authoring tools that make the entire process digital and paper-free. This technology represents an overwhelming assault of disruptive innovation on a 500+ year-old industry in less than 5 years. Today, SAP HANA is disrupting the technology industry in much the same way that Amazon and Apple have disrupted the publishing industry. Before we discuss how this happens, we need to consider a few fundamental rules of that industry.
The IT Industry: A History of Technology Constraints Throughout the history of the IT industry, the capabilities of applications have always been constrained to a great degree by the capabilities of the hardware that they were designed to run on. This explains the “leapfrogging” behavior of software and hardware products, where a more capable version of an application is released shortly after a newer, more capable generation of hardware — processors, storage, memory, and so on — is released. For example, each version of Adobe Photoshop was designed to maximize the most current hardware resources available to achieve the optimal performance. Rendering a large image in Photoshop 10 years ago could take several hours on the most powerful PC. In contrast, the latest version, when run on current hardware, can perform the same task in just a couple of seconds, even on a low-end PC. Enterprise software has operated on a very similar model. In the early days of mainframe systems, all of the software — specifically, the applications, operating system, and database — was designed to maximize the hardware resources located inside the mainframe as a contained system. The transactional data from the application and the data used for reporting were physically stored in the same system. Consequently, you could either process transactions or process reports, but you couldn’t do both at the same time or you’d kill the system. Basically, the application could use whatever processing power was in the mainframe, and that was it. If you wanted more power, you had to buy a bigger mai nframe. The Database Problem: Bottlenecks
When SAP R/3 came out in 1992, it was designed to take advantage of a new hardware architecture — client-server — where the application could be run on multiple, relatively cheap application servers connected to a larger central database server. The major advantage of this architecture was that, as more users performed more activities on the system, you could just add a few additional application servers to scale out application performance. Unfortunately, the system still had a single database server, so transmitting data from that server to all the application servers and back again created a huge performance bottleneck. Eventually, the ever-increasing requests for data from so many application servers began to crush even the largest database servers. The problem wasn’t that the servers lacked sufficient processing power. Rather, the requests from the application servers got stuck in the same input/output (IO) bottleneck trying to get data in and out of the database. To address this problem, SAP engineered quite a few “innovative techniques” in their applications to minimize the number of times applications needed to access the database. Despite these innovations, however, each additional database operation continued to slow down the entire system. This bottleneck was even more pronounced when it came to reporting data. The transactional data — known as online transaction processing, or
. read a small quantity of data when the purchasing screen was started up, the user would input more data, the app would read a bit more data from the database, and so on, until the transaction was completed and the record was updated for the last time. Each transactional record by itself doesn’t contain very much data. When you have to run a report across every transaction in a process for several months, however, you start dealing with huge amounts of data that have to be pulled through a very slow “pipe” from the database to the application. To create reports, the system must read multiple tables in the database all at once and then sort the data into reports. This process requires the system to pull a massive amount of data from the database, which essentially prevents users from doing anything else in the system while it’s generating the report. To resolve this problem, companies began to build separate OLAP systems such as SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse to copy the transaction data over to a separate server and offload all that reporting activity onto a dedicated “reporting” system. This arrangement would free up resources for the transactional system to focus on proces sing transactions. Unfortunately, even though servers were getting faster and more powerful (and cheaper), the bottleneck associated with obtaining data from the disk wasn’t getting better; in fact, it was actually getting worse. As more processes in the company were being automated in the transactional system, it was producing more and more data, which would then get dumped into the reporting system. Because the reporting system contained more, broader data about the company’s operations, more people wanted to use the data, which in turn generated more requests for reports from the database under the reporting system. Of course, as the number of requests increased, the quantities of data that had to be pulled correspondingly increased. You can see how this vicious (or virtuous) cycle can spin out of control quickly. The Solution: In-Memory Architecture
This is the reality that SAP was seeing at their customers at the beginning of the 2000’s. SAP R/3 had been hugely successful, and customers were generating dramatically increasing quantities of data. SAP had also just released SAP NetWeaver 2, which added extensive internet and integration capabilities to its applications. SAP NetWeaver added many new users and disparate systems that talked to the applications in the SAP landscape. Again, the greater the number of users, the greater the number of application servers that flooded the database with requests. Similarly, as the amount of operational data in the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse database increased exponentially, so did the number of requests for reports. Looking forward, SAP could see this trend becoming even more widespread and the bottleneck of the database slowing things down more and more. SAP was concerned that customers who had invested massive amounts of time and money into acquiring and implementing these systems to make their businesses more productive and profitable would be unable to get maximum value from them. Fast forward a few years, and now the acquisitions of Business Objects and Sybase were generating another exponential increase in demands for data from both the transactional and analytic databases from increasing numbers of analytics users and mobile users. Both the volume of data and the volume of users requesting data were now growing thousands of times faster than the improvements in database I/O. Having become aware of this issue, in 2004 SAP initiated several projects to innovate the core architecture of their applications to eliminate this performance bottleneck. The objective was to enable their customers to leverage the full capabilities of their investment in SAP while avoiding the data latency issues. The timing couldn’t have been better. It was around this time that two other key factors were becoming more significant: (1) internet use and the proliferation of data from outside the enterprise, and (2) the regulatory pressures on corporations, generated by laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley, to be answerable for all of their financial transactions. These requirements increased the pressure on already stressed systems to analyze more data more quickly. The SAP projects resulted in the delivery of SAP HANA in 2011, the first step in the transition to a new in-memory architecture for enterprise applications and databases. SAP HANA flips the old model on its head and converts the database from the “boat anchor” that slows everything down into a “jet engine” that speeds up every aspect of the company’s operations.
SAP’s Early In-Memory Projects SAP has a surprisingly long history of developing in-memory technologies to accelerate its applications. Because disk I/O has been a performance bottleneck since the beginning of three-tier architecture, SAP has constantly searched for ways to avoid or minimize the performance penalty that customers pay when they pull large data sets from disk. So, SAP’s initial in-memory technologies were used for very specific applications that contained complex algorithms that needed a great deal of readily accessible data. The Beginnings: LiveCache and SAP BWA
When SAP introduced Advanced Planning Optimizer (APO) as part of its supply chain management application in the late 1990s, the logistics planning algorithms required a significant speed boost to overcome the disk I/O bottleneck. These algorithms — some of the most complex that SAP has ever written — needed to crunch massive amounts of product, production, and logistics data to produce an optimal supply chain plan. SAP solved this problem in 1999 by taking some of the capabilities of its open-source database, SAP MaxDB (called SAP DB at the time), and built them into a memory-resident cache system called SAP LiveCache. Basically, LiveCache keeps a persistent copy of all of the relevant application logic and master data needed in memory, thus eliminating the need to make multiple trips back and forth to the disk. LiveCache worked extremely well; in fact, it processed data 600 times faster than disk-based I/O. Within its narrow focus, it clearly demonstrated that in-memory caching could solve a major latency issue for SAP customers. In 2003, a team in SAP’s headquarters in Waldorf, Germany, began to productize a specialized search engine for SAP systems called TREX (Text Retrieval and information EXtraction). TREX approached enterprise data in much the same way that Google approaches internet data. That is, TREX scans the tables in a database and then creates an index of the information contained in the table. Because the index is a tiny fraction of the size of the actual data, the TREX team came up with the idea of putting the entire index in the RAM memory of the server to speed up searches of the index. When this technology became operational, their bosses asked them to apply the same technique to a much more imposing problem: the data from a SAP BW cube. Thus, Project Euclid was born. At that time, many of the larger SAP BW customers were having significant performance issues with reports that were running on large data cubes. Cubes are the basic mechanism by which SAP BW stores data in multidimensional structures. Running reports on very large cubes (>100GB) was taking several hours, sometimes even days. The SAP BW team had done just about everything possible in the SAP BW application to increase performance, but had run out of options in the application layer. The only remaining solution was to eliminate the bottleneck itself. In the best spirit of disruptive innovators, the TREX team devised a strategy to eliminate the database from the equation entirely by indexing the cubes and storing the indexes in high-speed RAM. Initial r lts for Euclid w ind-blowin : The new tech lo ld ex te ses for the ort the same data th ds of
times faster than the old system. Eventually, the team discovered how to package Euclid into a stand-alone server that would sit next to the existing SAP BW system and act as a non-disruptive “turbocharger” for a customer’s slow SAP BW reports. At the same time, SAP held some senior-level meetings with Intel to formulate a joint-engineering project to optimize Intel’s new dual-core chips to natively process the SAP operations in parallel, thereby increasing performance exponentially. Intel immediately sent a team to SAP headquarters to begin the optimization work. Since that time the two companies have continuously worked together to optimi ze every successi ve generation of chips. In 2005, SAP launched the product SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence Accelerator, or BIA. (The company subsequently changed the name to SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator, or BWA) BWA has since evolved into one of SAP’s best-selling products, with one of the highest customer satisfaction ratings. BWA solved a huge pain point for SAP customers. Even more importantly, however, it represented another successful use of in-memory. Along with LiveCache, the success of BWA proved to SAP and its customers that in-memory data processing just might be an architectural solution to database bottlenecks. The Next Step: The T racker Project
Once the results for BWA and LiveCache began to attract attention, SAP decided to take the next big step and determine whether it could run an entire database for an SAP system in memory. As we’ll see later, this undertaking is a lot more complicated than it sounds. Using memory as a cache to temporarily store data or storing indexes of data in memory were key innovations, but eliminating the disk completely from the architecture takes the concept to an entirely different level of complexity and introduces a great d eal of unknown technical issues i nto the landscape. Therefore, in 2005, SAP decided to build a skunkworks project to validate and test the idea. The result was the Tracker Project. Because the new SAP database was in an early experimental stage and the final product could seriously disrupt the market, the Tracker Project was strictly “Top Secret,” even to SAP employees. The Tracker team was composed of the TREX/BWA engineers, a few of the key architects from the SAP MaxDB open-source database team, the key engineers who built LiveCache, the SAP ERP performance optimization and benchmarking gurus, and several database experts from outside the company. Basically, the team was an all-star lineup of everyone inside and outside SAP who could contribute to this “ big hairy audacious goal” of building the first in-memory database prototype for SAP (the direct ancestor of SAP HANA). In the mid-1990s, several researchers at Stanford University had performed the first experiments to build an in-memory database for a project at HP Labs. Two of the Stanford researchers went on to found companies to commercialize their research. One product was a database query optimization tool known as Callixa, and the other was a native in-memory database called P*Time. In late 2005, SAP quietly acquired Callixa and P*time (as well as a couple of other specialist database companies), hired several of the most distinguished database geniuses on the planet, and put them to work with the Tracker team. The team completed the porting and verification of the in-memory database on a server with 64gb of RAM, which was the maximum supported memory at the time. In early 2006, less than four months after the start of the project, the Tracker team passed its primary performance and “reality check” goal: the SAP Standard Application Benchmark for 1000 user SD two-tier benchmark with more than 6000 SAPs, which essentially matched the performance of the two leading certified databases at the time. To put that in perspective, it took Microsoft several years of engineering to port Microsoft SQL to SAP and pass the benchmark the first time. Passing the benchmark in such a short time with a small team — in total secrecy — was a truly amazing feat. Suddenly, an entirely new world of possibi lities had opened up for SAP to fundamentally change the rules of the game for datab ase technology. Shortly after achieving this milestone, SAP began an academic research project to experiment with the inner workings of in-memory databases with faculty and students at the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam in Germany. The researchers examined the prototypes from the Tracker team — now called NewDB — and added some valuable external perspectives on how to mature the technology for enterprise applications.
However, passing a benchmark and running tests in the labs are far removed from the level of scalability and reliability needed for a database to become the mission-critical heart of a Fortune 50 company. So, for the next four years, SAP embarked on a “bullet-proofing” effort to evolve the “project” into a “product”. In May 2010, Hasso Plattner , SAP’s supervisory board chairman and chief software advisor, announced SAP’s vision for delivering an entirely inmemory database layer for its application portfolio. If you haven’t seen his keynote speech, it’s worth watching. If you saw it when he delivered it, it’s probably worth watching again. It’s Professor Plattner at his best. Different Game, Different Rules: SAP HANA
One year later, SAP announced the first live customers on SAP HANA and that SAP HANA was now generally available. SAP also introduced the first SAP applications that were being built natively on top of SAP HANA as an application platform. Not only did these revelations shock the technology world into the “new reality” of in-memory databases, but they initiated a massive shift for both SAP and its partners and customers into the world of “real-time business”. In November 2011, SAP achieved another milestone when it released SAP Business Warehouse 7.3. SAP had renovated this software so that it could run natively on top of SAP HANA. This development sent shockwaves throughout the data warehousing world because almost every SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse customer could immediately3 replace their old, disk-based database with SAP HANA. What made this new architecture especially attractive was the fact that SAP customers did not have to modify their current systems to accommodate it. To make the transition as painless as possible for its customers, SAP designed Business Warehouse 7.3 to be a non-disruptive innovation.
Innovation without Disruption Clay Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma was very popular reading among the Tracker team during the early days. In addition to all the technical challenges of building a completely new enterprise-scale database from scratch on a completely new hardware architecture, SAP also had to be very thoughtful about how its customers would eventually adopt such a fundamentally different core technology underneath the SAP Business Suite. To accomplish this difficult balancing act, SAP’s senior executives made the team’s primary objective the development of a disruptive technology innovation that could be introduced into SAP’s customers’ landscapes in a non-disruptive way. They realized that even the most incredible database would be essentially useless if SAP’s customers couldn’t make the business case to adopt it because it was too disruptive to their existing systems. The team spoke, under NDA, with the senior IT leadership of several of SAP’s largest customers to obtain insights concerning the types of concerns they would have about such a monumental technology shift at the bottom of their “stacks.” The customers provided some valuable guidelines for how SAP should engineer and introduce such a disruptive innovation into their mission-critical landscapes. Making that business case involved much more than just the eye-catching “speeds and feeds” from the raw technology. SAP’s customers would switch databases only if the new database was minimally disruptive to implement and extremely low risk to operate. In essence, SAP would have to build a hugely disruptive innovation to the database layer that could be adopted and implemented by its customers in a non-disruptive way at the business application layer.
The Business Impact of a New Architecture When viewed from a holistic perspective, the entire “stack” needed to run a Fortune 50 company is maddeningly complex. So, to engineer a new technology architecture for a company, you first have to focus on WHAT the entire system has to do for the business. At its core, the new SAP database architecture was created to help users run their business processes more effectively4. It had to enabled them to track their inventory more accurately, sell their products more effectively, manufacture their products more efficiently, and purchase materials economically. At the same time, however, it also had to reduce the complexity and costs of managing the landscape for the IT department. Today, every business process in a company has some amount of “latency” associated with it. For example, one public company might require 10 days to complete its quarterly closing process, while its primary competitor accomplishes this task in 5 days — even though both companies are using the same SAP software to manage the process. Why does it take one company twice as long as its competitor to complete the same process? What factors contribute to that additional “process latency”? The answers lie in the reality that the software is simply the enabler for the execution of the business pro cess. The people who have to work together to complete the process, both inside and outside the company, often have to do a lot of “waiting” both during and between the various process steps. Some of that waiting is due to human activities, such as lunch breaks or meetings. Much of it, however, occurs because people have to wait while their information systems process the relevant data. The old saying that “time is money” is still completely true, and “latency” is just a nice way of saying “money wasted while waiting.” As we discussed earlier, having to wait several minutes or several hours or even several days to obtain an answer from your SAP system i s a primary contributor to process latency. It also discourages people from using the software frequently or as it was intended. Slow-performing systems force people to take more time to complete their jobs, and they result in less effective use of all the system’s capabilities. Both of these factors introduce latency into process execution. Clearly, latency is a bad thing. Unfortunately, however, there’s an even darker side to slow systems. When businesspeople can’t use a system to get a quick response to their questions or get their job done when they need to, they invent workarounds to avoid the constraint. The effort and costs spent on “inventing” workarounds to the performance limitations of the system waste a substantial amount of institutional energy and creativeness that ideally should be channeled into business innovation. In addition, workarounds can seriously compromise data quality and integrity. As we have discussed, the major benefits of in-memory storage are that users no longer have to wait for the system, and the information they need to ke e intelli t decisions is inst tl ailabl t their fin erti Th ies that lo in st tin in “real
time.” Significantly, once you remove all of the latency from the systems, users can focus o n eliminating the latency in the other areas of the process. It’s like shining a spotlight on all the problem areas of the process now that the system latency is no longer clouding up business transparency.
The Nee d for Business Flexibility In addition to speeding up database I/O throughput and simplifying the enterprise system architecture, SAP also had to innovate in a third direction: business flexibility. Over the years, SAP had become adept at automating “standard” business processes for 24 different industries globally. Despite this progress, however, new processes were springing up too fast to count. Mobile devices, cloud applications, and big data scenarios were creating a whole new set of business possibilities for customers. SAP’s customers needed a huge amount of flexibility to modify, extend, and adapt their core business processes to reflect their rapidly changing business needs. In 2003, SAP released their service-oriented architecture, SAP NetWeaver, and began to renovate the entire portfolio of SAP apps to become extremely flexible and much easier to modify. However, none of that flexibility was going to benefit their customers if the applications and platform that managed those dynamic business processes were chained to a slow, inflexible, and expensive database. The only way out of this dilemma was for SAP to innovate around the database problem entirely. None of the existing database vendors had any incentive to change the status quo (see The Innovator’s Dilemma for all the reasons why), and SAP couldn’t afford to sit by and watch these problems continue to get worse for their customers. SAP needed to engineer a breakthrough innovation in in-memory databases to build the foundations for a future architecture that was faster, simpler, more flexible, and much cheaper to acquire and operate. It was one of those impossible challenges that engineers and business people secretly love to tackle, and it couldn’t have been more critical to SAP’s future success.
Faster, Better, Cheaper There’s another fundamental law of the technology industry: Faster, Better, Cheaper. That is, each new generation of product or technology has to be faster, better, and cheaper than the generation it is replacing, or customers won’t purchase it. Geoffrey Moore has some great thoughts on how gamechanging technologies “cross the chasm.” He maintains, among other things, that faster, better, and cheaper are fundamental characteristics that must be present for a successful product introduction. In-memory computing fits the faster, better, cheaper model perfectly. I/O is hundreds to thousands of times faster on RAM than on disks. There’s really no comparison in how rapidly you can get memory off a database in RAM than off a database on disk. In-memory databases are a better architecture due to their simplicity, tighter integration with the apps, hybrid row/column store, and ease of operations. Finally, when you compare the cost of an in-memory database to that of a disk-based database on the appropriate metric — cost per gigabyte per second — in-memory is actually cheaper. Also, when you compare the total cost of ownership (TCO) of in-memory databases, they’re even more economical to operate than traditional databases due to the reduction of superfluous layers and unnecessary tasks. But faster, better, cheaper is even more important than just the raw technology. If you really look at what the switch from an “old” platform to a “new” platform can do for overall usability of the solutions on top of the platform, there are some amazing possibilities. Take the ubiquitous iPod for example. When Apple introduced the iPod in 2001, it revolutionized the way that people listened to music, even though it wasn’t the first MP3 player on the market. The key innovation was that Apple was able to fit a tiny 1.8-inch hard drive into its small case so you could carry 5gb of music in your pocket, at a time when most other MP3 players could hold only ~64mb of music i n flash memory. (This is a classic illustration of “changing the rules of the game.”) I/O speed wasn’t a significant concern for playing MP3s, so the cost per megabyte per second calculation wasn’t terribly relevant. By that measure, 5gb of disk for roughly the same price as 64mb of RAM was a huge difference. It wasn’t significantly faster than its competitors, but it was so phenomenally better and cheaper per megabyte (even at $399) that it became a category killer. In hindsight, Apple had to make several architectural compromises to squeeze that hard drive into the iPod. First, the hard drive took up most of the case, leaving very little room for anything else. There was a tiny monochrome display, a clunky mechanical “click wheel” user interface, a fairly weak processor, and, most importantly, a disappointingly short battery life. The physics needed to spin a hard disk drained the battery very quickly. Despite these limitations, however, the iPod was still so much better than anything else out there it soon took over the market. Fast-forward six years, and Apple was selling millions of units of its most current version of the “classic” iPod, which contained 160gb of storage, 32 times more than the original 5gb model. Significantly, the new model sold at the same price as the original. In addition to the vastly expanded storage capacity, Apple had added a color screen and a pressure-sensitive “click wheel.” Otherwise, the newer model was similar to the original in most ways. By this time, however, the storage capacity of the hard drive was no longer such a big deal. Hard drives had become so enormous that nobody had enough music to fill them. In fact, in 2001 people had been thrilled with 5gb of storage, because they could download their entire CD collection onto the iPod. Meanwhile, Moore’s law had been in effect for four full cycles and 16gb of memory cost about the same as a 160gb hard drive. In 2007, Apple could build an iPod with 16gb of solid-state RAM storage — which was only one-tenth of the capacity of the current hard drive model — for the same price as the 2001 model. It was the shift to solid-state memory as the storage medium for iPods that really changed the game for Apple. Removing the hard drive and its spinning disks had a huge impact on Apple’s design parameters, for several reasons. First, it enabled the company to shrink the thickness and reduce the weight of the iPod, making it easier to carry and store. In addition, it created more room for a bigger motherboard and a larger display. In fact, Apple could now turn the entire front of the device into a display, which it redesigned as a touch-screen interface (hence the name iPod Touch). Inserting a bigger motherboard in turn allowed Apple to insert a larger, more powerful processor in the device. Most importantly, however, eliminating the physical hard drive more than doubled the battery life since there were no more me chanical disks to spin. These innovations essentially transformed a simple music player into a miniature computer that you could carry in your pocket. It had an operating system, long battery life, audio and video capabilities, and a sufficient amount of storage. Going even further, Apple could also build another model with nearly all of the same parts that could also make phone calls. Comparison of Apple iPod Models
Source: Apple Inc.
Once a large number of people began to carry a computer around in their pocket, it only made sense that developers would build new applications to exploit the capabilities of the new platform. Although Apple couldn’t have predicted the success of games like “Angry Birds,” they realized that innovation couldn’t be unleashed on their new platform until they removed the single biggest piece of the architecture that was imposing all the constraints. Ironically, it was the same piece of technology that made the original iPod so successful. Think about that for a second: Apple had to eliminate the key technology in the iPod that had made them so successful in order to move to the next level of success with the iPod Touch and the iPhone. Although this might seem like an obvious choice in retrospect, at the time it required a huge leap of faith to take. In essence, getting rid of the hard drive in the iPods was the most critical technology decision Apple made to deliver the iPod Touch, iPhone, and, eventually, the iPad. Most of the other pieces of technology in the architecture improved as expected over the years. But the real game changer was the switch from disk to memory. That single decision freed Apple to innovate without constraints and allowed them to change the rules of the game again, back to the memory-as-storage paradigm that the portable music player market had started with. SAP is convinced that SAP HANA represents a similar architectural shift for its application platform. Eliminating the disk-based database will provide future customers with a faster, better, and cheaper architecture. SAP also believes that this new architecture, like the solid-state memory in the iPod, will encourage the development of a new breed of business applications that are built natively to exploit this new platform. Note: as of early 2012, Apple still m akes and sells the “classic” iPod (160gb/$249), but it is a tiny fraction of their overall iPod sales. So, someb ody must be buying the “old” iPods and Apple must be maki ng some m oney off of them, but do you k now anyone who’s bought a hard-drive based iPod in the last five years? You’d have to really need all that storage to give up all the features of the iPod touch. SAP thinks that there will also be a small category of its customers who will continue to want the “old” architecture — so they’ll continue to support that option, but they’re predicting a similar adoption trend once the SAP Business Suite is supported on SAP HANA. At that point, you’ll need an overwhelmingly compelling business reason to forego all the goodness of the new architecture and renovated SAP apps on top of SAP HANA.
In-Memory Basics Thus far, we’ve focused on the transition to in-memory computing and its implications for IT. With this information as background, we next “dive into the deep end” of SAP HANA. Before we do so, however, here are a few basic concepts about in-memory computing that you’ll need to understand. Some of these concepts might be similar to what you already know about databases and server technology. There are also some cutting-edge concepts, however, that merit discussion. Storing data in memory isn’t a new concept. What is new is that now you can store your whole operational or analytic database entirely in RAM as the primary persistence layer 5. Historically database systems were designed to perform well on computer systems with limited RAM. As we have seen, in these systems slow disk I/O was the main bottleneck in data throughput. Today, multi-core CPUs — multiple CPUs located on one chip or in
one package — are standard, with fast communication between processor cores enabling parallel processing. Currently server processors have up to 64 cores, and 128 cores will soon be available. With the increasing number of cores, CPUs are able to process increased data volumes in parallel. Main memory is no longer a limited resource. In fact, modern servers can have 2TB of system memory, which allows them to hold complete databases in RAM. Significantly, this arrangement shifts the performance bottleneck from disk I/O to the data transfer between CPU cache and main memory (which is already blazing fast and getting faster). In a disk-based database architecture, there are several levels of caching and temporary storage to keep data closer to the application and avoid excessive numbers of round-trips to the database (which slows things down). The key difference with SAP HANA is that all of those caches and layers are eliminated because the entire physical database is literally sitting on the motherboard and is therefore in memory all the time. This arrangement dramatically simplifies the architecture. It is important to note that there are quite a few technical differences between a database that was designed to be stored on a disk versus one that was built to be entirely resident in memory. There’s a techie book6 on all those conceptual differences if you really want to get down into the details. What follows here is a brief summary of some of the key advantages of SAP HANA over its aging disk-based cousins. Pure In-Memory Database
With SAP HANA, all relevant data are available in main memory, which avoids the performance penalty of disk I/O completely. Either disk or solid-state drives are still required for permanent persistency in the event of a power failure or some other catastrophe. This doesn’t slow down performance, however, because the required backup operations to disk can take place asynchronously as a background task. Parallel Processing
Multiple CPUs can now process parallel requests in order to fully utilize the available computing resources. So, not only is there a bigger “pipe” between the processor and database, but this pipe can send a flood of data to hundreds of processors at the same time so that they can crunch more data without waiting for anything. Columnar and Row-Based Data Storage
Conceptually, a database table is a two-dimensional data structure with cells organized in rows and columns, just like a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Computer memory, in contrast, is organized as a linear structure. To store a table in linear memory, two options exist: row-based storage and column storage. A row-oriented storage system stores a table as a sequence of records, each of which contains the fields of one row. Conversely, in column storage the entries of a column are stored in contiguous memory locations. SAP HANA is a “hybrid” database that uses both methods simultaneously to provide an optimal balance between them. The SAP HANA database allows the application developer to specify whether a table is to be stored column-wise or row-wise. It also enables the developer to alter an existing table from columnar to row-based and vice versa. The decision to use columnar or row-based tables is typically a determined by how the data will be used and which method is the most efficient for that type of usage. Column-based tables have advantages in the following circumstances:
Calculations are typically executed on a single column or a few columns only. The table is searched based on values of a few columns. The table has a large number of columns. The table has a large number of rows, so that columnar operations are required (aggregate, scan, etc.). High compression rates can be achieved because the majority of the columns contain only few distinct values (compared to the number of rows). Row-based tables have advantages in the following circumstances:
The application needs to only process a single record at one time. (This applies to many selects and/or updates of single records.) The application typically needs to access a complete record (or row). The columns contain primarily distinct values so that the compression rate would be low. Neither aggregations nor fast searching is required. The table has a small number of rows (e. g., configuration tables). Compression
Because of the innovations in hybrid row/column storage in SAP HANA, companies can typically achieve between 5x and 10x compression ratios on the raw data. This means that 5TB of raw data can optimally fit onto an SAP HANA server that has 1TB of RAM. SAP typically recommends that companies double the estimated compressed table data to determine the amount of RAM needed in order to account for real-time calculations, swap space, OS and other associated programs beyond just the raw table data. Persistence Layer
The SAP HANA database persistence layer stores data in persistent disk volumes (either hard disk or solid-state drives). The persistence layer ensures that changes are durable and that the database can be restored to the most recent committed state after a restart. SAP HANA uses an advanced delta-insert approach for rapid backup and logging. If power is lost, the data in RAM is lost. However, because the persistence layer manages restore points and backup at such high speeds (from RAM to SSD) and recovery from disk to RAM is so much faster than from regular disk, you actually “lose” less data and recover much faster than in a traditional disk-based architecture.
SAP HANA Architectural Overvie w Now that we’ve discussed the key concepts underlying in-memory storage, we can focus more specifically on the SAP HANA architecture. As we noted earlier, conceptually SAP HANA is very similar to most databases you’re familiar with. Applications have to put data in and take data out of the database, data sources have to interface with it, and it has to store and manage data reliably. Despite these surface similarities, however, SAP HANA
is quite different “under the hood” than any database in the market. In fact, SAP HANA is much more than just a database. It includes many tools and capabi lities “in the box” that make it much more valuable and versatile than a regular database. In reality, it’s a full-featured database platform. In what ways is SAP HANA unique? First, it is delivered as a pre-configured, pre-installed appliance on certified hardware. This eliminates many of the typical activities and problems you find in regular databases. Second, it includes all of the standard application interfaces and libraries so that developers can immediately get to work using it, without re-learning any proprietary APIs.
SAP HANA in-mem ory appliance
Finally, SAP HANA comes with several ways to connect easily to nearly any source system in either real-time or near real-time. These features are designed to make SAP HANA as close to “plug-and-play” as it can be and to make it a non-disruptive addition to your existing landscape. We’ll spend a few moments here explaining these capabilities at a basic level. We’ll discuss them in much more technical detail in the SAP HANA Architecture chapter.
Programming Interfaces for SAP HANA SQL
SQL is the main interface for client applications. The SQL implementation of the SAP HANA database is based on SQL 92 entry-level features and core features of SQL 99. However, it offers several SQL extensions on top of this standard. These extensions are available for creating tables as both row-based and column-based tables and for conversion between the two formats. For most SQL statements it is i rrelevant whether the table is columnbased or row-based. However, there are some features — for example, time-based queries and column-store specific parameters — that are supported only for columnar tables. SQLScript
The SAP HANA database has its own scripting language, named SQLScript, that offers scripting capabilities that allow application-specific calculations to run inside the database. SQLScript is similar conceptually to “stored procedures,” but it contains several modern innovations that make it much more powerful and flexible. MDX Interface
, to connect a variety of analytics applications like SAP Business Objects products and clients such as Microsoft Excel.
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Engines The core of the SAP HANA database contains several engines that are used for specific tasks. The two primary engines are the planning engine and the calculation engine. Planning Engine
The SAP HANA database contains a component called the planning engine that allows financial planning applications to execute basic planning operations in the database layer. Calculation Engine
What truly makes SAP HANA unique is that, in addition to its being a standard SQL database, it also natively supports data calculation inside the database itself. By incorporating procedural language support — C++, Python, and ABAP — directly into the database kernel through a dedicated calculation engine, it can achieve exceptional performance because the data do not need to be moved out of the database, processed, and then written back in.
Libraries The technical details of communicating with the SAP HANA database are contained in a set of included client libraries for standard platforms and clients. The following client libraries are provided for accessing the SAP HANA database via SQL or MDX: JDBC driver for Java clients ODBC driver for Windows/Unix/Linux clients, especially for MS Office integration DBSL (Database Shared Library) for ABAP Business Function Library
SAP has leveraged its deep application knowledge from the ABAP stack to port specific functionality as infrastructure components within SAP HANA to be consumed by any application logic extension. Examples of common business functions are “currency conversion” and “calendar functionality.”
SAP HANA Studio The SAP HANA Studio is the primary interface for developers, administrators, and data modelers. It is based on the open-source Eclipse framework, and it consists of three perspectives: the administration console, the information modeler, and lifecycle management. The administration console of the studio allows system administrators to administer and monitor the database. It includes database status information as well as functions to start/stop the datab ase, create backups, perform a recovery, change the configuration, and so on. The information modeler is used for modeling data. It enables users to create new data models or modify existing ones. The lifecycle management perspective provides an automated SAP HANA service pack (SP) for updates using the SAP Software Update Manager for SAP HANA (SUM for SAP HANA). Data Modeling in SAP HANA
Business and IT users can either create on-the-fly non-materialized data views or build reusable ones on top of standard SQL tables via a very intuitive user interface, which utilizes SQLScript and stored procedures to perform business logic on the data models. Information models created in SAP HANA can be consumed directly by Business Objects BI clients or indirectly by using the Universe/Semantic Layer built on top of SAP HANA views. Information models in SAP HANA are a combination of attributes/dimensions and measures. SAP HANA provides three types of modeling views: 1. Attribute views are built on dimensions or subject areas used for business analysis. 2. Analytical views are multidimensional views or OLAP cubes, which enable users to analyze values from single-fact tables related to the dimensions in the attribute views. 3. Calculation views are used to create custom data sets to address complex business requirement using database tables, attribute views, and analytical views in on-the-fly calculations. In traditional databases, users experience bottlenecks when changing business requirements requires modifications to the existing data model, which required users to delete and re-load data into materialized views. In contrast, in SAP HANA, dynamic data modeling on the lowest granular level is loaded into the system. These raw data are constantly available in memory for analytical purposes, and they are not pre-loaded in cache, physical aggregate tables, index tables, or any other redundant data storage. Data Provisioning for SAP HANA
SAP HANA offers both real-time replication and near real-time/batch replication to move data from source systems to the SAP HANA database. Replication-based data provisioning like Sybase Replication Server or SAP SLT (System Landscape Transformation) provide near real-time synchronization of data sets between the source system and SAP HANA. After the initial replication of historical records, the changed data are pushed from the source to SAP HANA based on triggers such as table updates. SAP SLT can also be used to “direct write” data back to the source system in scenarios where “write back” or “round trip” synchronization to the SAP source system is needed. ETL-based data provisioning is primarily accomplished with SAP BusinessObjects Data Services (DS). DS loads snapshots of data periodically as a batch and is triggered from the target system. The type of data provisioning tool used is primarily determined by the business needs of the use case and the characteristics of the source system. Real-Time Replication Using SLT
SLT replicator provides near-real-time and scheduled data replication from SAP source systems to SAP HANA. It is based on SAP’s proven System Landscape Optimization (SLO) technology that has been used for many years for Near Zero Down Time upgrade and migration projects. Trigger-
. being database and OS agnostic, and it can parallelize database changes on multiple tables or by segmenting large table changes. SLT can be installed on an existing SAP source system or as an additional lightweight SAP system side-by-side with the source system. Real-Time Replication with Direct Write/Write-back
SAP HANA also supports real-time replication with direct write using database shared library (DBSL) connection. Using DBSL, the SAP HANA database can be connected as a secondary database to an SAP ECC system and provide accelerated data processing for existing SAP applications. Applications can use the DBSL on the application server layer to simultaneously write to traditional databases and the SAP HANA database. Extraction (ETL) / Periodic Load
The ETL-based data load scenario uses SAP BusinessObjects DataServices to load the relevant business data from virtually any source system (SAP and non-SAP) to the SAP HANA database. SAP BusinessObjects Data Services is a proven ETL tool that supports broad connectivity to databases, applications, legacy, file formats, and unstructured data. It provides the modeling environment to model data flows from one or more source systems along with transformations and data cleansing. SAP H ANA Database Administration
The SAP HANA Studio Administration Console provides an all-in-one environment for System Monitoring, Back-up & Recovery, and User provisioning. System Monitoring
The Administration console provides tools to monitor the system’s status, its services, and the consumption of its resources. Administrators are notified by an alert mechanism when critical situations arise. Analytics and statistics on historical monitoring data are also provided to enable efficient data center operations and for planning future resource allocations. Backup & Recovery
The Administration console in the SAP HANA Studio supports the following scenarios: Recovery to the last data backup Recovery to both the last and previous data backups Recovery to last state before the crash Point-in-time recovery In the event of disaster scenarios such as fires, power outages, earthquakes or hardware failures, SAP HANA supports Hot Standby using synchronous mirroring with the redundant data center concept — including a redundant SAP HANA system — in addition to Cold Standby using a standby system within one SAP HANA landscape, where the failover is triggered automatically. User Provisioning
SAP HANA supports user provisioning with authentication, role-based security and analysis authorization using analytic privileges. Analytical privileges provide security to the analytical objects based on a set of attribute values. These values can be applied to a set of users by assigning them to user/role. SAP HANA Hardware
SAP HANA is delivered as a flexible, multipurpose appliance that combines SAP software components optimized on hardware provided by SAP’s leading hardware partners such as Cisco, Dell, IBM, HP, Hitachi, NEC, and Fujitsu, using the latest Intel Xeon E7 processors. SAP HANA servers are sold in “t-shirt” sizes ranging from Extra-Small (128GB RAM) all the way up to Extra Large (>2TB RAM). Because RAM is the key technology for SAP HANA, SAP uses the amount of RAM to determine the server’s t-shirt size as well as its price. SAP’s underlying philosophy is “the more processors (cores), the better,” so it does not impose a per-processor charge for SAP HANA. With the current certified Scale-Out options from SAP HANA hardware providers, companies can deploy up to 16 Extra Large server nodes into on logical database instance, which equates to a maximum of 32TB of RAM and 128 CPUs with 1280 total cores. SAP is currently testing a 60 node SAP HANA instance in the labs. The hardware vendor provides factory pre-installation for the hardware, the OS, and the SAP software. It may also add specific best-practices and configuration. The vendor finalizes the installation with on-site setup and configuration of the SAP HANA components, including deployment in the customer data center, connectivity to the network, Solution Manager setup, SAP router connectivity, and SSL support. The customer then establishes connectivity to the source systems and clients, including the deployment of additional replication components on the source system(s) and, potentially, the installation and configuration of SAP BusinessObjects business analytics client components. Although the term “appliance” suggests a “black box” that plugs into an outlet, in reality installing SAP HANA requires on-site activities and coordination on a high technical level. The appliance approach for SAP HANA systems reduces the implementation and maintenance effort significantly, but it does not eliminate it completely.
SAP HANA Use Cases Because SAP HANA is both a database (in the traditional sense) and a database platform (in the modern sense), it can be used in multiple scenarios and deployed in several ways. SAP HANA performs equally well for analytic and transactional applications. Due to its hybrid table structure, however, it really shines in scenarios that involve both types of data. It’s important to remember that SAP has developed SAP HANA to be a non-disruptive addition to existing landscapes. With this point in mind, we’ll discuss the key use cases that are most typical for SAP HANA deployments today, and we’ll consider some potential future scenarios. In its current form, SAP HANA can be used for four basic types of use case: agile data mart, SAP Business Suite accelerator, a primary database for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, and a development platform for new applications. As SAP HANA matures and SAP
, provides supported natively on SAP HANA as a primary database, as well as many more new “native-HANA” applications. Agile Data Mart
The earliest scenarios where SAP HANA has been deployed in production are as a stand-alone data mart for a specific use case. In this scenario, SAP HANA acts as the central hub to collect data from a few SAP and non-SAP source systems and then display some fairly simple and focused analytics in a single-purpose dashboard for users. This use case has the advantages of (1) being completely non-disruptive to the existing landscape and (2) providing an immediate, focused solution to an urgent business analytics problem. These projects are also typically completed very quickly, sometimes in just a few weeks, because the business problem is well known and the relevant data and source systems are easily identified. SAP HANA is set up as a stand-alone system in the landscape, which is then connected to the source systems and displayed to a small number of users in a simple Web-based or mobile user interface. This process involves zero disruption to the existing landscape, and companies get instant value because they can now do things that were impossible before they acquired SAP HANA. Additionally, the development cycles for these use cases are typically very short, because most of these scenarios use a standard SAP BusinessObjects front end with self-service analytics or Microsoft Excel. We label these systems “agile data marts” because they perform a few of the same functions as a tradi tional data mart — ETL, data modeling, analytic front end — but they are very fast to set up and flexible to use. The key advantage of SAP HANA for the agile data mart scenarios is that these scenarios were either completely impossible to build in a traditional database architecture or they were so cost prohibitive that companies could not justify building them. The scenarios might be straightforward, but the deficiencies of the “old” database world made them “unfixable.” You can access the videos listed below to listen to a few highly satisfied customers talking enthusiastically about their agile data mart scenarios with SAP HANA. Nongfu Spring Medtronic
SAP provides a special licensing bundle to build an agile data mart use case with SAP HANA that includes the extractors and connectors needed to obtain data from source systems and the front-end tools needed to build analytical applications on top of the data. SAP Business Suite Accelerator
The second major scenario where SAP HANA is being used is to accelerate transactions and reports inside the SAP Business Suite. Again, SAP HANA is being set up as a stand-alone system in the landscape, side-by-side with the database under the SAP Business Suite applications. In this scenario, however, SAP HANA is being used to “off load” some of the transactions or reports that typically take a long time (hours or days) to run, but it is not being used as the primary database under the application. We explained earlier that certain transactions or reports inside the SAP Business Suite can be very slow, due primarily to the slow I/O of the diskbased database underneath the system and the huge requests for data generated by these transactions and reports. Budgeting and planning transactions in SAP require the system to call data from many different tables in order to run its calculations and present a result. Reports are also very data-intensive, involving vast amounts of data contained in multiple tables. For both transactions and reports, then, the application must request the data from the database, load it into a buffer table in the SAP application server, run the algorithm or calculation, and then display the results. Sometimes, that completes the process. Other times, however, the user needs to make some adjustments to the results and then save the changes back to the database. Quite often, this process is iterative, meaning that the user must run the report or transaction, review the results, make some changes, and then run the report or transaction again to reflect the changes. Imagine a scenario where every time the transaction or report runs, it takes one hour to finish (from when you press “Enter” until the results are displayed on the screen). What if it took several hours or even a day or two to run that transaction or report? Clearly, system latency can seriously slow down the entire company. Eliminating System Latency: The Case of Hilti
To illustrate severe system latency, let’s consider the case of Hilti, the global construction tools manufacturer. Hilti used to generate a list of 9 million customers from 53 million database records in its SAP ERP system in about three hours . A salesperson used to hit “Enter” and then return three hours later to obtain the results. Significantly, 99% of the time the system took to generate that list came from simply retrieving the records off the diskbased database. Once the data were conveyed to the SAP application, the algorithm only took a few fractions of a second to calculate. This major — and unnecessary — delay was the epitome of “latency.” To eliminate this latency problem, Hilti set up an SAP HANA system next to their production SAP ERP system and then copied the relevant tables into SAP HANA. The results? Hilti can now run the exact same report in about three seconds. In addition, installing SAP HANA was totally nondisruptive. It required no changes to the algorithm, no changes to the production database, and no changes to the user interface. In fact, the users didn’t even realize there had been any change to the system until they ran the report for the first time. They expected the process to take several hours — as always — so they got up from their desks to do something else. To their complete surprise, the completed report appeared on their screen before they could get out of their chairs. Watch Hilti’s SAP HANA story here. Technically, there is very little that needs to be done to accelerate a few problematic transactions or reports in an SAP Business Suite application. We’ll discuss this topic that in detail in the chapter on the Accelerated SAP Business Suite. In summary, SAP has already delivered the content for most of the truly problematic transactions and reports as part of the latest service packs for the SAP Business Suite — for free. Once the relevant tables have been replicated to the SAP HANA system, there is a quick change in the configuration screen to redirect the transaction to read from the SAP HANA database instead of the primary database — and that’s about it. Users log in as they normally do, execute the transaction or report, and the results come back incredibly fast. SAP has also set up special fixed-price, fixed-scope SAP rapid deployment solutions (RDS) to assist customers in the rapid implementation of these “accelerated” transactions and reports. Accelerated SAP ER P Transactions and Re ports
You can expect to see many more “problem” transactions and reports generated at previously unimaginable speeds as SAP introduces enhancement
. Sales Reporting
Quickly identify top customers and products by channel — with real-time sales reporting. Improve order fulfillment rates and accelerate key sales processes at the same time, with instant analysis of your credit memo and billing list. Financial Reporting
Obtain immediate insights across your business — into revenue, customers, accounts payable and receivable, open and overdue items, top general ledger transaction, and days sales outstanding (DSO). Make the right financial decisions, armed with real-time information. Shipping Reporting
Rely on real-time shipping reporting for complete stock overview analysis. You can better plan and monitor outbound delivery — and assess and optimize stock levels — with accurate information at your fingertips. Purchasing Reporting
Gain timely insights into purchase orders, vendors, and the movement of goods — with real-time purchasing reporting. Make better purchasing decisions, based on a complete analysis of your order history. Master Data Reporting
Obtain real-time reporting on your main master data — i ncluding customer, vendor, and material lists — for improved productivity and accuracy. SAP Solutions for Accelerated Applications SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 10.0 Powere d by SAP HANA
The power of SAP HANA dramatically enhances unified planning, budgeting, forecasting and consolidation processes. Powered by SAP HANA, SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 10.0, version for SAP NetWeaver aims to increase agility by helping enterprises harness big data to plan better and act faster with better insight into all relevant information and rapid write-back. The application is planned to be the first enterprise performance management (EPM) application to support the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse component, powered by SAP HANA announced last year. SAP intends to allow customers running the application that have invested i n SAP HANA to leverage the power of inmemory computing technology to boost performance by accelerating planning and consolidation processing. SAP CO-PA Acceler ator
SAP CO-PA Accelerator dramatically improves the speed and depth of working with massive volumes of financial data in ERP for faster and more efficient profitability cycles. The solution helps finance departments to perform real-time profitability reporting on large scale data volumes and to conduct instant, on-the-fly analysis at any level of granularity, aggregation, and dimension. Furthermore, finance teams can run cost allocations at significantly faster processing time and be empowered with easy, self-service access to trusted profitability information. This solution can also be implemented alongside the wider SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Performance Management solutions portfolio to help organizations create a complete picture of their cost and profit drivers. You can try the solution on your own with the SAP CO-PA Accelerator TestDrive and visit the website to discover how organizations are generating significant business value with the solution. SAP Finance and Controlling Acceler ator
SAP Finance and Controlling Accelerator supports finance departments with instant access to vast amounts of ledger, cost and material ledger data in ERP as well as easy exploration of trusted and detailed data. The solution offers four implementation scenarios — Financial Accounting — Controlling — Material Ledger — and Production Cost Analysis, which can be implemented individually or in any combination. The power of SAP HANA combined with SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) empowers financial professionals to perform faster reporting and analyses, accelerate period-end closing, and make smarter decisions.
SAP Sales Pipeline Analysis
With SAP Sales Pipeline Analysis powered by SAP HANA, sales departments can get real-time insight into massive volumes of pipeline data in CRM while performing on the fly calculations and in-depth analysis on any business dimension. Sales managers can now leverage the power of SAP HANA combined with SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for complete and instant visibility of accurate and consolidated pipeline data. They can react more quickly to changing sales conditions with real-time information, and accelerate deals through the pipeline with powerful and user-driven analytics. As a result, best-run businesses can unlock hidden revenue opportunities as well as significantly increase profits and sales effectiveness.
SAP Customer Segmentation Accelerator
The SAP Customer Segmentation Accelerator helps marketing departments build highly specific segmentations on high volumes of customer data and at unparalleled speed. Marketers can now work with large amounts of granular data to better understand customer demands, behaviors and preferences — targeting the precise audience with the right offers across every customer segments, tactics and channels. The power of SAP HANA combined with SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) empowers marketers to maximize profits with highly tailored campaigns, dramatically reduce the cost of marketing by targeting more easily high margin customers, and react quicker to optimize campaigns and tactics. You can view a demonstration of the solution and discover how organizations like yours are generating significant business value by visiting this website.
SAP HANA Rapid D eployment Solutions
A great majority of these solutions powered by SAP HANA can be deployed as rapid-deployment solutions in order to ensure a quick time to value. The rapid deployment solutions streamline the implementation process bringing together software, best practices, and services ensuring maximum predictability with fixed cost and scope editions. SAP Rapid Deployment solutions leverage an innovative delivery model to accelerate the implementation times and lower risk. Implementation is supported by a standardized methodology, accelerators developed uniquely for each offering, and predefined best practices, meeting typical business requirements to address the customer’s immediate needs. Even as customers benefit from prebuilt functionality, these solutions provide a platform designed to evolve and extend as the customer’s business grows. SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions are available through SAP as well as SAP partners by traditional licensing or subscription pricing, transparency of price and scope eliminate project risks for companies. A good example is the SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for operational reporting with SAP HANA that can help you quickly generate insightful reports — from sales to financials to shippi ng — on high volumes of ERP data. A second example is SAP rapid-deployment solution for sales pipeline analysis with SAP HANA that helps you to analyze massive amounts of pipeline data in CRM. You can vi ew a demonstration of the sol ution here. Here are a few of the SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions that are available to enable the accelerated SAP applications: SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for accelerated finance and controlling with SAP HANA Gain access to large volumes of secure and detailed data from cost and material ledgers — quickly and easily. By running SAP HANA, you can improve decision making through accelerated reporting, analyses, and period-end closings. SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for operational reporting with SAP HANA Quickly and affordably generate insightful reports from sales to shipping — in real time — using our operational reporting solution with SAP HANA. Rely on in-memory technology to process high volumes of data quickly, and get ready to transform decision-making business-wide. SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for profitability analysis with SAP HANA Analyze massive amounts of profitability data in enterprise resource planning (ERP) (CO-PA) faster than ever before. Our ERP profitability analysis solution with SAP HANA can help you perform real-time reporting and conduct instant, on-the-fly analysis — for more profitable decision making across your enterprise. SAP rapid-deployment solution for customer segmentation with SAP HANA SAP HANA combined with SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can help you analyze and segment massi ve amounts of customer data in real time. You can target the preci se audience with the right offers across customer segments, tactics, and channels. SAP rapid-deployment solution for sales pipeline analysis with SAP HANA Gain instant insight into massive volumes of sales pipeline data while performing on-the-fly calculations and in-depth analysis on any business dimension. You can also try out a few of the current accelerated applications running LIVE: http://hanauseast.testdrivesap.com/copa. We’ll go into much more detail on the applications and RDS packages in the Accelerated SAP Business Suite chapter. SAP offers a specific licensing bundle to utilize SAP HANA for this use case that includes additional replication tools needed for the connections to the SAP source system. SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Powered by SAP HANA
Possibly the “killer” use case for SAP HANA in 2012 is SAP BW 7.3 on SAP HANA. In this scenario, companies replace the entire database under their SAP BW 7.3 system with SAP HANA. They simply swap out whatever disk-based database their system is currently running on with SAP HANA — in just a few weeks.7 Recall from our earlier discussion of early SAP in-memory projects that SAP BW was the first SAP application that was renovated and updated to natively run on SAP HANA as its primary run-time database. Most of these renovations were necessary to more closely tie the SAP BW application to the SAP HANA database. In a disk-based architecture, SAP BW is separated from the database by an abstraction layer, essentially making it impossible for the application to “see” anything in the database other than bare tables. Once the abstraction layer is removed, the SAP BW application
cannot only “see” everything in the database, but the entire database is designed around the needs of that specific application. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for SAP customers. With SAP HANA, SAP BW now generates turbo-charged query responses natively, without the need for any side-car accelerators or crazy multilayered third-party architectures. Because the entire da tabase under the SAP BW system physically sits i n memory, every activity — not just queries — is executed orders of magnitude faster. SAP released the 7.3 version of SAP BW in general availability in early 2011 and then released the SAP HANA-enabled version into general availability in April 2012. All of the SAP HANA-specific enhancements were bundled into the SPS05 update, and customers who had already upgraded to 7.3 could install the service pack and migrate to SAP HANA in a matter of days (seriously). Red Bull was the first live customer of SAP BW on SAP HANA. They told the world about their amazing 10-DAY project to get up and running at the Sapphire Now 2011 conference in Madrid, Spain. The whole effort was incredibly non-disruptive. SAP is seeing similar results with the other customers in the ramp-up project. All of the changes on the SAP BW side are delivered “under the hood” in the service pack, and the database migration can be performed without any changes to the SAP BW application. All of the customer’s content and configuration are completely unchanged. Have a look at the end-to-end migration guide for a great overview of the SAP BW database migration process. You should also read a great blog post by John Appleby, a consultant who performed one of the first SAP BW on SAP HANA migrations. The speed and flexibility acquired by replacing the old database with SAP HANA reflect two fundamental benefits of keeping the entire database in memory: (1) This architecture eliminates the need to send huge amounts of data between application and DB servers, and (2) it allows users to execute performance-critical operations directly on the data in the database itself. Basically, running SAP BW on SAP HANA completely eliminates nearly every one of the nasty things that historically slowed down the system, from both a user perspective and an administration perspective. We’ll explore all of the technical enhancements in the SAP BW on SAP HANA chapter. SAP offers a specific “run-time only” license option to utilize SAP HANA as the primary persistence layer for SAP BW. If you are already an SAP BW customer, the company offers several options for license credits based on previous SAP BW and BWA licensing. Consult your SAP account executive for the details. SAP has also set up a special migration fund to provide professional services credits to migrate to SAP BW on SAP HANA. SAP HANA as an Application Development Platform
Probably the most wide-open innovation opportunity for SAP HANA is as an application platform. If the speed and simplification that were achieved by porting SAP BW are any indication, users can realize an unbelievable amount of value not only by renovating existing applications (SAP and non-SAP) to run natively on SAP HANA, but by also building entirely new applications that are designed from scratch to maximize SAP HANA’s powerful capabilities. The performance limitations of traditional databases and processing power have often led organizations to compromise on how to deploy business processes on their enterprise platforms. Now, these organizations can choose to liberate themselves from these constraints and optimize business processes in ways that are more natural to the way their employees actually perform their work. This i s where SAP sees a clear parallel to the Apple App Store evolution. When Apple first released the App Store, most of the first apps available were “mobile-ized” versions of desktop or Web apps (email, browser, etc.). However, once developers considered the possibilities of combining the new capabilities of the device and writing native applications for the iPhone/iPod Touch (Angry Birds, Foursquare), innovation exploded. There are three basic types of applications being built on SAP HANA today: New apps built by SAP, New and renovated apps built by partners such as independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs), Custom apps built by companies for internal use. SAP brands applications that leverage SAP HANA as a database as “Powered by SAP HANA.” Partners whose applications have been certified by SAP can also add the “Powered by SAP HANA” brand to their solution name. SAP-built Applications for SAP HANA
SAP is delivering a new class of solutions on top of the SAP HANA platform that provide real-time insights on big data and state-of-the-art analysis capabilities. These innovative solutions can empower organizations to transform the way they run their businesses by making smarter and faster decisions, responding more quickly to events, unlocking new opportunities, and even inventing new data-driven business models and processes that were simply not possible with disk-based databases. Below are a few examples of native-SAP HANA applications. We’ll consider them in greater detail in the SAP HANA Applications chapter. SAP BusinessObjects Sale s Analysis for Reta il powered by SAP HANA
This solution provides retailers with real-time access to critical information and allows nearly real-time interactive analysis, which is not possible with traditional database technology. It offers prebuilt data models, key performance indicators (KPIs), role-specific dashboards and customized reports to provide retailers with a deeper understanding of all factors influencing the merchandising life cycle. SAP BusinessObjects Sales Analysis for Retail aims at providing the integration needed for improved scalability and performance for retailers operating in separate sales, inventory and promotions systems. The new service provides Point-of-Sale (POS) analysis allow retailers to assess performance and generate quick responses through the use of prebuilt dashboards, interactive reports and more than 70 KPIs and inventory management to provide retailers with the ability to identify critical stock and margin issues through close inventory alignment. SAP Smart Mete r Analytics
SAP Smart Meter Analytics is a “native-HANA” application that was designed for utility companies facing an exponential increase in data volume driven by their deployment of smart meters. This new application enables utility companies to turn massive volumes of smart meter data into powerful insights and transform how they engage customers and run their businesses. With SAP Smart Meter Analytics, utility companies can: Instantly aggregate time of use blocks and total consumption profiles to analyze their customers’ energy usage by what neighborhood they are in, the size of their homes or businesses, building type, and by any other dimension and at any level of granularity Segment customers with precision based on energy consumption patterns that are automatically generated by identifying customers that have similar energy usage behavior
Provide energy efficiency benchmarking based on statistical analysis so that utility companies can help their customers understand where they stand compared to their peers and how they can improve their energy efficiency Empower customers with direct access to energy usage insights via web portals and mobile devices connected to SAP Smart Meter Analytics via web services These capabilities delivered by SAP Smart Meter Analytics enable utility companies to increase adoption of service options such as demand response programs, launch targeted energy efficiency programs, improve fraud detection capabilities, and develop new tariffs and more accurate load forecasts.
SAP Sales & Opera tions Planning
SAP Sales & Operations Planning is a next generation planning application that is powered by SAP HANA and delivered in the cloud. The solution enables: Planning and real-time analysis with a unified model of demand, supply chain, and financial data at any level of granularity and dimension Rapid, interactive simulation and scenario analysis, using the full S&OP data model to support demand-supply balancing decisions Embedded, context-aware social collaboration enables rapid planning and decision-making across the organization These capabilities enable companies to align demand and supply profitably, reduce supply chain costs, and drive revenue growth.
SAP Supplier InfoNet
SAP Supplier InfoNet is a cloud-based solution, powered by SAP HANA, that enables companies to: Minimize supply chain disruption by proactively monitoring and predicting real-time supply risks across a multi-tier supplier network Drive stronger supplier performance by benchmarking supplier performance for your company against others in the business network and identifying significant shifts and trends in supplier performance using leading-edge machine learning and statistical analysis Manage your supply base by aggregating and transforming supplier data to deliver instant insights into the operational health of the supply base. Recalls Plus
Recalls Plus is SAP’s first consumer mobile app that enables parents to proactively monitor recalls of their kids’ strollers, cribs, toys, and other items for greater safety and peace of mind. Features of the app include: Search recall history by brand or category Create a personal watch list of items like car seats, cribs, strollers and so on Track allergen related recalls Share relevant recalls with others Read and monitor recalls from all relevant US government agencies: CPSC, NHTSA, FDA and USDA Recalls Plus is available for free and can be accessed via an iPhone app or a Facebook app: iPhone app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/recalls-plus/id499200328 Facebook app: https://apps.facebook.com/recallsplus
Partner-built Partner-bui lt Applications Applications for SAP HANA
The SAP partner ecosystem provides thousands of SAP-certified software solutions that plug into SAP’s applications to provide a variety of valueadded extensions and process enhancements. From that perspective, anything that speeds up an SAP system will also have a positive impact on any partner solutions that are integrated with that system. There are also numerous SAP partner solutions that need to “turbocharge” themselves to increase their own performance — and to keep kee p up with the turbocharged turbocharged SAP S AP systems coming co ming on top of SAP S AP HANA in the future. future. Regardless of the programming language these partner apps are written in, they all can be ported over to SAP HANA in a fairly straightforward way. However, just as SAP is renovating its existing applications, partners too can approach re-platforming as an opportunity to rethink some of the design parameters that they employed in the original solution design and to rebuild their apps to take advantage of SAP HANA’s many benefits natively. Oversight Systems is one of the first ISVs to renovate their SAP-certified solution along these lines. Oversight Systems provides solutions that continuously monitor user activities — in real-time — inside SAP systems to detect policy violations and potentially fraudulent transactions, such as travel and expenses, accounting and reporting, reporti ng, and HR and payroll. Their Their solution conducts complex, on-the-fly on-the-fly calculations that demand a great grea t deal of o f I/O performance from databases. databas es. Therefore, the addition additio n of SAP HANA underneath underneath their their solution s olution makes perfect sense. s ense. Custom Applications Applications for SAP S AP HANA
As stated earlier, SAP HANA is a full-blown full-blown,, do-just-abou do-just-about-an t-anyt ythin hing-y g-youou-wan wantt application platform. platform. ItIt speaks pure SQL and it includes includes all of the most common APIs, so you can literally write any type of application you want on top of it. There are a few rules and “guide rails” that are designed to keep things from going wrong, but the the sky truly is the limit limi t when it comes to i magining what to build with SAP HANA. Although Although SAP HANA is valuable valuable for all types of activities, it “shines” particularl particularly y well in a few unique unique situations. situations. For example, if you’re building building an enterprise-scale application for a business scenario that (1) needs to search or aggregate huge volumes of data, (2) requires detailed/granular data analysis and/or complex algorithmic or statistical calculations, or (3) suffers from latency between transactional recording and reporting, then SAP HANA is a great choice. That’s not to say that SAP HANA can’t run your “standard” applications — it certainly can do that (really fast). Nevertheless, the most exciting use cases SAP is seeing for SAP HANA as the foundation of custom apps are situations where a company has an urgent business need that is literally impossible to automate today due to the limitations of traditional databases or the lack of a supercomputer. If you’re a business owner who has a killer idea that fits the above description, then SAP HANA could be the solution that makes the impossible, possible. This is where the “Angry Birds” analogy really starts to make sense. Once the SAP ecosystem of ISVs, SAP partners, and SAP customers starts to unleash their innovation on top of SAP HANA, there literally is no limit to the amazing and game-changing applications they can build. It is incredibly important for SAP to renovate its portfolio and build amazing new applications to exploit the vast potential of SAP HANA. It is even more important, however, for the SAP ecosystem to do this, because there are millions of unrealized business ideas in their companies that SAP HANA can bring to life.
SAP HANA Roadmap The The future future roadmap for SAP HANA is actually very simple: Continue to make SA P HANA faster, better, b etter, cheaper — plus BIGGER and BROADER. Moore’s law doesn’t look as though it’s going to be slowing down anytime soon. It is likely, then, that we’re only a few years away from having more than 1000 cores and 10TB of RAM on a single “medium” SAP HANA server. With that much processing power and high-speed RAM available, there really are no limits to how fast SAP can speed up its own apps and literally any other app on the planet. SAP will continue co-innovating with Intel and other hardware partners to ensure that SAP HANA is continuously updated and optimized to take advantage of the latest and greatest technology
a vances ances o ecome even even as er an s o ay. ay. Although Although the the speed spee d boost generated generated by the hardware hardware is i s exciting, it is only only half half of the equation. Renovat Renovating ing applications to take advantage advantage of o f the ever-increasing horsepower is also critical. There’s a great deal of value that can be achieved by doing things “better” in the applications. Renovating and re-imagining how applications work and how they deal with data in the “no constraints” paradigm represents a fundamental philosophical shift for application developers. There are enormous opportunities to streamline, optimize, and simplify application architectures by adding SAP HANA as the database engine underneath them. SAP will invest an enormous amount of resources to extend SAP HANA’s capabilities as an application platform for both its own applications and non-SAP applications. This investment will result in an increasingly rich and robust set of developer tools to renovate and re-imagine any application and to build amazing new applications. This opportunity for optimization and simplification not only makes things even faster than just the hardware speed boost, it also results in significantly lower TCO for companies. SAP HANA can have a massive impact on reducing TCO and improving business value. “Cheaper” isn’t achieved only through industry-standard processors, RAM, and servers. Cheaper is a holistic mindset that starts from application design and then progresses through user efficiency all the way to administration and operations. SAP will continue to invest heavily in many areas to make SAP HANA the cheapest and most efficient database to operate in production environments. These efforts include innovating in new landscape configurations such as native cloud deployments of SAP HANA. Significantly, however, SAP isn’t satisfied to “only” be the fastest, best, and cheapest database on the planet. SAP’s goals also include enabling the BIGGEST data scenarios by offering integrated solutions with Sybase “Big Data” products and open-source projects like Hadoop. In addition, with a robust ecosystem of ISVs, system integrators, and SAP customers building their innovative applications on SAP HANA, SAP intends to become the BROADEST database platform for new applications. Just as Apple provided the platform for App Store developers, SAP will provide SAP HANA as a platform for thousands thousands of amazing new enterprise applications applic ations for the ecosystem. ecos ystem. SAP customers need to understand that SAP HANA not only is the engine that powers the current generation of SAP applications, but it will be the growth engine for all kinds of amazing NEW SAP apps. Over the next few years, SAP HANA will become the primary database for EVERY enterprise application in the SAP portfolio. That’s true for standard, on-premise applications like the SAP Business Suite; SME solutions like SAP Business One, SAP Business ByDesign, and SAP All-in-One; and the emerging portfolio of cloud/on-demand solutions. In poker terms, SAP is going “all in” with SAP HANA. SAP has made a passionate commitment to innovate for the future of its ecosystem, and the benefits of this shift for SAP’s customers and partners are too overwhelming overwhelming for the company compa ny to do anything anything less. SAP HANA will be the heart and soul of SAP’s “real-time” design philosophy to renovate all existing applications and build amazing new applications. The renovation work is moving very quickly inside SAP, so much so that it has surpassed even the most optimistic timelines. The SAP BW renovation and porting to SAP HANA was the first major step towards a completely renovated SAP Business Suite. The next major step will be for SAP to complete the renovation and porting of its flagship application, SAP ERP, to run natively on SAP HANA. The remaining applications in the SAP Business Suite — SAP CRM, SAP SCM, SAP PLM, and SAP SRM — should follow shortly after that. In parallel, SAP is adding SAP HANA to all of the other applications applicati ons in the portfolio, and it i t will release them as they come on line. Renovating these applications involves much more than simply replacing the database. Over the years, SAP has had to make many adjustments in its application layer to avoid the I/O bottleneck associated with the database. Unfortunately, these “database avoidance techniques” have resulted in extensive “plaque” buildup inside the applications, in the forms of redundant code, tedious data aggregations and transformations, replication of data, and so on. These problems were “necessary evils” to work around the constraints of the disk-based architecture. In an SAP HANA world, however, they’re they’re completely c ompletely unnecessary unnecessary and therefore need to be removed remo ved from the system. Obviously, SAP’s renovation efforts will involve a great deal of streamlining and cleanup. At the same time, however, this renovation also represents a golden opportunity for SAP’s engineers to reimagine all of the things that these applications do from the perspective of living in a world with no constraints. These experts can question their original assumptions, invent better ways of doing things, remove latency from the processes, and program their applications to perform calculations more efficiently deep inside the database. All of these developments will lead to lower TCO and more flexibili ty for customers, which in turn will make their investment in SAP much more valuable. valuable. This exercise is also having an amazing effect on the SAP culture. Going back into the code of all of their apps with a fresh eye and ambitious dreams free from constraints has rekindled a firestorm of innovation within the SAP development group. The coffee corners in SAP labs around the world are literally buzzing with new ideas and passionate discussions. In fact, you can often see code samples from these discussions written on the windows because the participants ran out of whiteboard space (as in the movie “A Beautiful Mind”). This is the “ intellectual renewal” renewal” that SAP executives have been talking about, and it is having a monumental impact on the speed and volume of innovation coming from SAP. SAP HANA has literally awakened a sleeping giant of innovation inside SAP. Moreover, this enthusiasm appears to be contagious: People are witnessing the same type of awakening throughout the the SAP SA P ecosystem. ec osystem.
In the long run, once the entire SAP portfolio has been “HANA-fied,” 8 SAP will be able to deliver a vastly simplified landscape for its customers. By merging OLAP and OLTP into a single SAP HANA instance, SAP can provide a massive reduction in layers and TCO in the landscape while at the same time providing much more flexibility and business value through real-time access to all of the relevant data. It will take SAP several years to engineer and deli ver this this vision vis ion to its i ts customers. If the the past five years of in-memory i n-memory (r)evolution (r)evolution at SAP SA P are an indication, indica tion, however, however, the next next five years of this journey will be extraordinarily fast and exciti ng. 1 Markides, C. (2002). Strategic Innovation. In: E. B. Roberts (Ed.). Innovation. Driving Product, Process, and Market Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
2 Woods, D. and Word, J. (2004), SAP NetWeaver for Dummies, Wiley Publishing Inc., Indianapolis, IA.
3 With the SAP HANA RDS migration package customers can migrate in ~7 weeks, if they are already on BW 7.3 SP7, with Unicode, and 7.x data flows and authorizations.
4 Magal, S. and Word, J. (2011), Integrated Business Processes with ERP Systems, John Wiley & Sons. Hoboken, NJ
5 People always ask “if all the data is in volatile storage like RAM, what happens if the power goes out?” We’ll talk about that in more detail later, but basically, SAP HANA has some very sophisticated backup tools to prevent prevent data loss from disas ters.
6 Plattner, H & Zeier, A. (2011). In-memory data management: an inflection point for enterprise applications. Springer.
7 The SAP HANA RDS for database migration takes ~7 weeks for most customers who are already running SAP BW 7.3.
8 Meaning “Powe red by SAP HANA” and renovated to natively take advantage of SAP HANA.
Chapter 2
SAP HANA Architecture
COMING FALL OF 2012
Chapter 3
SAP HANA Business Cases & ROI Model
COMING FALL OF 2012
Chapter 4
SAP HANA Applications COMING FALL OF 2012
Chapter 5
SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on SAP
COMING FALL OF 2012
Chapter 6
Data Provisioning with SAP HANA COMING FALL OF 2012
Chapter 7
Data Modeling with SAP HANA COMING FALL OF 2012
Chapter 8
Application Development with SAP HANA COMING FALL OF 2012
Chapter 9
SAP HANA Administration & Operations COMING FALL OF 2012
Chapter 10
SAP HANA Hardware Overview
HANA is the first SAP solution that has been built to be specifically run as an appliance and optimized for a very specific combination of S AP processor, memory, and operating system. This approach represents a departure from SAP’s long history of broad platform support. SAP implemented this new policy to still provide customers with multiple choices in hardware platforms while avoiding the TCO implications of multiple OS and processor support combinations. In order to understand why, we need to look back historically at some of the hardware platform changes that led SAP to adopt this policy this strategy and explore why this path offers SAP customers the best balance of broad hardware partner options and focused innovation around a stable set of key components. When SAP shifted from mainframe to client-server architecture with SAP R/3, two of the critical benefits were the lower costs and the more standardized options associated with the UNIX-based servers that had just become available. When the mass-adoption of SAP R/3 took off, customers began asking SAP to certify more and more new combinations of operating system and database on various hardware platforms. This made sense because many companies were employing existing landscapes from a preferred hardware vendor and had developed expertise in certain versions of operating system and database that they wanted to leverage for their SAP environment. SAP happily obliged, building out a robust certification laboratory in its headquarters to constantly test and validate new hardware and software combinations that were being released by its partners for customer use. At the time, SAP believed that providing customers with such a broad choice would help them achieve lower TCO of their SAP solutions by reusing technology and resources that were already in place. SAP also felt that being hardware and OS/DB “agnostic” would be the best strategy to set itself apart from the other enterprise app vendors. This “technology-neutral” strategy worked very well for SAP for more than 30 years. At a certain point in the mid-2000s, however, the small number of combinations that SAP began with had exploded into a truly dizzying collection. Customers no longer benefited significantly from such a broad list of hardware and technology choices, and the costs for SAP and its customers of this broad coverage were becoming unsustainable. After SAP R/3 was released, the UNIX platform began to splinter i nto multiple dialects, with each hardware vendor putting its efforts behind its preferred variant (HPUX, AIX, Solaris, etc). In addition, x86 platforms from Intel and AMD began to displace the RISC-based platforms of the early UNIX hardware vendors due to their lower costs and their support for industry standards. Later, Linux began to displace the original UNIX operating systems due to its lower costs and the advantages of open-source code. Soon, the Product Availability Matrix (PAM) for SAP ERP exceeded 200 combinations of OS and database, with a vast number of hardware platforms for those combinations. At a certain point, choice became a liability for SAP and its customers rather than the benefit that it was originally intended to be. So, when SAP began development on the precursors of SAP HANA, the company made a strategic decision to avoid all of the costs and complexity of supporting so many variations of hardware and technology platforms. SAP was primarily concerned with the three pieces of technology that had the greatest impact on performance and would be the largest drivers of TCO reduction: operating system (OS), RAM, and processors. SAP decided to bet on open-source and industry standards as the core platform for SAP HANA. By supporting only ONE combination of OS and processors, SAP could invest all its development and testing resources into a single platform while still allowing customers to choose which hardware vendor would deliver and support the appliance. SAP had been working with Novell/SUSE for many years to support Novell SLES Linux as a certified operating system for SAP applications. Because Linux is so technically similar to UNIX, almost any UNIX engineer could transition his or her skills easily. Moreover, because Linux was opensource and easi ly supported by third parties, it was clearly the lowest TCO option for running an SAP system. In addition to selecting a single OS, SAP had to settle on a single processor family for the new solution. Although there were many chips on the market that could handle SAP’s traditional application-processing requirements, there weren’t any processors that had been designed to handle inmemory processing tasks (because enterprise-scale in-memory computing didn’t exist yet). The initial SAP HANA conversations that SAP’s executives held with anyone outside the company were with Intel because SAP realized that shifting to in-memory computing would require a new breed of processors that were optimized for the new architecture, and Intel has a long history of innovating for the future needs of the enterprise. SAP laid out its strategy for the shift to i n-memory computing to Intel’s executives, and the two parties discussed the level of co-innovation that would
. top executives from each company agreed that the they would have to establish a new level of co-i nnovation partnership and starting in 2005, Intel sent a team of their best software and chip engineers to SAP HQ to begin the work of jointly optimizing each successive version of the industry-standard Intel Xeon chips for the needs of SAP’s evolving in-memory database. Since that time, SAP has benefitted from early access to each new generation of Xeon processor from Intel, and Intel has incorporated SAP’s unique in-memory processing requirements into its chip capabilities. Intel and SAP: A History of Co-Innovation
® architecture, and a la rge proportion of new For more than 10 years, Intel and SAP have worked together to deliver industry-leading performan ce of SAP solutions on Intel SAP implementations are now deployed on Intel ® platforms. The latest success from that tradition of co-innovation is avail ab le to customers of all siz es in SAP HANA, which is delivered on the Intel ® Xeon ® processor. The relationship b etween Intel and SAP has b ecome even stronger over the years, growing to include a broad set of collab orations and initiatives. Some of the most visible : Joint roadmap enablement. Early in the design process, Intel and SAP decision makers identify complementary features and capabilities in their upcoming produ cts, and those insig hts help to di rect the devel opm ent cycle for ma ximu m val ue. Collab orative product optimization. In tel engineers located on -site at SAP work with their SAP counterparts to provide tuning expertise that enab les SAP HANA and other software solutions to take ad vantage of the latest hardware features. Comb ined research efforts. Together, researchers from Intel and SAP continually explore a nd drive the future of business compu ting As a result of the se e fforts, custome r sol ution s ach ieve perform ance, scalab ili ty, reli ab ility, and energ y efficie ncy tha t transla te i nto favorab le ROI and TCO, for i ncrease d business value.
Having created an optimized “core” (operating system, RAM, and processors) for SAP HANA, SAP needed to reach out to the server manufacturers to package the software and hardware into industry-standard appliances in a way that would remove as much configuration and integration work from the customers as possible (agai n, lowering TCO). SAP realized that even though the core components of the SAP HANA servers would be nearly identical (OS, RAM, and processors), the hardware vendors provide a great deal of additional value in the implementation, management and operations of the hardware. Plus, customers typically have a preferred hardware vendor for their enterprise landscapes. This is really where SAP felt that customer choice would have the most value. So, they engaged seven of their primary hardware vendors (see the next paragraph) to build certified SAP HANA appliances and create packaged services to implement SAP HANA quickly and easily at customer sites. In early 2011, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, IBM, and HP all jumped on the SAP HANA bandwagon and had their flagship Intel-based servers certified and in production. Hitachi joined the list later that year, and NEC was certified in early 2012. This broad support from industry-leading hardware vendors provides customers with a choice of seven hardware partners to deploy their SAP HANA solution, each with unique service and support offerings to fit their customers’ needs. SAP’s strategy of “solid core,” multivendor hardware support for SAP HANA has been received extremely well by customers because it eliminates the confusing number of hardware combinations and focuses on the value-added solutions that each vendor can offer on top of the “solid core.” General SAP HANA Hardware S pecifications
SAP HANA is sold as a pre-configured, pre-installed appliance that is delivered directly from the hardware partner. SUSE Linux SLES 11 is the only supported operating system, and Intel E7 processors are the only supported chips. Samsung RAM is currently the primary memory used by all of the hardware partners. Most partner systems use on-board 15k RPM hard disks (4x ratio for main memory) for data-volume backup and Fusion I/O SSD cards (1:1 ratio for main memory) for log-volume backup. SAP ensures the quality, availabi lity, and performance of the certified systems through a rigorous process of end-to-end quality testing, performance testing, and continuous early access to next-generation technologies from all of its partners. SAP HANA Product Availability Matrix (PAM)
The latest and most accurate PAM can always be downloaded from the SAP Service Marketplace. Here is the May 2012 SAP HANA PAM.
Additional Infrastructure
SAP recommends that customers deploy 10 gb network data connections. SAP has no preference on external storage/SAN; rather, it is determined by the server vendor. Multi-Node and Scale-Out Options
SAP HANA is a linearly scalable database, meaning, you can string together multiple physical servers into a single logical database instance and achieve linear performance results for every additional server added to the landscape. Currently, SAP HANA has certified a 16-node scale-out for production environments and is currently testing a 60 node scale-out landscape. Li terally, you just add another node/server to the landscape, and you immediately enjoy an exponential increase in performance, in addition to the additional memory. Refer to the SAP HANA hardware partner section of this chapter for more information on the various scale-out offerings from the individual partners. SAP recently (April 2012) completed its first internal benchmark for the 16 node scale out solution. The data set consisted of five years of Sales and Distribution Records (100 Billion records) and was run on a single logical server consisting of 16 nodes. Each node was a certified IBM X5 machine with eight Intel E7-8870 processors with 10 cores, running at 2.40 GHz. The total cost of the 16 node system was roughly USD$640K. SAP HANA was able to scan 100 Billion rows/Sec on the 100 TB dataset and was able to load 16 million records/min. SAP HANA’s compression algorithms were able to achieve 20x compression on the raw data when loading into memory, going from 100TB on disk to 3.8TB in memory. Typical query results were: BW Workload: 300ms – 500ms Ad-Hoc Analytics: 800ms – 2s No database tuning, indexing or caching were needed to achieve these results. To put that in context, the closest competitive database is roughly 1000x slower in the same benchmark and several times more expensive.
High Availability
SAP HANA supports cold standby hosts, meaning a standby host is kept ready in the event that a failover situation occurs during production operation. In a distributed system, some of the servers are designated as worker hosts, and others as standby hosts. Significantly, you can assign multiple standby hosts to each group. Alternatively, you can group together multiple servers to create a dedicated standby host for each group. A standby host is not used for database processing. All of the database processes run on the standby host, but they are idle and do not enable SQL connections.
Disaster Recovery
The SAP HANA database holds the bulk of its data in memory to ensure optimal performance, but it still uses persistent storage to provide a fallback in case of failure. During normal database operations, data are automatically saved from memory to disk at regular save-points. Additionally, all data changes are recorded in the log. The log is saved from memory to SSD after each committed database transaction. After a power failure, the database can be restarted in the same way as a disk-based database, and it returns to its last consistent state by replaying the log since the last save-point. Although save-points and log writing protect your data against power failures, they do not help if the persistent storage itself is damaged. Protecting against data loss due to disk failures requires backups. Backups save the contents of the data and log areas to different locations. These backups are performed while the database is running, so users can continue to work normally. The impact of the backups on system performance is negligible.
If the SAP HANA system detects a failover situation, the work of the services on the failed server is reassigned to the services running on the standby host. The failed volume and all the included tables are reassigned and loaded into memory in accordance with the failover strategy defined for the system. This reassignment can be performed without moving any data, because all the persistency of the servers is stored on a shared disk. Data and logs are stored on shared storage, where every server has access to the same disks. Before a failover is performed, the system waits for a few seconds to determine whether the service can be restarted. During this time, the status is displayed as ”Waiting.” This procedure can take up to a minute. The entire process of failover detection and loading may take several minutes to complete. SAP Hardware P artner Details
In the remaining section of this chapter, each Certified SAP HANA hardware partner was given the opportunity to briefly describe their SAP HANA offering and discuss their value-added services for SAP HANA implementation, support, and operations. We encourage you to speak directly to the hardware partners for more details about their products and services for SAP HANA. Links: Intel Cisco Dell Fujitsu Hitachi HP IBM NEC
Intel & SAP: Co-innovation for Real-Time Computing For more than 10 years, Intel and SAP have worked together to deliver industry-leading performance of SAP solutions on Intel architecture, and a large proportion of new SAP implementations are now deployed on Intel platforms. The latest success from that tradition of co-innovation is available to customers of all si zes in the SAP HANA, which is fully supported only on the Intel Xeon® processor E7 family. The relationship between Intel and SAP has become even stronger over the years, growing to include a broad set of collaborations and initiatives. Some of the most visible include the following: Joint roadmap enablement. Early in the design process, Intel and SAP decision-makers identify complementary features and capabilities in
their upcoming products, and those insights help to direct the development cycle for maximum value. Collaborative product optimization. Intel engineers located on-site at SAP work with their SAP counterparts to provide tuning expertise that enables SAP HANA and other software solutions to take advantage of the latest hardware features. Combined research efforts. Together, researchers from Intel and SAP continually explore and drive the future of business computing. As a result of these efforts, customer solutions achieve performance, scalability, reliability, and energy efficiency that translate into favorable ROI and TCO, for increased business value. Operational Success and Management of Real-Time Events
In-memory computing based on SAP solutions on the Intel Xeon® processor E7 family enables greater business agility and innovative usage models that let companies respond to changing conditions in real time. Scenarios such as monitoring customer and supplier activity can generate petabytes of data, the value of which depends on the ability to distill it into actionable intelligence. SAP HANA and the Intel Xeon® processor E7 family deliver rapid data analysis that discerns patterns and trends so you can adjust your just-in-time supply chain rapidly. You can also model “what if” scenarios to structure sales and promotions for optimal outcomes based on the latest sales and pipeline information. Features of the Intel Xeon processor E7 family such as 30MB of L3 cache, Intel ® QuickPath Interconnects, and quad-channel integrated memory controllers deliver extraordinary capabilities for businesses of all sizes that implement SAP HANA for functionality such as business intelligence and data analytics.
Performance Optimizations of SAP HANA with the Intel Xeon ® Processor E7 Family
SAP HANA benefits dramatically from high-speed Intel ® QuickPath processor-to-memory interconnects and the latest processor instructions, Streaming SIMD Extensions. Those features eliminate many I/O bottlenecks, so processor headroom is available to generate excellent throughput and responsiveness. SAP HANA is also engineered to take particular advantage of RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability) features of the Intel Xeon processor E7family, especially error correction through Machine Check Architecture Recovery, for mission-critical implementations. As a result of the high level of performance optimization for servers based on the Intel Xeon processor E7 family, SAP HANA can provide businesses of all sizes superior results for data warehousing implementations such as business intelligence and data analytics. Assured Performance with Mission-Critical Advanced Reliability of the Intel Xeon Processor E7 Family
Machine Check Architecture Recovery, a reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) feature built into the Intel Xeon ® processor E7 family, enables the hardware platform to generate Machine Check Exceptions. In many cases, these notifications enable the system to take corrective action that allows SAP HANA to keep running where an outage would otherwise occur. Hardware based on the Intel Xeon® processor E7 family enables SAP HANA to fail over from one processor socket to another in the event of a processor failure and to handle memory errors with as little impact to workloads as possible. Copyright© 2012 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.
Cisco Systems SAP HANA Solutions As part of the “Unified Appliance Environment”, Cisco has developed a full portfolio of SAP HANA appliances based on Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS™) spanning from the smallest T-shirt sizing, supporting as low as 64 GB memory, up to large scale-out solutions which can support up to 8 TB of usable memory. Depending on the compression factors, the Cisco appliances can support databases up to 56 TB, the largest currently supported by SAP. However the Cisco technology can support up to 20 TB of usable memory, which corresponds to uncompressed databases up to 100 TB or more. Cisco UCS: A Unique SAP HANA Solution
Cisco UCS is a single unified system entirely programmable through unified, model-based management to simplify and speed deployment of enterprise-class applications and services. All Cisco UCS SAP HANA appliances are intelligent infrastructure that can be managed through the embedded, single management plane across multiple Cisco UCS rack and blade servers (Figure 1). This radically simplifies operations and lowers costs. The model-based management applies personality and configures server, network, and storage connectivity resources. Using Cisco service profiles, which define the model, it is simple to provision servers by applying a desired configuration to physical infrastructure. The configuration is applied quickly, accurately, and automatically, improving business agility, staff productivity, and eliminating a major source of errors that can cause downtime. The Cisco Fabric Extender Architecture reduces the number of system components to purchase, configure, manage, and maintain by condensing three network layers into one. It eliminates both blade server and hypervisor-based switches by connecting fabric interconnect ports directly to individual blade servers and virtual machines. Virtual networks are now managed exactly as physical networks are, but with massive scalability. This represents a radical simplification over traditional systems, reducing capital and operating costs while increasing business agility, simplifying and speeding deployment, and improving performance. Cisco UCS helps organizations go beyond efficiency: it helps them become more effective through technologies that breed simplicity rather than complexity. The result is flexible, agile, high-performance, self-integrating information technology that reduces staff costs and increases uptime through automation, providing a more rapid return on investment. The excellent performance combined with the broad range of usable memory make the Cisco UCS SAP Appliances an excellent, easy-to-manage choice for analyzing massive amounts of business data.
Cisco UCS SAP HANA Architecture
SAP HANA T-Shirt Sizes Offered
The Extra Small (XS) and Small (S)-size appliances are based on the Cisco C260 M2 rack mount server with 2 Intel ® Xeon® Processor E7-4870 (2.4 GHz) and up to 256 GB of usable memory. This configuration is primarily used for development, test, and small production SAP HANA systems with uncompressed datasets up to 1.75 TB. The Cisco UCS appliance incorporates a persistency layer, based on internal SSD drives that require no additional drivers tainting the Linux kernel. The Medium (M)-size appliance is based on the Cisco C460 M2 rack mount server with 4 Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-4870 (2.4 GHz) and up to 512 GB of usable memory. This configuration is ideal for use in mid-sized and larger production environments such as the one used by Medtronic, a large, worldwide manufacturer of medical devices (see customer example). The persistency layer is provided by two Fusion IO cards to avoid possible bottlenecks in duo card configurations sharing the same PCI slot. SAP HANA Scale-out offering
The Cisco UCS solution that has been certified for large SAP HANA implementations is a uniquely scalable appliance. It allows customers to easily adapt to the growing demands of their individual environment by incrementally adding Cisco B440 M2 blade servers with 4 Intel ® Xeon® Processors E7-4870 (2.4 GHz) and up to 512 GB usable memory each, as needed. For every four Cisco UCS blade servers, the persistency layer is provided by an EMC VNX 5300 or a NetApp FAS 3240, depending on customer preference. The “basic configuration” of the Cisco scale-out offering is made up of redundant fabric interconnects with embedded infrastructure management, a Cisco UCS C200 server for SAP HANA studio, a Cisco 2911 for secure remote management, and one enclosure with support for up to 4 Cisco B440 blades. The basic configuration can easily scale by adding up to 3 extension bundles each providing an additional blade enclosure for up to 4 more Cisco B440 M2 blade servers each and the correspondent storage from EMC or NetApp. High Availability SAP HANA Solution
Cisco UCS SAP HANA appliances have redundancy designed-in providing no single point of failure. However, in the event of a hardware failure on a blade or rack server, any spare Cisco UCS server can take over the role of the failed server in minutes by simply applying the service profile to the spare server. Disaster recovery (DR) scenarios can be easily implemented by using service profiles to quickly provision servers at the DR site in conjunction with the “classical” replication technologies of EMC and NetApp. SAP H ANA Support infrastructure
All Cisco UCS servers are interconnected with a low-latency, high-bandwidth 10-Gbps unified Ethernet fabric. The unified fabric supports both IP and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) connections through redundant, high performance, low-latency Cisco Fabric Interconnects. The Cisco Fabric Interconnect, with embedded management, is the core of the Cisco UCS and reduces both the number of network “hops” and network latency, critical to SAP HANA performance. The unified fabric radically reduces the number of cables, inter-chassis switches, and network adapters required by legacy platforms. This reduces energy consumption and operational costs resulting in much lower total cost of ownership. Additional software
The operating system, Cisco UCS drivers, and Cisco UCS management software are all part of the appliance; therefore no additional software is necessary to manage the entire system. However Cisco Intelligent Automation for SAP HANA is highly recommended. The Cisco Intelligent Automation software solution supports the daily operation of a SAP HANA appliance by: Monitoring the CPU and memory workload, and the average index read time at blade level Automating quarterly maintenance, including firmware updates and file system validation Ensuring configuration management assurance for all appliance components Monitoring data services availability Proactively monitoring SAP HANA subsystem components status Monitoring query execution response times using the SAP HANA index for the query execution SAP HANA Query Response Time Executing sample queries and recording total execution time and query component performance breakdown Proactively monitoring the SAP TREX services statistics based on thresholds Alerting CPU, memory, or throughput thresholds for SAP TREX services Automating Cisco UCS blade and rack server provisioning for use in the appliance in minutes, instead of days SAP HANA Installation and Support Services
Cisco SAP HANA installation services includes the assembly of all necessary hardware and software required for a SAP HANA appliance. Cisco’s SAP HANA engineers will install the appliance into the customer’s network and connect it to source system(s). Also included are the necessary SuSe Linux Licenses, Smartnet 24x7x4 day 2 support for the Ci sco hardware, as well as licenses, and first-year maintenance for EMC or NetApp storage as required. Implementation of solutions based on Cisco SAP HANA appliances are provided through Cisco Advanced Services and Cisco’s ecosystem of systems integrators and partners. These solutions include data modeling, data load, replication, and SAP HANA application configuration. Customer Success Story
Medtronic dramatically improved reporting performance, increasing the value of its customer information, with the SAP HANA Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS™) server platform.
platform and Cisco
Challenge:
Medtronic needed to increase its ability to analyze large amounts of data, such as customer feedback. BI reporting on its fast-growing data warehouse was straining the capabilities of the company’s computer infrastructure. Because employees couldn’t generate some types of reports (particularly using unstructured data), their ability to draw conclusions from existing data was limited. Solution:
The company deployed the SAP HANA platform on the Cisco UCS server platform based on the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family. In preliminary testing, users of an “un-tuned” system observed query times just one-third as long as those with existing production systems. With the fully scaled and optimized implementation now in place, Medtronic hopes to cut response times even further. Customer Benefit:
BI operations at Medtronic will use the SAP HANA platform to report on structured and unstructured data, wherever it resides, whether on SAP or nonSAP systems. The added performance, scalability, and flexibility of this new architecture will increase the value of company data as it continues to proliferate, increasing employee efficiency and enabling smarter decision making. For More Information
For more information on Cisco UCS, please visit http://www.cisco.com/go/ucs For more information on Cisco UCS SAP HANA Appliances, please visit http://www.cisco.com/go/sap To learn more about Cisco Solutions, please visit http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns340/ns394/ns224/solutions.html To contact Cisco for addition information on SAP on Cisco UCS please email
[email protected]
Dell SAP HANA Solutions For more than a decade, Dell has collaborated with SAP to deliver hundreds of SAP solutions across many industries. A recipient of the distinguished SAP Pinnacle Award in the category of exceptional customer satisfaction and support, Dell can help organizations achieve better, faster and more sustainable business results. Our solutions are high-performing, end-to-end, and standards-based . In addition to innovative, leading-edge hardware platforms, Dell offers access to thousands of enterprise computing solutions consultants. We incorporate lessons learned and experiences into a proven enterprise solution delivery model that spans hardware, consulting, implementation, hosting and application management services designed to enhance value for customer investments in SAP solutions. An SAP global technology partner, D ell offers customers a portfolio of end-to-end solutions in support of SAP HANA applications including hardware, software and services that help reduce IT costs while helping organizations transform their business. Dell’s innovative platforms dramatically increase the availability and speed of business information, leading to more insightful decision-making using SAP HANA. Dell’s Unique SAP H ANA Value Proposition
Dell and SAP have teamed up to offer an optimally configured SAP HANA solution that includes a hardware appliance, pre-loaded software and a full range of services. This solution is reliable and scalable and offered in multiple configurations to meet your specific business needs. Our end-to-end and all-in-one solutions give your organization full access to the power of SAP HANA. Dell’s end-to-end SAP HANA solution provides: Superior technology — Dell’s PowerEdge R910 is certified for SAP HANA and includes everything needed to support your SAP HANA
solution, including scalable memory and storage. This all-in-one solution provides for seamless and integrated implementation and management. Integrated system management — Dell’s VIS Creator and VIS Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) tools si mplify management of virtual and physical server, network and storage compo nents. AIM integrates with SAP management consoles such as Solution Manager or Adaptive Computing Controller, to add capacity to the SAP landscape or move applications between physical and virtual resource pools based on demand. Large-scale enterprise consulting expertise — Dell leverages its experience delivering enterprise IT and solving “big data” issues for global companies to provide actionable and real world technology, strategies and solutions. Dell’s Center of Excellence (CoE) is well established for SAP HANA, BWA, and Mobility. Proven methodology — Dell’s In-Memory Computing and Analytic Methodology (DIMCAM) implementation services guides customers by solving complex problems faster. Comprehensive services — Dell’s portfolio of SAP full lifecycle services leverage industry best practices to deliver better business outcomes for SAP clients. World-Class Support Services — Dell’s world-class ProSupport and Mission Critical Services keep your SAP HANA solution running smoothly. The combination of Dell’s PowerEdge R910 platform and SAP HANA allows users to conduct analytics, performance management and operations in a single system. Together, the solutions help enable a business to react faster to events impacting operations today. Through this, an organization can quickly identify and analyze trends and patterns to improve planning, forecasting and price optimization. Enterprise customers taking advantage of Dell’s SAP HANA platform get a cost-effective, optimized in-memory computing solution that increases availability and reduces risk. At Dell, we are continuously evolving our server, application and server portfolio to meet evolving enterprise needs in the virtual era. In February 2012, we announced our PowerEdge 12th generation server platform and Dell EqualLogic PS storage arrays. Our newest servers provide dramatic performance and management gains for high-power computing, collaboration, database ERP and business intelligence. Dell EqualLogic PS storage arrays combine the industry’s highest Ethernet networking bandwidth — 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) — with increased storage capacity in less
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Dell’s SAP HANA Product
The Dell PowerEdge Server R910 platform has been certified by SAP to run SAP In-Memory Appliance software (SAP HANA). Offering customers a powerful and flexible way to query and analyze large volumes of data with great speed, Dell customers running SAP HANA on PowerEdge R910 servers can gain real-time access to information and analytics to best address rapidly evolving market environments. Dell’s SAP HANA appliance provides: Performance and reliability in a scalable 4U, four-socket server allowing large workload consolidation, max virtualization machine density,
and scale for the SAP HANA in-memory database. Integrated diagnostics with Intel® Advanced RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) Technology, internal dual SD modules for hypervisor redundancy, including design and component quality paired with Dell Lifecycle Controller. Robust infrastructure in the form of performance resources, power e fficiency, I/O, and memory scalability. Processing power using the highest performing Xeon 7500 Series processors, up to 1TB of DDR3 memory, and 2 x 10Gb Optional LOM with 10 PCIe slots to consolidate inefficient workloads. Energy-efficient system design built with Energy Smart technologies includes power management features enabling power capping, power inventory, and power budgeting within your specific environment. Logical component layout of the internal components aids with airflow direction, helping to keep the server cool. The SAP HANA appliance from Dell is fully contained in the PowerEdge R910 server, making use of fast internal disks for storage and Fusion ioDrive solid state cards. The Fusion ioDrive from Dell provides high IOPs and low latency performance for the in-memory SAP HANA database. While Fusion ioDrive is used to maintain the system’s logs, a RAID group made up of internally held 15K RPM disks is used to maintain a copy of the data image. T-Shirt sizes offered
Dell offers several different sizes of HANA appliances based on the Dell PowerEdge R910 platform to meet your needs.
High Availability
The Dell™ PowerEdge™ R910 is a high-performance 4-socket 4U rack server designed for reliability and scalability for mission-critical applications. High availability features include: Built-in reliabi lity features at the CPU, memory, hardware and hypervisor levels Intel advanced reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) capabilities Redundant power supplies Remote IDRAC6 connectivity Integrated systems management, Lifecycle Controller and embedded diagnostics to help maximize uptime Internal Dual SD Module providing superior hypervisor redundancy Dell’s focus on reliability starts with product design and ends only when we’ve delivered a platform that meets strict testing and quality control standards. Support infrastructure
Dell’s SAP HANA appliance is designed to be an all-inclusive solution that comes as a pre-integrated unit with all necessary hardware, storage, and networking capabilities. Additional software needed
Dell’s SAP HANA platform is an end-to-end and all-in-one solution that comes preloaded with all of the software and management tools necessary. Additionally, Dell offers its OpenManage Essentials software for no charge. Open Manage Essentials is a web-based hardware management application that provides a comprehensive view of Dell systems, supported devices, and components in the enterprise’s network. This product provides additional system management capabilities, including: A simple and effective user interface Easy installation and low touch maintenance Tools to discover, inventory and monitor Dell Servers, storage and networking switches Agent-free Management to discover and correlate IDRAC / Server and Blades / Chassis Dell offers SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP for SAP HANA solutions. Support Services
Dell is an expert in SAP HANA system support. Internally, we have over 65 instances of SAP with over 22,000 users, and globally, we have over 500 SAP consultants. In addition, Dell has more than 1,800 ITIL-certified professionals. The result is that we have a strong systems management and support practice and an in depth understanding of SAP hardware and software solutions. Customers are provided a responsive service and support experience with collaborative support for SAP HANA by Dell, SAP, and SUSE based on standard and enterprise support agreements. Dell’s SAP HANA appliance comes with 3 years of Dell’s award winning ProSupport Mission Critical services and a 3-year extended hardware warranty . Customers receive 24x7x365 phone support, escalation management and collaborative support leveraging Dell’s global ProSupport infrastructure of more than 30,000 technicians supporting more than 100 countries in 55 languages. Dell’s ProSupport Mission Critical services accelerate rapid resolution by providing quick delivery of onsite parts and or labor and providing access to Dell’s proven and reliable Critical Situation Process. Key support features: Onsite Response — 4-Hour onsite service with 6-hour hardware repair available 24x7, including holidays. CritSit Procedures — Severity level 1 issues will be reviewed by Dell and may be nominated for CritSit incident coverage through Dell
Global Command Centers. During a CritSit incident, expert resource teams are mobilized to get you back up and running fast. Emergency dispatch — Onsite service technician dispatched in parallel with phone-based troubleshooting when you declare a Severity level 1 incident. Additional SAP HANA services
Dell offers additional SAP HANA services to assist with your implementation. SAP HANA Executive Workshop — This workshop helps to develop the Use Case and Business justification for a SAP HANA solution and helps organizations determine whether SAP HANA is a fit for their situation. SAP HANA Proof of Concept — Using Dell DIMCAM methodology and IMPROVE jump start process, customers can see quickly the value
that SAP HANA will bring to the decision making process.
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computing, real-time analytics and mobile applications. These enabling technologies can provide the savings to invest in SAP HANA and will provide SAP customers flexible computing infrastructure, competitive knowledge through improved analytics and secure mobile computing frameworks. Implementation — Once the Proof of Concept is complete, a SAP HANA Implementation workshop can develop a deployment plan and create the Business Justification for the rest of the deployment. Analytics Factory — Dell offers global business intelligence consulting and support. Customer success stories
Every Angle Software Solutions is an international software company that partners with Dell to deliver an add-on SAP performance and operations management appliance solution. The Every Angle solution enables the simple, flexible and fast production of valuable business content from an organization’s SAP database; the software then enhances the data using intelligent algorithms. Every Angle has an impressive customer list — including companies like Heineken, Philips, Bridgestone and Hunter Douglas — and their current installations span multiple industries globally. Every Angle is upgrading its offering by developing an SAP HANA-based appliance using Dell’s PowerEdge R910 platform. Every Angle chooses Dell because: The R910 offers a complete, integrated solution including hardware, software, services and support. Every Angle’s current SAP performance management appliance is based on the Dell PowerEdge platform, and the relationship between our companies is proven and strong. Dell Services consulting provided the expertise to accelerate Every Angle’s time to market. Every Angle can rely on award-winning support from Dell Pro Support. Every Angle has a long-standing relatio nship with Dell and uses Dell servers, storage and networking internally to run the company. Every Angle’s mission is to create a solution that is not only powerful and reliable bust also simple to install, quick to implement and easily supportable. The company’s goal is to install the Every Angle appliance and have it delivering meaningful data in under a week! Every Angle pairs the power of SAP HANA with Dell technology and with their proprietary software solution. It will sell Dell’s R910 SAP HANA appliance as a Dell OEM. The solution is currently in testing. Contact information for inquiries
Contact your Dell Sales or Services Account Executive.
Fujitsu SAP HANA Solutions Fujitsu, the recipient of the 2012 SAP ® Pinnacle award in the “Technology Innovator of the Year” category, has been recognized for its engagement and excellence in developing ingenious SAP HANA infrastructure solutions. The Fujitsu portfolio for SAP HANA addresses the requirements of various customer segments — from specific turnkey appliances for small and midsize companies to customized solutions for large enterprises. The end-toend offering including consultancy services, solution appliance, integration and migration services as well as the services for the operation and support makes the Fujitsu offering unique. The following aspects underline the strong position of Fujitsu in combination with SAP: Mission-critical readiness is a top priority reached by the comprehensive scale-out offering and extensive high-availability features. Fujitsu is the first SAP partner worldwide to offer a certified platform for SAP Business One Analytics powered by SAP HANA. Fujitsu, a global player managed services, has capabilities to offer managed SAP HANA to multinationals as well as local small and medium enterprises. The Fujitsu SAP HANA Global Demo Center can be used remotely by customers who wish to test and experience the business impact of SAP HANA. A hosted proof of concept service for tests with original customer data is also in place. In terms of TCO reduction the Fujitsu offering scores with: Quick return on investment supported by jump-start services for fast implementation and an option for rapid deployment of SAP HANA with pre-defined use cases Reduced downtime via professional solution maintenance Low operation efforts thanks to an easy administration concept for upgrade and maintenance Fujitsu SAP HANA P roduct Family
Fujitsu SAP HANA infrastructure solutions are based on industry-standard PRIMERGY servers, which represent a unique combination of Japanesestyle innovation and German quality standards. With rock-solid reliability and independently proven leading price performance, one benefits from favorable lifecycle costs. Operational costs are reduced through server management, benchmark proven energy efficiency, and innovative marketleading technology. Further major building blocks of the Fujitsu SAP HANA infrastructure solution are NetApp FAS3200 Series storage systems (scale-out offering) and Fujitsu network infrastructure. T-Shirt Sizes o ffered
The Fujitsu T-shirt size options are based on PRIMERGY RX600 servers. They represent a TCO-optimized entry-level offering, which provides ample performance and capacity without investment in an external storage system. The XS configuration can be upgraded seamlessly to the M size model.
* All configurations are constantly reviewed and the latest technology is validated and made available whenever applicable.
The single node configurations are ideal for proof of concept/proof of value projects, development, tests, quality assurance, training and initial SAP HANA implementations with a defined scope. However, these systems can also be included as building blocks in a multi-node environment. Scale-out offering
The Fujitsu multi-node offering for SAP HANA is based on industry-standard PRIMERGY building blocks combined with a shared NetApp storage system and high performance Brocade Ethernet Fabric switches as the standard option. Customers can start small and easily add and integrate PRIMERGY servers and storage capacity as requirements grow. Today the solution is certified for massive scalability of up to 16 nodes and 8 TB of main memory, however the concept is already disposed to further growth.
High Availability
Special attention was paid to high availability as a major component for mission-critical readiness of the overall SAP HANA solution. Thus high availability is already an integral part of the building block concept. One server can be assigned as a fail-over server and quickly take over in case a productive server breaks down. The second pillar of the high availability concept is the utilization of NFS (Network File System) and the shared NetApp FAS 3240 series. The pivotal idea of in-memory computing is to store data in the main memory of a computer to allow fast access. The risk of this concept is that data stored in the main memory is volatile. Once the computer is down, data kept in the main memory is irretrievably lost. The usage of NFS ensures that all data is constantly mirrored on the NetApp FAS system. In case of a data loss in main memory, data can be copied back from the storage system. Besides, the inclusion of an external FAS storage system provides the classical back-up and restore functionalities. Highest demand concerning system availability can be met by expanding the infrastructure to a two-site concept, which means that all infrastructure components and data are reflected in a second data center. This guarantees disaster resilience with continuous operation even in case of a total data center breakdown. Support infrastructure
As an additional, certified component the Fujitsu SAP HANA infrastructure solution always includes a PRIMERGY RX 100 Infrastructure Management Server (IMS). This mono socket rack server is used for: Efficient SAP HANA software maintenance: initial installation and upgrade Seamless integration into the customer’s systems management landscape Easy remote support access as a key part of the solution maintenance offering (SolutionContract) System administrators especially benefit from the IMS component when software updates are required in multi-node environments, as the update only needs to be started once from the IMS and i s then automatically distributed within the entire server environment. Additional software needed
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Support Services
The Fujitsu end-to-end offering comprises a complete set of services for non-disruptive implementation, integration and operation of the SAP HANA solution. Services for HANA Implementation and Integration
Fujitsu SAP HANA S olutionContract (Services for SAP HANA Operation)
SolutionContract is the maintenance and support service for defined Fujitsu solutions. It represents a mix of proactive and reactive services, which ensure that malfunctions are detected and corrected before they can have any impact on operations. The concept takes into account that Fujitsu solutions consist of hardware, software and network products from different vendors. Fujitsu is the single point of contact for all infrastructure components of a Fujitsu solution as well as their interoperability. SolutionContract offers several service-level options depending on individual requirements. Note: SAP Software support is not part of this solution contract! Additional SAP H ANA Services Fujitsu SmartSta rt — Short Time to Value Offering (Rapid Deployment)
SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions support a fast implementation and utilization by providing business users with modular, pre-packed and ready-touse business content. The Fujitsu SmartStart option expands this approach. SAP HANA, the Rapid Deployment Solution and customer-specific settings are implemented and pre-tested on certified Fujitsu infrastructure in the Fujitsu staging center. The end-to-end offering also comprises the onsite implementation plus infrastructure and application integration. Thus SmartStart combines SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions benefits with Fujitsu expertise and services to quickly go live with SAP HANA business scenarios fully integrated with the SAP Business Suite. Fujitsu Global SAP HANA Demo Cente r
Fujitsu has set up the first Global SAP HANA Demo and Proof of Value Center to provide customers with a practical insight into the scope of SAP HANA capabilities and services.
Customer Success Stories SAP Business War ehouse Migration to SAP HANA
A leading international manufacturer of automotive components has to date used an SAP Business Warehouse (BW), but it took several hours to generate reports meaning that important information was often only available the next day. To accelerate this process management opted for the innovative SAP HANA appliance software. The complementary portfolio of SAP HANA infrastructure and services, jointly offered by Fujitsu and TDS*, convinced the management to entrust this vital project to the two companies in combination. SAP experts at TDS’s IT Consulting business unit were tasked with design and implementation, and with operation and support of the production system and Fujitsu contributed the certified SAP HANA infrastructure solution based on powerful PRIMERGY RX600 rack servers. *(TDS — a Fujitsu company) Mitsui
“To promote the growth of Mitsui’s businesses, it is essential to have an IT platform that flexibly adapts to change and supports rapid decision making. The objectives of SAP HANA align with these needs. We greatly value Fujitsu’s early leadership in support of SAP HANA, as well as Fujitsu’s capabilities in providing global support for our IT platforms, and we intend to continue to work with Fujitsu in this area in the future. With the global cooperation from the team at Fujitsu , we have already begun implementing this technology, and look forward to continuing to work with Fujitsu to achieve our mutual objectives”. — Mr. Toru Nakajima
Associate Officer and General Manager of Information Technology Promotion Division Mitsui & Co., Ltd. Contact information for inquiries
Global Fujitsu SAP Competence Center
[email protected]
Hitachi Data Systems Converged Platform for SAP HANA Hitachi Data Systems Converged Platform for SAP HANA is an SAP-certified, optimized, and converged infrastructure platform for SAP HANA which gives organizations the ability to accelerate better business decisions and provides advanced business insight based on instant, intuitive access to data. This converged platform comprises Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) 2000 enterprise class storage and Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 with SAP in-memory computing technology for a broad range of high-speed analytic capabilities. The HDS SAP HANA Solution is pre-integrated in Hitachi Data Systems distribution centers and architected to meet SAP’s high standards, including SUSE Linux 11 (for SAP) and SAP HANA. Customers can derive the following benefits from Hitachi Data Systems Converged Platform for SAP HANA: Predictable, Repeatable, Reliable Results: Pre-validated reference architectures, pre-packaged solutions with enterprise-class
components across the entire stack, and targeted provisioning to help ensure consistent, predictable results as organizations look to manage and store massi ve volumes of fast-changing data. Exceptional Performance: High-density computing and throughput with wide-striping technology for enhanced utilization. Customers be nefit from flexible server management capabilities and scalable architectures. Faster Time-to-Value: Quicker, simpler deployment offered from a single source for ordering and for providing services for planning and implementation. Pre-configuration and SA P validation of key components drastically reduces onsite deployment time. Intelligent automation of complex tasks enables rapid provisioning of resources with the assurance that the appropriate underlying infrastructure components are in place. As additional applications and business units use SAP HANA or data volumes increase, all three Hitachi D ata Systems SAP HANA appliances sizes, ‘Small’, ‘Medium’, and ‘Large’, offer a smooth path to easily scale system processing capability without “forklift upgrades” or complete system overhauls. HDS C onverged Platform SAP HANA T-Shirt Sizes
Each Hitachi Data Systems Converged Platform for SAP HANA — ‘Small’, ‘Medium’, and ‘Large’ — is delivered as a single unit that is ready to plug into the customer network, and each offers a scalable patch to easily increase system processing capability. Hitachi Data Systems Conve rged Platform for SAP HANA includes: Operating System: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 for SAP Storage: AMS 2100 is designed for high availability, down to the dual battery backup that protects the cache during power outage. It contains
symmetric active-active controllers that self-balance workloads. SAN: Fibre Channel host bus adaptors Blade Servers: Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 offers large I/O capacity and onboard memory required for effective implementation of SAP
HANA. Systems include 4-way x86 blade se rvers with Intel 10-core processors. SAP HANA:
SAP HANA Load Controller 1.0 SAP IMCE Server 1.0, Client, Studio SAP Host Agent Sybase Replication Server 15.5 +ECDA Hitachi Data Systems Converged Platform for SAP HANA — Small, Medium, Large — meets varying performance requirements. All three options come with Hitachi Data Systems AMS 2100 storage subsystems and with SAP HANA pre-loaded. Hitachi supports SAP HANA from the smallest configuration with a single Compute Blade and 256GB of RAM to the largest configuration of 4 Compute Blade 2000s and 1.0 terabytes of RAM.
Operating System: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 for SAP Storage: AMS 2100, which is designed for high availability, down to the dual battery backup that protects the cache during po wer outage. It
contains symmetric active-active controllers that self-balance workloads. Network: Fibre Channel host bus adaptors Compute : Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 offers the large I/O capacity and onboard memory required for effective implementation of SAP HANA
Hitachi Converged Platform for SAP HANA Architecture
Hitachi-SAP Alliance
Since 1994, Hitachi, Ltd., and its subsidiaries, including Hitachi Data Systems, have had a strategic relationship with SAP which includes the sale, integration and implementation of SAP solutions. During this time, Hitachi has won numerous SAP awards for exceptional customer satisfaction. In 2011, Hitachi became an SAP Global Technology Partner, the highest level of partnership SAP offers. Many large global enterprises run their business on SAP and Hitachi. Hitachi also ensures the necessary storage performance and high throughput to meet the stringent demands of in-memory computing. By dramatically reducing the traditional delay between operations and analytics, this platform helps business leaders gain near real-time insights and information to make smarter business decisions, faster. Services
Hitachi Data Systems Global Solution Services (GSS) offers experienced infrastructure consultants, proven methodologies, and comprehensive services for Converged Platforms to help customers further streamline their SAP environments. The HANA Implementation Service ensures a smooth integration of the Hitachi Converged Platform for SAP HANA with our customers’ SAP landscapes. Support infrastructure
Hitachi Consulting is equipped to support every aspect of a SAP HANA solution and can supply strategy, infrastructure, HANA Appliance, Integration, Development, and Support Services for a HANA initiative. The lines between infrastructure, software, and applications have been blurred. Having one partner that provides one fully integrated solution is a tremendous value. Hitachi’s full breadth of capabilities delivers one fully-integrated, highly optimized environment which ensures the desired results in a lower cost, lower risks, and high-business-value HANA initiative. Contact Hitachi
If you would like to get in touch with the SAP team at Hitachi please emai l
[email protected]. Further information can be found at www.hds.com/go/sap or Hitachi Consulting: http://www.hitachiconsulting.com/hana .
HP SAP HANA solutions Through a close, collaborative partnership that spans more than 20 years, HP and SAP have worked together to offer an innovative and comprehensive portfolio of solutions that help customers of all sizes, in all industries, solve their business problems. This strategic partnership has ultimately resulted in jointly developed solution offerings like HP AppSystems for SAP HANA. HP AppSystems for SAP HANA incorporate hardware, software and services into predefined configurations for a powerful and comprehensive solution that’s designed to work together. The portfolio includes: Multiple single node configurations (XS, S, M, M+, L) based on industry-leading HP ProLiant DL580 and DL980 G7 Servers An XL scale-0out configuration, based on industry-leading HP BladeSystem Servers, with fully automated fail over for high availability HP’s Unique Value Proposition for SAP HANA
HP has worked with SAP on in-memory technologies from the beginning, and was the first SAP partner to design and deliver SAP NetWeaver ® Business Warehouse Accelerator in 2006. Based on that experience, HP has developed the core competencies to deliver successful implementations of HP AppSystems for SAP HANA, and offers a portfolio of six configurations (XS, S, M, M+, L, XL) to meet the needs of any size business. HP has implemented more than 77,000 SAP installations worldwide, and HP infrastructure runs nearly half of all SAP installations in the world. In fact, HP is a global leader in SAP operations, supporting 1.7 million users in over 50 countries, and has developed a core competency for designing
, ensure optimal performance throughout their lifecycle.
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Industry Leading Technology — Optimized for SAP H ANA
HP designed the HP AppSystems for SAP HANA on industry leading x86 HP ProLiant DL580 and DL980 G7 Servers for single node SAP HANA implementations, and on HP ProLiant BL680 G7 Server Blades for larger scale-out requirements, providing a large contiguous memory footprint for faster in-memory applications. The scale-out solution in the portfolio of HP AppSystems for SAP HANA is based on HP ProLiant BL680c G7 Server Blades, the industry-leading blade solution that is ideal for SAP HANA scale-out implementations. For the SAP HANA scale-out technology, HP delivers a unique storage platform based on the HP X9300 Network Storage System that offers unlimited scale-out capability and disaster tolerant features. Designed to be extremely scalable, flexible, and cost-efficient, HP X9300 Network Storage Systems deliver excellent performance and a modular storage infrastructure to accommodate unprecedented storage growth and performance. HP AppSystems for SAP HANA
Based on HP Converged Infrastructure products Multiple configuration choices, sized for your company’s needs (XS, S, M, M+, L, XL) HP ProLiant DL580 G7 Servers or HP ProLiant DL980 G7 Servers for XS to L single-node configurations HP ProLiant BL680 G7 Server Blades for XL highly scalable configurations up to 8 TB of compressed data HP Storage for log files and data files HP X9300 Network Storage Systems for your scale-out cluster file system HP Networking with HP Virtual Connect and ProCurve HP ProLiant Service packages and HP Insight Control management software HP Fast Start Service HP Technology Support Services
SAP HANA T-Shirt s izes offer ed
Scale-out offering
HP offers a unique scale-out offering that provides the high availability your business demands today, and a future-ready solution that can grow as your needs grow. This design significantly reduces the cost, difficulty and down-time associated with future field upgrades. HP’s scale-out solution is based on proven, industry-leading technology including: HP ProLiant BL680c G7 Server Blades, the blade solution that is ideal for SAP HANA scale-out implementations for balanced computing to handle the most demanding enterprise class applications. The HP X9300 IBRIX Network Storage System is a unique storage platform that offers unlimited scale-out capability and disaster tolerant features. HP P6500 Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVA) delivers high-throughput, mission-critical, redundant storage for data & log files, SYS files, config files, traces and more. HP networking solutions like HP Virtual Connect for simplifying and virtualizing the connectivity between the HANA blade nodes, the network, and the shared storage. High availability is provided through a stand-by blade with automatic failover. Disaster tolerance technology is also included with HP’s scale-out solution. When SAP certifies a disaster tolerant solution for SAP HANA, HP’s scale-out appliance design is already equipped to handle this functionality, so you can be assured it will meet your future demands. High Availability and Disaster Recovery
With HP AppSystems for SAP HANA, HP has delivered a fully automated failover mechanism for high availability, a stand-by blade that automatically is activated upon a failure of any node in the cluster. Only one node is needed, regardless of the number of nodes i n the cluster. As mentioned earlier, disaster tolerance is designed into HP’s SAP HANA technology today, so once SAP HANA software is released with disaster tolerance capability, HP’s scale-out solution is already equipped to enable this functionality. Storage infrastructure
HP PCIe IO Accelerator for HP ProLiant Servers is a direct-attach, solid-state, PCIe card-based solution for application performance enhancement. Based on Multi-Level Cell (MLC) and Single Level Cell (SLC) NAND Flash technology, these devices are ideal for accelerating IO performance and maintaining SAP HANA log file data. For mission-critical deployments and shared-storage infrastructures, HP X9300 IBRIX Network Storage System features an NFS cluster file system and support for single-node high availability. It’s designed for high availability and extreme scalability while delivering excellent performance and a modular storage infrastructure to accommodate unprecedented storage growth. Additional Software
HP ensures global quality standards by pre-loading and configuring SAP HANA software at the factory before delivery. No additional software is necessary for the HP AppSystems for SAP HANA. All solutions are built to your specifications and include all required components, services and support. However, optional monitoring and backup software solutions are available from HP to further enhance your solution. HP AppSystems for SAP HANA can be monitored by means of HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM), available as a free download from HP. SIM is also available as a component of the Insight Control suite of management software, which is avai lable for purchase from HP. Support Services
HP delivers a comprehensive solution that encompasses hardware, software, services and support from a single resource. HP delivers the full lifecyle of services required to get from assessment and design of a SAP HANA solution to the build, implementation, and support of the solution. Design and Build
With every SAP HANA system, HP includes the resources to assist with the sizing and configuration of an SAP HANA environment. This includes the sizing of the appropriate system, and recommendations on the configurations to address your requirements for multiple SAP landscapes, high availability, and disaster tolerance. Then with every SAP HANA order, HP includes its core competency process for factory integration where we integrate the hardware, load all software components, and apply your unique environmental settings for network and source systems. And then the system completes a burn-in test before shipment to your location. Implementation
Delivery of the SAP HANA appliance is not the final step. Beyond the design and build of a SAP HANA solution, implementation of the solution into your environment is equally, if not more, critical to a successful experience with getting SAP HANA up and running. So HP includes installation, implementation, and training with every SAP HANA solution we deliver. The basic foundational service includes the following: Incorporation of SAP HANA in the local network Connection of SAP HANA to source systems Implementation of basic security and authorizations Configuration of SAP BusinessObjects front end or Microsoft® Excel to communicate with SAP HANA Validation of the integrated environment and the end-to-end functionality of the SAP HANA system Review of the access to, and use of, the SAP i n-memory computing studio Installation and configuration troubleshooting Support
After a successful implementation, support of your SAP HANA solution is turned over to HP Services’ SAP support teams. HP includes both proactive and reactive support to ensure the highest availability of the solution. For proactive support, you are assigned a local HP engineer responsible for delivering an “Account Support Plan”, customized to fit your needs, and consisting of delivering updates to hardware firmware and operating system, regular system health checks, and setup of remote monitoring. For reactive support, HP delivers support from SAP HANA trained engineers in its mission-critical response center. This team is one of the most experienced teams in the industry for resolving issues with SAP in-memory appliances. With a connection to SAP’s support operation, HP can take first call on any SAP HANA support issue. Based on this well established process, HP is able to deliver industry best support and minimize downtime for SAP in-memory solutions. Additional SAP H ANA services from HP
HP provides services to help you identify your strategy, quantifying the business opportunity, computing the ROI, and implementing an HP AppSystem for SAP HANA into your SAP landscape. These services were designed exclusively for SAP HANA, and include: The HP Business Intelligence Master Plan Service is an overarching BI strategy development service designed to assist you in the definition of a BI strategy and the design of a landscape to enable the realization of that strategy including a roadmap for implementation. The HP Impact Analysis for SAP HANA helps you understand the technical feasibility of introducing SAP HANA to meet real-time and highvolume data analysis requirements, and is highly recommended for each SAP HANA implementation. The HP Financial Assessment for SAP HANA provides granular information to support your decision process and is formatted to be suitable for use in supporting budgeting processes. The HP Solution Assessment for SAP HANA is an engagement during which HP consultants will assess the existing information landscape in detail, identify data sets for use with SAP HANA, identify any gaps in the current environment and create a solution blueprint based on the findings. The HP Landscape Preparation Service for SAP HANA is designed to ensure that the surrounding solution landscape is in place and optimized in order to allow for the inclusion of the SAP HANA appliance and speed time-to-value of the SAP HANA solution. This includes the upgrade or installation of SAP and non-SAP components in the landscape. HP Fast Start Service includes required services that accompany the appliance to ensure the appliance is properly installed, database connections are made, and the replication and extract, transform, load (ETL) of data from the source systems have been tested and confirmed as fully functional. The HP Implementation Service for SAP HANA is a complete end-to-end SAP HANA implementation based on a solution blueprint designed by a team of HP consultants. HP consultants follow the HP Global Implementation Methodology for Business Intelligence for all SAP HANA implementation projects HP Migration Services — SAP HANA Appliance Software Service Pack 3 supports the deployment of an HP AppSystem for SAP HANA as the database for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse. HP is offering a migration package for current SAP NetWeaver BW customers to assist in migrating from their existing database to an HP AppSystem for SAP HANA. This migration package includes complimentary phone assessment services, asset recovery services, financial services and migration services:
SAP NetWeaver BW upgrade service SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3 migration to a database built on SAP HANA SAP NetWeaver BW optimization for the SAP HANA database Customer success stories
T-Mobile selected SAP HANA to help them address the challenge of tracking their customer promotions and offers in a timely manner. With SAP HANA, they could process POS data in real time to evaluate what offers were successful, and even micro-segment their customers for more effective real-time promotions. The challenge: T-Mobile had an extremely short timeline to get their SAP HANA solution up and running. They contacted HP and asked if we could get a HANA solution built, installed and implemented in less than 3 weeks. HP delivered. The T-Mobile requirements were captured and an SAP HANA system was sized and built in HP’s SAP HANA factory. HP then integrated the hardware; loaded software, customer network and host settings; all delivered within 2 weeks. With HP Fast Start Service implementation, T-Mobile was loading data, testing the reporting use case scenario within the 3-week timeline requirement. The T-Mobile SAP HANA project is just one example of how customers can rely on HP to provide reliable, high-performance technology for SAP HANA, and the services required to design, build, implement, and support for a successful implementation. Contact information for inquiries
For more information, visit www.hp.com/go/sap/hanaor contact your HP sales represe ntative.
IBM Systems and Services Solutions for SAP HANA SAP HANA deployed on IBM System x Workload Optimized Solutions with the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) offer simple, seamless scalability for your SAP HANA environment. In addition, IBM offers installation and managed services to help you manage your SAP HANA infrastructure cost-effectively. IBM Global Business Services (GBS) can help you extract the business value out of your SAP HANA implementation. IBM and S AP team for long-term business innovation
With a unique combination of expertise, experience and proven methodologies — and a history of shared innovation — IBM can help strengthen and optimize your information infrastructure to support your SAP applications. IBM and SAP have worked together for 40 years to deliver innovation to their shared customers. Since 2006, IBM has been the market leader for implementing SAP’s original in-memory appliance, the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA). Hundreds of BWA deployments have been successfully completed in multiple industries and countries. These BWA appliances have been successfully deployed in many of SAP’s largest business warehouse implementations, which are based on IBM hardware and DB2 — optimized for SAP. IBM and SAP offer solutions that move business forward and anticipate organizational change by strengthening your business analytics information infrastructure for greater operational efficiency and offering a way to make smarter decisions faster. IBM eX5 Systems with GPFS Power SAP HANA
SAP HANA, delivered on IBM eX5 enterprise servers with fifth-generation IBM ® Enterprise X-Architecture® technology (eX5), helps transform the enterprise by addressing current needs while delivering the robust scalability and performance needed to accommodate growth. SAP HANA running on powerful IBM eX5 enterprise servers with the Intel Xeon processor E7 family combines the speed and efficiency of in-memory processing with the ability to analyze massive amounts of business data — enabling companies to eliminate barriers between real-time events and real-time business decisions. IBM is the first to decouple memory and input/output (I/O) from the processor — moving processing power from what’s theoretically possible to what’s actually possible. IBM System x servers with fifth-generation IBM eX5 technology enable SAP HANA customers to benefit from a shared vision that delivers simplicity and automation designed to help organizations accelerate business outcomes while lowering TCO. IBM eX5 enterprise servers with Intel Xeon processors offer extreme memory and performance scalability. With improved hardware economics and new technology offerings, IBM is helping SAP realize a real-time enterprise with in-memory business applications. IBM eX5 enterprise servers deliver a long history of leading SAP benchmark performance. These System x servers are equipped with processors from the Intel Xeon processor E7 family, which combine exceptional raw compute power with increased memory bandwidth and support for significantly greater memory capacity to deliver superior performance to previous-generation processors. With up to ten cores in each processor, the four-socket x3850 X5 can be scaled to 40 cores and 80 threads with the use of Intel HyperThreading Technology. Organizations can achieve extreme scaling within each node for running demanding workloads on a compact system. SAP HANA is a business-critical technology and requires a robust and reliable enterprise computing platform. Sophisticated eX5 features such as Predictive Failure Alerts warn ahead of potential hardware failures, trigger preemptive action, and help maintain application availability. In addition, eX5 features such as eXFlash solid-state disk technology can yield significant performance improvements in storage access, helping deliver an optimized system solution for SAP HANA. Standard features in the solution such as the High IOPS MLC Duo Adapter for IBM System x can also provide fast access to storage. Workload Optimized Solutions
IBM offers several Workload Optimized Solution models for SAP HANA. These models, based on the 2-socket x3690 X5 and 4-socket x3950 X5, are optimally designed and certified by SAP and can be ordered as a single appliance part number. They are delivered preconfigured with key software components preinstalled to help spe ed delivery and deployment of the solution. The IBM System x3690 X5 is a 2U rack-optimized server. This machine brings the eX5 features and performance to the mid tier. It is an ideal match for the smaller, two-CPU configurations for SAP HANA. The x3690 X5–based configurations offer 128 to 256 GB of memory and the choice of only solid-state disk or a combination of spinning disk and solid-state disk. The x3950 X5–based configurations leverage the scalability of eX5 and offer the capability to pay as you grow — starting with a 2-processor, 256 GB configuration and growing to a 8-processor, 1 TB configuration.
, . systems are designed for maximum utilization, reliability, and performance for compute-intensive and memory-intensive workloads such as SAP HANA. This server is ideal for the medium- and large-scale SAP HANA implementations. The x3950 X5–based configurations integrate either the 320 GB High IOPS SD Class SSD PCIe adapter or the 640 GB High IOPS MLC Duo Adapter. Note: An 8-socket configuration uses a scalability kit that combines the 7143-H2x* with the 7143-H3x* to create a single 8-socket, 1 TB system. IBM and SAP have worked closely together to validate each of the workload-optimized configurations and have also collaborated on performance testing. Performance testing of SAP HANA running on IBM eX5 enterprise servers and have demonstrated the ability to handle 10,000 queries per hour against 1.3 TB of data, returning results within seconds. Outstanding results like this are founded on years of joint product development which allows IBM and SAP offerings to be integrated for simplified implementation. This is true of IBM’s DB2 database which is tightly aligned with SAP HANA for seamless replication of data when using the Sybase replication server. Simple and S eamless Scalability
Using the workload-optimized solution models you can combine multiple models together to create multi-node scale-out configurations. These multinode scale-out configurations enable you to achieve larger SAP HANA memory sizes simply by adding compute nodes. IBM was the first vendor to have multi-node scale-out configurations and currently has 4-node x3690 X5 and x3950 X5 and 16 node x3950 X5 solutions validated. You can start with one 256GB node, upgrade to a 512GB node, and grow your environment to 16 nodes. This modular approach enables you to invest in a Workload-Optimized solution for SAP HANA and grow your infrastructure as your SAP HANA environment grows. In addition, you can handle unplanned outages by including an additional High-Availability (HA) node in your configuration. These multi-node scale-out configurations do not require an external Storage Area Network (SAN) or multiple SANs. The IBM General Parallel File System™ (GPFS ™) software in these configurations has the unique capability to use the storage contained within each node helping to simplify the infrastructure required for SAP HANA. Only IBM has a High-Availability concept which allows customers to seamlessly extend their installation to enable High Availability using GPFS replication and an additional stand-by node. GPFS™, with its high-performance enterprise file management, can help move beyond simply adding storage to optimizing data management for SAP HANA. High-performance enterprise file management using GPFS gives SAP HANA applications: Performance to satisfy the most demanding SAP HANA applications Seamless capaci ty expansion to handle the explosive growth of data SAP HANA environments High reliability and availability to help eliminate production outages and provide disruption-free maintenance and capacity upgrades Seamless capacity and performance scaling — along with the proven reliability features and flexible architecture of GPFS — help your company foster innovation by simplifying your environment and streamlining data workflows for increased efficiency for SAP HANA applications. IBM Intelligent Cluster integrated packaging and assembly can help speed installation and deployment of multi-node scale-out HA configurations as well as reduce implementation risk if you require all of your HANA server nodes preassembled and packaged in a rack. By implementing SAP HANA on eX5 enterprise servers with GPFS, you can realize faster performance, less complexity and greater efficiency from a powerful and proven converged infrastructure environment of integrated technologies. These workload-optimized solutions for SAP HANA can help simplify operations, consolidate resources and dynamically migrate functionality as business changes, while delivering the ability to quickly change the way users look at mass amounts of data without compromising data integrity or security. For more information about the IBM Systems solution for SAP HANA and the IBM System x Workload Optimized Solutions for SAP HANA, please read the IBM Redpaper: SAP In-Memory Computing on IBM eX5 S ystems Services to speed deployment
To help speed deployment and simplify maintenance of your x3690 X5 and x3950 X5: Workload Optimized Solution for SAP HANA, IBM Lab Services and IBM Global Technology Services offer quick-start services to help set up and configure the appliance and health-check services to ensure it continues to run optimally. In addition, IBM also offers skills and enablement services for administration and management of IBM eX5 enterprise servers. IBM offers Quick Start implementation services to help you install and configure your SAP HANA appliance and HealthCheck services to help you manage and maintain your SAP HANA appliance. IBM also offers skills enablement services to provide technical training to your teams that need to manage the HANA appliance. If you determine that you do not want to manage the SAP HANA appliance, then IBM offers a Managed Service that can provide 24x7 monitoring and management of the SAP HANA appliance. A trusted service partner
Many clients require more than software and hardware products. They need a partner to help them assess their current capabilities, identify areas for improvement and develop a strategy for moving forward. This is where IBM Global Business Services (GBS) provides immeasurable value with thousands of SAP consultants in 80 countries. GBS combines its SAP implementation experience and skills with the broader IBM business intelligence competencies to create an unparalleled opportunity for our clients to not only implement SAP HANA solutions, but to then take that implementation to new heights and identify transformational opportunities. The GBS HANA team within IBM has leveraged the experiences gained to date on SAP HANA offerings and grouped efforts into two main opportunities for clients who wish to deploy SAP HANA — “Do New Things” and “Run Existing Things Faster”. The GBS Consulting Practice offers a broad range of services for SAP HANA such as: Discovery and assessment services to maximize business impact Architecture assessment and benchmark services Proof of concept services Express deployment offerings, including industry best practices
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Combining the strengths of GBS with IBM System x Workload Optimized Solutions for SAP HANA allows our customers to gain the maximum benefits of their investment in SAP HANA — and to bring those solutions to life to address immediate information needs and identify the transformational opportunities that can bring the organization to the highest levels of insig ht and action. IBM can also offer financing options h elping clients to acquire IT solutions that are tailored to their individual goals and budg et. For more information
To learn more about the IBM Systems and Services solutions for SAP HANA and IBM eX5 Workload Optimized Systems, please contact your IBM
