SAP- HANA

Copyright © 2014 Epistemy Press LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted 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].. [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 g ratefully ratefully ackn owledge SAP’s SAP’s kind permission permission to use its trademarks trademarks in this p ublication. 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 trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries all over the world. Business Objects and the Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects, 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. All other products mentioned in this book are registered or unregistered trademarks of their respective companies. SAP AG is neither the author nor the publisher of this publication and is not responsible for its content, and SAP Group shall not be liable for f or errors or or omissions with respect respec t 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 agreement with SAP. SAP has no obligation to pursue any course of business outlined in this material or to develop or release any functionality mentioned in this document. This material and SAP’s strategy and possible future developments are subject to change and may be changed chan ged by SAP at any time for any reason reason without 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. ISBNs: 978-0-9856008-1-5 (Mobi) Digital Digital book(s) book(s) (epub and mobi) produced by Booknook.biz Booknook.biz..

 About  Ab out the Cov Covee r Imag Imagee

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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 your face because you can step on the accelerator and drive as fast as you want to or as fast 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 headquarters in Germany, Germa ny, you’l you’lll see this sign about about 2 miles south of of the Frankfurt airport on the the A5 A 5 — and there there’s ’s no speed limit on your your way to visit SAP.

Note from the Author

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ince 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 “real-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 chapters as they are finished and then release the remaining chapters as they are completed later. 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 saphana.com.

Table of Contents 1 SAP HANA Overview Updated with SP7 details Updated RDS Information

2 SAP HANA Architecture 3 SAP HANA Business Cases 4 SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA 5 SAP Business Warehouse Powered by SAP HANA 6 Introduction to SAP Big Data Technologies (NEW CHAPTER) 7 Data Modeling with SAP HANA (NEW CHAPTER) 8 Application Development with SAP HANA 9 SAP HANA Administration & Operations 10 SAP HANA Hardware Updated PAM, Cisco, HP, IBM, HuaWei, VCE, Fujitsu sections Updated Data Center topics

11 SAP HANA Projects & Implementation Updated RDS section and new advice section

 Acknowledgments

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lthough we’re at the beginning of this journey, many people have already been phenomenally helpful in the scoping, content preparation and 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, Kathlynn Gallagher, David Jonker, Naren Chawla, David Porter, Steve Thibodeau, Swen Conrad, John Schitka, David Jonker

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), Thorsten Staerk (VCE)

Production Robert Weiss (Development Editor) Michele DeFilippo (1106 Design) Sophie Jasson-Holt & Deb Cameron (Evolved Media)

How to use this book “May you live in interesting times”

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his 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 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 subtopics 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 regardless 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 realtime 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 saphana.com 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. CEO of Infosys & Former Executive Board Member, SAP AG

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ime magazine picked “The Protester” as its person of the year for 2011, recognition of  individuals who spoke up around the world — from the Arab 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 factorybuilt 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 in 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 mainmemory, 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 ColgatePalmolive, 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 simplification, without disruption. SAP HANA provides a single in-memory database foundation for managing transactional as well as analytical data processing. Thus a complex question can be posed to real-time operational data, instead of asking pre-fabricated questions on pre-aggregated or summarized data. SAP HANA 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 the CEO of Infosys and a former member of the Executive Board of SAP AG who led the development of SAP HANA.

Chapter 1

SAP HANA Overview “Significant shifts in market share and fortunes occur not because companies try to play  the game better than the competition but because they change the rules of the game” — Constantinos Markides1

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very 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 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 ears. 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 mainframe.

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 OLTP — from documents such as purchase orders and production orders were stored in multiple locations within the database. The application would 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 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 processing 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 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 results for Euclid were mind-blowing: The new technology could execute query responses for the same reports on the same data thousands 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 optimize every successive 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 inmemory. Along with LiveCache, the success of BWA proved to SAP and its customers that inmemory data processing just might be an architectural solution to database bottlenecks.

The Next Step: The Tracker 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 deal of unknown technical issues into 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 inmemory 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 possibilities had opened up for SAP to fundamentally change the rules of the game for database 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.

SAP In-Memory Technology Evolution

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 in-memory 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 Business Warehouse customer could immediately 3 replace their old, diskbased 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 effectively 4. It had to enable 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 process. 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 is a primary contributor to process latency. It also discourages people from using the software frequently or as it was intended. Slowperforming 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 make more intelligent decisions is instantly available at their fingertips. Thus, companies that employ in-memory systems are operating in “real time.” Significantly, once you remove all of the latency from the systems, users can focus on 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 Need 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, Bett er, 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 game-changing 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 thousands to millions 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 inmemory database to that of a disk-based database on the appropriate  metric — cost per terabyte 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 in 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 mechanical 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 solidstate 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 late 2013, Apple still makes and sells the “classic” iPod (160gb/$249), but it is a tiny fraction of their overall iPod  sales. So, somebody must be buying the “old” iPods and Apple must be making some money off of them, but do you know  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 for migrations to the SAP Business Suite 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 and analytic data 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: rowbased 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 Overview 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 capabilities “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. 7 This eliminates many of the typical activities and problems ou 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-memory 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 irrelevant whether the table is column-based 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 The SAP HANA database also supports MDX (MultiDimensional eXpressions), the de facto standard for multidimensional queries. MDX can be used to connect a variety of analytics applications like SAP Business Objects products and clients such as Microsoft Excel.

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

Applicat ion 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 database, 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 require modifications to the existing data model, which requires 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. Raw data is constantly available in memory for analytical purposes, and it is 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-Based Data Replication using SLT is based on capturing database changes at a high level of abstraction in the source SAP system. It benefits from 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 HANA 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 Storage snapshots (SP7) Log replay on storage snapshots (SP7) Scale-out support (new hosts are backed up automatically, also added in SP7) 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 SP7 Updat e Ever since SAP HANA was initially released in 2010, SAP has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to innovation and continual product improvements. In the previous service packs (SP5/SP6), SAP added extensive new functionality, such as collapsing the architectural layers between application and data processing, as well as converging database and application services into a single, in-memorybased architecture. SAP HANA SP5 also supplied numerous capabilities such as enhanced security, high availability via data replication, more sophisticated text analysis, and an array of functionality — known as SAP HANA Extended Application Services — to provide developers access to the database via a consumption model over HTTP. Taken together, these improvements greatly bolstered SAP HANA proficiency in large-scale data center deployments. With SAP HANA SP6, SAP builds on this solid legacy by debuting SAP HANA smart data access technology. This technology helps enterprises dynamically derive real-time insights across heterogeneous sources such as Hadoop. New in-memory spatial capabilities in SAP HANA enable organizations to uncover richer and more meaningful signals from business and geospatial data. And the completion of the integration of Sybase data management with SAP HANA will further transform customers’ end-to-end data management landscape. SAP HANA SP7 improvements can be broken into three primary categories:

1. Enhanced information processing to help customers get the most from their data. 2. Augmented developer and DBA productivity to deliver applications more quickly. 3. Operational improvements to extend performance and reliability.

Enhanced information processing Managing the massive data volumes that characterize Big Data environments is very costly: it takes a lot of time, requires additional, often redundant storage and network capacity, and mandates superfluous maintenance activities. It also delivers results more slowly to users. Thus, avoiding unnecessary large-scale data movements is a core best practice for optimal Big Data productivity; it’s simply better and more efficient to bring the computation to the data, rather than the other way around. This tactic is particularly powerful when combined with in-memory processing. By expanding upon the inherently powerful SAP HANA information processing capabilities, SAP enables application developers to leverage the full strength of the database through analytics libraries, predictive results exploration, text search, geospatial data, and soon. Developers are able to process Big Data and combine the results with real-time analytics, in a single query. This also makes it feasible to access and synthesize enterprise data regardless of location, size, and representation — without needing to move any information. SAP HANA smart da ta access SAP HANA smart data access provides data virtualization capabilities that expedite dynamic data queries across heterogeneous relational and non-relational database systems such as Hadoop, SAP® Sybase® Adaptive Server® Enterprise (SAP Sybase ASE), SAP ® Sybase® IQ, Teradata, and SAP HANA itself. In SP7, support for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server was added as well as the ability to use Sybase Event Stream Processor as a data source. Using the generic adaptor framework, other data sources can be added as well, provided those data sources support ODBC. SAP is bringing the complete potential of the SAP HANA platform to provide data virtualization, which will simplify data queries across heterogeneous sources, while optimizing response time based on where data is stored and how it is used. SAP HANA smart data access helps customers construct real-time big data applications with fast and secure query access to data across their business networks, while minimizing unnecessary data transfers and data redundancy. Spatial d ata processing SAP has expanded the scope of the SAP HANA platform with the incorporation of new spatial data processing capabilities that combine geospatial data with business data, resulting in a new dimension for real-time business applications. Customers and ISVs are able to process blends of spatial, predictive, and text analysis results within one SQL statement, providing simplified development of intelligent and intuitive location-based solutions. Additionally, SAP HANA customers are able to utilize geo-content at no additional charge, making it possible to seamlessly develop and deploy spatially-based solutions using native in-memory processing, mapping content, and services. These new spatial capabilities, content, and services will be exceptionally useful for

industries that require real-time, mission-critical location solutions for planning, monitoring, and analytics, combined with faster performance, and decreased total cost of ownership (TCO). For example, energy infrastructure companies can employ the spatial processing capabilities in SAP HANA to immediately identify and take action on high-risk pipeline components based on numerous variables, all in real-time. This newfound agility will help reduce potential outages, maintenance costs, and the risk of catastrophic failure. For more information, see the SAP HANA Spatial Reference.

Extended nat ural languag e processing SAP HANA SP6 and SP7 furnish developers with an assortment of new and augmented techniques for working with natural language via full text and fuzzy searches. In particular, fuzzy search now incorporates compound words, column conditions, predefined columns, and additional filter conditions. Text analysis has been strengthened with new language identification intelligence, along with greater fact extraction throughput. SAP HANA multilingual text mining capabilities have also been enhanced to support additional languages such as Simplified Chinese. This makes it much easier to measure and monitor client sentiment instantaneously, and thus use the “voice of the customer” to pinpoint sentiments, problems, and requests. The result: better, more informed decisions. Extremely large d ata warehouse with integr ated near-line stor e Fully exploiting the power of Big Data means gaining insight into the entire range of the enterprise’s information. It’s now possible to fuse data from SAP HANA and SAP Sybase IQ into a single logical database that’s visible from SAP Business Warehouse. This means that customers can now achieve real-time, in-memory processing with near-line storage at petascale data size, along with full visibility across all information siloes. Integra ted stream processing Complex event processing has proven to be one of the most prolific sources for Big Data. SAP Sybase Event Stream Processor (ESP) is now integrated with SAP HANA, simplifying comprehensive integration with machine and event-driven data. This amalgamation means that customers can now construct queries and applications that associate structured and unstructured data, including the massive streams of information captured by SAP Sybase ESP.

Augmented developer and DBA productivity Enterprises rely on their teams of software developers and DBAs to create the next generation of applications to properly leverage Big Data. SAP HANA SP6 supports these critical constituents with a collection of powerful capabilities aimed at increasing their effectiveness.

Simplified predictive application d evelopment

The application function modeler in SAP HANA studio presents model-driven access to native functions and predictive algorithms, which helps speed the software development process. Meanwhile, SAP HANA Extended Application Services (SAP HANA XS) provide a faster, more open, and highly flexible application and web server services supporting HTML5 and serverside JavaScript. This reduces TCO and development times, thanks to the minimized “layers” required to deploy applications. It also provides an enhanced architecture with a collection of  essential capabilities such as: High availability failover. Expanded OData support. Authentication. Increased connectivity options. New lighter-weight, browser-based IDEs for SAP HANA native development. SAP HANA SP6 provides an easy integration between SAP HANA studio and SAP HANA repository. This lets developers browse design-time related objects in the repository, as well as use context-sensitive menus to perform the most regularly used commands related to the repository. A command line interface is available, too. SAP HANA SQL has been expanded, with new statements for access control, data definition, and system management. There are also many new SQL functions to assist developers and DBAs. SP7 built on these changes, adding even more SQL statements and functions. For more information, see the SAP HANA SQL and System Views Reference. SAP HANA SP6 also expands on the database’s SQLScript capabilities, including ARRAY, APPLY_FILTER, column view parameter binding, and scalar user-defined functions. The SAP HANA SQLScript Editor has benefited from enrichments such as a wizard to create new procedures, aids for building templates, and noteworthy new debugging capabilities. Developers and DBAs are now free to define the appropriate access techniques for each deployed application package, including: Authentication method. Anonymous SQL connection enablement. Cache control. Cross-origin requests. Default entry.

Integra ted dat a pro visioning a nd modeling SAP HANA SP6 introduces the Data Provisioning Workbench. This is a new editor inside SAP HANA Studio that furnishes developers and DBAs with a common unified data model and user interface for end-to-end replication scenarios. It makes it much easier to create, develop, administer, and manage data provisioning workflows. SAP HANA open unified architecture supports administration and monitoring API Services for all Data Replication components. Enhanced dat a services SAP HANA SP6 supplies database administrators with a native extract, transform, load (ETL) solution that boosts performance, and an innovative, guided advisor that profiles and

assesses the quality of incoming data. Traditionally, ETL tasks have proven to be some of the more problematic areas of configuring a comprehensive Big Data environment. Consequently, by streamlining and simplifying this essential process, SAP lets developers and DBAs focus on their main responsibilities rather than time-consuming ancillary tasks.

Embedd ed interactive ed ucation SAP HANA interactive education is a pre-packaged, interactive learning offering consisting of  business applications, data models, sample data and application code, and data generation tools. It serves as a source of best practice implementation examples, and accelerates development of quality customer and partner content. This approach augments the knowledge of developers and DBAs, while furnishing a baseline model for use in SAP educational materials that customers and partners can tap for self-study. SAP HANA interactive education contains 17 models across 22 database tables, with scalable data record sizes via a configurable data generator. It’s also aligned with SAP HANA Academy educational content, and base for openSAP courses. Enterprise-wide data modeling SAP HANA, in concert with SAP ®  Sybase®  PowerDesigner®, generates and shares the necessary metadata to drive end-to-end data modeling, from planning to implementation. This integration makes it possible for developers and DBAs to “close the loop” with complete visibility into the full range of the organization’s data. They can then build more comprehensive, and accurate, applications and reports. More sophisticated monitoring DBAs benefit from a collection of monitoring improvements to SAP HANA studio, such as additional visibility into the costs of statement execution, the ability to repeat SQL statement execution, and supplementary metrics and alerts of critical situations such as: Savepoint duration. Column-store unloads. Status of Python trace.

Operational improvements Enterprises are increasingly relying on Big Data to drive critical business decisions. This dependency demands a fresh look at key technology infrastructure, with a particular emphasis on reliability, security, and high availability.

Streamlined configura tion The new SAP HANA Platform Lifecycle Manager incorporates the major functions of the Software Update Manager for SAP HANA, and streamlines major administrative tasks such as: Integrating the SAP HANA system in the landscape. Administering SAP HANA systems and hosts.

Managing SAP HANA applications content. Updating SAP HANA systems with single support packages as well as support package stacks. Managing additional components. Deploying products and transports. The essential tasks of backup and recovery have also been improved through enhancements to the backup editor — including the Backup Wizard — in SAP HANA studio. It’s now possible to view details about the most recent successful backup, along with information about active backups. Administrators are able to delete old backups, as well as split data backups into files of limited size. They may also instruct the Recovery Wizard to ensure that all required log backups are available before starting the recovery process. Finally, it’s now possible to copy a database in a scale-out environment by using SAP HANA backup and recovery capabilities.

Enhanced d isaster r ecovery SAP HANA SP6 introduces new asynchronous and asymmetrical long-distance remote data center failover capabilities. This supports maximum data protection performance for disaster recovery across long geographic distances (>50 km) with enhanced system availability and recovery capabilities via Asynchronous System Replication (based on transactional subsystem). Additionally, it expands system availability and business continuity with near-zero downtime for upgrades, and patches targeted at disaster recovery systems. It also reduces effort and improves flexibility with enhanced system copies, with snapshot support and asymmetrical disaster recovery support systems. SAP HANA SP6 also extends its data center replication capabilities for upgraded system availability and business continuity. Open hardware architecture for ta ilored data center integr ation SAP has introduced an initiative to drive the availability and the openness of the SAP HANA platform. It includes tailored data center integration to provide customers the choice to integrate the SAP HANA platform with their existing network storage infrastructure. Moreover, the new program will also involve the existing certification program for SAP HANA, which targets third-party tools such as business intelligence (BI), ETL and backup/recovery products. In addition, SAP HANA SP6 concludes the pledged integration with Sybase Data Management technologies such as: SAP Sybase ASE. SAP Sybase IQ. SAP Sybase Event Stream Processor (SAP Sybase ESP). SAP Data Services. SAP ® Sybase® SQL Anywhere®. SAP Sybase Replication Server. SAP Sybase PowerDesigner.

Mobile synchronization Mobile devices are an increasingly popular method for capturing and working with enterprise data. The SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere mobile and embedded database now supports bidirectional synchronization with SAP HANA across wireless networks. This gives authorized users the ability to securely interact with their data on the device of their choice. System management The new and enriched SAP HANA data center management environment provides extended system management, visibility, and monitoring capabilities for more productive and effective enterprise system administration. It offers enhanced table distribution and partitioning management, for both scale out and scale up, along with tracing capabilities for highperforming, scalable systems. It also delivers a comprehensive collection of security improvements designed to safeguard information through: Authentication mechanisms that now include SAML 2.0 and X.509 client certificates. Encryption via automatic inclusion of the secure store file system (SSFS) in backup and recovery. Access authorization that covers validity period, time zone, email address, and locale. Additional privilege categories. Password configuration directly through SAP HANA studio. Supplementary audit logging capabilities for actions such as session disconnects, dropping tables, repository interaction, and backups/recoveries. A secure internal credential repository that permits safe storage of credentials for outbound connections from SAP HANA applications. Improved authentication and access control options for connections to remote data sources that will be presented as if they were stored in SAP HANA. For more information on SP6 features and capabilities, please see the SP6 Release Notes. SP 7 incorporates additional security features, including SPNEGO support for SAP HANA XS SAP Logon Ticket and SAP Assertion Ticket support Flexibility around password changes The ability to set a validity period for a user in SAP HANA Studio The ability to create users by copying existing users New privileges for repository change management, debugging SQLScript code, and smart data access Support for SAP’s new cryptographic library, CommonCryptoLib SSL support for system replication For more details, see the SP7 Release Notes and the SP7 Security Overview presentation.

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 perprocessor 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. Furthermore, as of SP7, SAP HANA can be deployed in another way, through the SAP HANA tailored data center integration, which is aimed at large customers with a substantial investment in storage.

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, a primary database for the SAP Business Suite, a primary database for SAP Business Warehouse,  and a development platform for new applications. As SAP HANA matures and SAP renovates its entire portfolio of solutions to take advantage of all the horsepower in SAP HANA, you can expect to see nearly every product that SAP provides supported natively on SAP HANA as a primary database, as well as many more new “native-HANA” applications.

For a listing of hundreds of permutations of these core use cases and details on current SAP HANA live customers by industry and function, please visit the SAP HANA Use Case Repository.

Agile Data Mart The earliest scenarios where SAP HANA has been deployed in production are as a standalone 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 traditional 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.

Nong fu 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 The second major scenario where SAP HANA is being used is to accelerate transactions and reports inside the SAP Business Suite. As of mid-2013, SAP HANA can now be used as the primary database under every application in the SAP Business Suite (excl. SAP SRM). SAP HANA can be set up as either a stand-alone system in the landscape, side-by-side with the database under the SAP Business Suite applications or as the primary database for the entire SAP Business Suite. 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 disk-based 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. Please see the chapter on SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA   for many more details.

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 non-disruptive. 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 ERP Transactions and Reports You can expect to see many more “problem” transactions and reports generated at previously unimaginable speeds as SAP introduces enhancement pack updates to SAP HANA. Here’s a short listing of some of the SAP ERP transactions and reports that are currently available:

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 — including customer, vendor, and material lists — for improved productivity and accuracy.

SAP Solutions for Accelerated Applications SAP BusinessObjects Planning a nd Conso lida tion 10.0 Powered 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 Business Warehouse component, powered by SAP HANA announced last year. SAP intends to allow customers running the application that have invested in SAP HANA to leverage the power of in-memory computing technology to boost performance by accelerating planning and consolidation processing. SAP CO-PA Accelerator 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, selfservice 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 Accelerator 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 realtime 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 Seg mentation Accelerato r 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 Deployment Solutions A great majority of these solutions powered by SAP HANA can be deployed as rapiddeployment 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 HANA Rapid Deployment Solutions A great majority of SAP HANA use cases can be deployed as rapid deployment solutions in order to ensure a quick time to value. SAP Rapid Deployment solutions combine SAP software with content based on best practices and an innovative delivery model with a predefined scope and at predictable costs. This helps to accelerate the implementation times and lower risk.

Background Rapid-deployment solutions came to exist in response to customers’ need for simple, ready

to consume solutions, offering integration and responding to business needs. Organizations that deploy SAP HANA can leverage the innovative SAP Rapid Deployment solutions delivery model to accelerate the implementation times and lower the deployment project risks such as scope creep, schedule and budget overages. Implementation is supported by a standardized methodology and content based on best practices developed uniquely for each offering. The best practices provide a solid foundation for SAP Rapid Deployment solutions and consist of tested configuration and implementation content, methodologies and step-by-step approaches to run specific key processes with minimal implementation effort. Even as customers benefit from the pre-defined scope and prebuilt functionality, these solutions do not limit the customers in terms of scope. An SAP HANA rapid-deployment solution provides the SAP HANA customer with a platform designed to evolve and extend as the customer’s business grows. In addition, you get immediate value through prebuilt analytical content that comes with most of the SAP HANA rapid-deployment solutions. While rapid-deployment solutions are traditionally available for on-premise deployment, now they are also available to be deployed in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. Rapid-deployment solutions allow customers to evaluate, implement and go live with HANA-based solutions on the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud in weeks, further simplifying and helping companies to achieve real-time enterprise faster. By deploying rapid-deployment solutions in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, the customer can be more competitive, by shortening the time-to-value, accelerating the speed of  innovation, reducing the total cost of implementation, and reducing the implementation risks. As part of the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud offering, rapid-deployment solutions are available for on-boarding customers to the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, but also preassembled and ready-to-use. This combination of rapid-deployment solutions and a deployment in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud helps customers to speed up adoption of new technologies and processes and to have a fast return on invest.

Availability of SAP HANA rapid-deployment solutions SAP Rapid Deployment solutions are available through SAP, as well as SAP partners. The offerings from SAP and partners can be found on SAP Store. The broad portfolio of rapiddeployment solutions for SAP HANA covers areas like BW on HANA, Suite on HANA, Big Data and Analytics on HANA, Enterprise Performance Management on HANA, Finance on HANA, and Analytics on HANA. All of the solutions come to speed up the implementation of SAP HANA by delivering documentation and content based on best practices. A good example is the SAP HANA Live rapid-deployment solution. With the SAP HANA Live rapid-deployment solution, customers get pre-configured content in form of pre-built reports covering a broad range of operational reporting that offer immediate insight into essential business operations, are easy to use and can be customized based on specific business needs. Another example is the SAP Business Intelligence Adoption rapid-deployment solution. It helps customers make the right choice of the right reporting tool for the right reports. It provides a complete offering for a successful BI adoption for SAP BW, SAP HANA, and the SAP ERP application and includes pre-built reports in all relevant ERP areas. Besides packages that speed up the implementation of business use cases there are

packages that focus on a smooth technical transition from an existing SAP implementation to HANA — like the rapid database migration of SAP BW to SAP HANA  or the rapid database migration of SAP Business Suite to SAP HANA. Those solutions enable you to replace the actual underlying relational database of SAP BW or SAP Business Suite with SAP HANA as a database — quickly and without disruption. Customers implementing SAP ERP can benefit from a holistic implementation scenario for SAP Business Suite combined with the newest technologies from SAP the SAP ERP Foundation rapid-deployment solution. The SAP ERP foundation extension is leveraging SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA by combining it with complementary SAP innovations from UX, Mobility, Analytics, Cloud and Technology to provide a complete suite of  applications, fully integrated, with consistent master data, enabling real time information, anywhere and anytime throughout the organization. To support a fast implementation of the SAP ERP foundation extension at affordable cost, several rapid-deployment solutions have been pre-assembled that are covering business application, user experience and real-time analytics. For customers planning to implement new use cases for Big Data based on SAP HANA various rapid-deployment solutions are available. Here are two examples: The new solution SAP HANA Customer Engagement Intelligence can be implemented quickly with the corresponding SAP HANA Customer Engagement Intelligence rapiddeployment solution. This rapid-deployment solution delivers additional value with the included content, like a prebuilt integration into SAP CRM, pre-defined SAP BusinessObject reports, and detailed configuration documentation. The SAP Predictive Analytics Content Adoption rapid-deployment solution helps to quickly implement a predefined predictive analysis use case for a variety of lines of business and industry scenarios. For a smooth and rapid implementation the solution delivers prebuilt SAP BusinessIntelligence content and preconfigured content for both SAP and data sources from non-SAP software.

SAP Business Warehouse Powered by 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. 8 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 multi-layered third-party architectures.

Because the entire database under the SAP BW system physically sits in 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. SAP NW BW on SAP HANA is now Generally Available to all customers globally. All of the SAP HANAspecific 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 our 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. If you want to implement some scenarios based on SAP BW powered by HANA, the available rapiddeployment solutions will help to migrate your data, make your SAP BW system lean, and to profit from new reports and use cases. Here is a choice of the available solutions including SAP BW powered by SAP HANA: Rapid database migration of SAP BW to SAP HANA — supports the migration of an existing SAP Business Warehouse installation to the SAP HANA database system without disruption of the existing Business Warehouse content in. Go live in only 8–10 weeks. Rapid data migration to SAP BW — supports the migration of data from virtually any existing data warehouse system to SAP BW, optionally running in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. SAP BW Near-Line Storage rapid-deployment solution — helps reducing the data stored in the database for SAP BW by leveraging a nearline storage based on SAP Sybase IQ. By doing this, SAP BW gets easier to maintain and the underlying database gets leaner,

whilst the archived data is still right at your fingertips. SAP Business Intelligence Adoption rapid-deployment solution — provides a complete offering for a successful BI adoption for SAP BW, SAP HANA (optional), and the SAP ERP application and helps customers make the right design choices on how to consume existing and new content. Go live in as little as 3–10 weeks. SAP HANA CRM Analytics rapid-deployment solution — helps you quickly analyze large volumes of data — in real time, using role-based reports and dashboards — to better understand your customers. Go live in as little as 12 weeks. SAP HANA Asset Analytics rapid-deployment solution, — offers visual simplicity in analysis. It uses a new BW data model optimized for HANA, and supports the BI platform, and options for mobility. It leverages operational and planning data from SAP EAM plant maintenance. SAP Enterprise Risk Reporting for Banking rapid-deployment solution, provides a risk data model with preconfigured data flows, analysis, and reports for risk management reporting in banks. In addition the solution contains the most important key performance indicators according to the Basel III regulation.

SAP HANA as an Applicat ion Development Plat form 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 is 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 realtime 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 Sales Analysis for Retail 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), rolespecific 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 Meter 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 decisionmaking 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 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 value-added 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 up with the turbocharged SAP systems coming on top of SAP HANA in the 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, and HR and payroll. Their solution conducts complex, on-the-fly calculations that demand a great deal of I/O performance from databases. Therefore, the addition of SAP HANA underneath their solution makes perfect sense.

Custom Applications for SAP HANA As stated earlier, SAP HANA is a full-blown, do-just-about-anything-you-want application platform. It speaks pure SQL and it 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 sky truly is the limit when it comes to imagining what to build with SAP HANA. Although SAP HANA is valuable for all types of activities, it “shines” particularly well in a few unique situations. For example, if you’re 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 future roadmap for SAP HANA is actually very simple: Continue to make SAP HANA faster, better, 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 advances to become even faster than it is today. Although the speed boost generated by the hardware is exciting, it is only half of the equation. Renovating applications to take advantage of 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 ust 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 November of 2012, SAP showed the extreme scalability of SAP HANA by showcasing a 250TB RAM SAP HANA system with 250 nodes.

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. In just the first year since SAP HANA became available, over 100 startups have been founded to harness this power to drive their innovation. Just as Apple provided the platform for App Store developers, SAP will provide SAP HANA as a platform for thousands of amazing new enterprise applications for the ecosystem. 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, onpremise 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 for the company to do anything less. SAP HANA will be the heart and soul of SAP’s “real-time data platform” 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 was the release of its flagship application, SAP Business Suite — SAP CRM, SAP SCM, SAP PLM on SAP HANA. In parallel, SAP is adding SAP HANA to all of the other applications in the portfolio, and it 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 completely unnecessary and therefore need to be removed 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 flexibility for customers, which in turn will make their investment in SAP much more 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” 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 SAP ecosystem. In the long run, once the entire SAP portfolio has been “HANA-fied,” 9 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 deliver this vision to its customers. If the past five years of in-memory (r)evolution at SAP are an indication, however, the next five years of this journey will be extraordinarily fast and exciting.

Chapter 2

SAP HANA Architecture

COMING SPRING 2015

Chapter 3

Developing A Business Case for SAP HANA This chapter was written with the expert assistance of David Porter, Sr. Director, SAP Value Engineering and Steve Thibodeau, Sr. Principal, SAP Value Engineering.

Introduction “SAP HANA is really, really fast!” Unless you’ve missed all the SAP marketing blurbs, analyst reports, and trade articles over the past year, it’s pretty likely that you know that SAP HANA is an incredibly fast database. In fact, SAP HANA is sometimes more than 100,000 times faster than traditional databases for query response times. So what??? In general, “fast” is regarded as a positive attribute for a product. However, that quality alone is seldom sufficient to justify a purchase. If you can’t figure out how a super-fast database can help you run your business better, then how can you justify the expense and effort required to buy and implement it? The approach to building a business case presented in this chapter avoids the “speeds and feeds” argument that has long plagued the software industry. Instead, it examines how SAP HANA can enable organizations to execute their business processes more quickly and efficiently. It also focuses on the value of the real-time information that SAP HANA makes available, as well as the resulting level(s) of business value it delivers. The primary goal of  this chapter is to help you address and answer the “So what?” question and to provide some guidelines on how to construct a convincing business case in order to justify an investment in the SAP HANA platform.

Why Do You Need A Business Case, Anyway? There are various reasons for building a convincing business case, and the relative importance of each reason will vary from organization to organization. Some of the most fundamental reasons are: To demonstrate overall business value for the project To provide an initial financial justification for purchase and implementation To ensure that the project is aligned with the organization’s business goals and/or initiatives To establish the base-line expectations for subsequent assessment of the project’s success To provide internal documentation explaining the expected business benefits to users (and possibly to other departments in the organization)

A well-developed business case is not just a collection of data. Rather, it is also a collection of opinions and views from relevant stakeholders — both supporters and detractors — as well as representation from both the business and IT departments. If the primary goal of a business case project is to calculate total cost of ownership (TCO) and/or return on investment (ROI) of an investment in new software, then that case will likely provide an incomplete and potentially unreliable forecast of the quality of that investment. An effective business case must quantify not only the tangible value proposition of the project but also the intangible value, because both metrics are components of overall business value. A strong business case for SAP HANA typically includes multiple use cases or projects — concrete examples of how the organization will utilize the product in the course of business. The key here is to “Think big, start small.” The big picture helps shape the long-term value from the investment, but starting small enables you to build in quick wins that establish success early and then continue to build business momentum with later projects. Going further, some uses cases should reflect “stretch” goals — ambitious projects that may span several years. At the same time, they should include projects that not only can be implemented quickly, but also demonstrate measurable business value. The final collection of  use cases can then be used to build a roadmap for current and future deployments of SAP HANA. The roadmap will balance each project’s business value against the corresponding difficulty of implementation and/or risk involved. This approach will enable your organization to prioritize its various projects in a thoughtful and comprehensive manner, thus maximizing the likelihood that the entire initiative will be approved.

Methodology For each business case you build, we recommend the following multistep approach: 1. CREATE the storyline 2. ADD the financial dimension 3. TIE it all together The first step, creating the storyline, is fundamental to any SAP HANA business case. The storyline is what makes the business case unique to your organization. The use cases in the storyline should map to goals and processes that distinguish your organization from the competition. After you have created a viable storyline, the next step is to add the financial dimension. No matter how impressive the story, by itself it isn’t sufficient to obtain funding for the project. Adding the financial dimension extends the storyline to the expected business value and provides some quantitative measures that can be used in the evaluation process. After these two steps have been completed, the final step is to package up the business case in a format that is appropriate for the individuals who will evaluate the project. We will discuss each of these steps in greater detail throughout this chapter. Before we proceed, however, we need to consider the fundamental concept of business value.

Levels of Value

We’ve mentioned business value a couple of times already in this chapter. Exactly what do we mean by this term? “Business value” actually covers a relatively wide range of benefits, both quantitative and qualitative. Moreover, there are different levels, or degrees, of business value. The chart below illustrates a useful model for categorizing these levels. This model identifies three levels: Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Transformation. Let’s take a closer look at each one.

1. Efficiency The first level of business value, Efficiency, is the result of doing things the “right way.” Typically this means doing things faster, better, or cheaper or otherwise improving the way ou do things (but not what you do). Of all the levels of business value, the gains from efficiency are the easiest to quantify. There are two basic subcategories of Efficiency: IT Efficiency and Business Efficiency.

 IT Efficiency  Organizations are likely to focus heavily on IT Efficiency when (1) the software investment under consideration is part of a broader effort such as creating an analytics center of  excellence or shared analytical services and (2) the main rationale for doing so is to reduce IT costs. At this level of business value, IT is viewed as a cost center within the organization — an expense or overhead item that needs to be managed and contained. The following list identifies some common examples of IT Efficiency.

Reducing the annual maintenance costs of older applications and databases Reducing the internal costs of enhancing or upgrading software Reducing the IT FTE resources required to manage older applications and databases Reducing the hardware infrastructure to simplify administration and minimize floor space/carbon footprint

Business Efficiency  The Business Efficiency level extends beyond issues that are purely related to the IT department. However, business efficiency/productivity is only an intermediate step in assessing the overall value of a project. Line of Business Examples: To better identify the most promising sales opportunities To gain an enhanced perspective on cost drivers To increase the productivity of knowledge workers

2. Effectiveness The second level of value — Effectiveness — redirects the focus from “doing things the right way” to “doing the right things at the right time.” To properly assess this level, we need to discard many of the prevailing assumptions that underlie current business processes. Although efficiency can deliver a fair amount of business value, effectiveness offers the promise of much more. In fact, SAP HANA provides organizations with the opportunity to fundamentally rethink their basic business processes (i. e., what they do and when and how they do it). For example, organizations rarely, if ever, depend exclusively upon a total cost of  ownership (TCO) analysis (i.e., Efficiency) to justify a business analytics initiative. Although cost is a concern, the top-performing companies in each industry incorporate analytics into their infrastructure in order to create and maintain competitive advantage. At the Efficiency level of business value, business performance is improved first through visibility and then through insight. Visibility provides the ability to access relevant information quickly and in context. Then, insight  provides a deeper understanding of the underlying causes of a situation or the likely outcome of a course of action under consideration. Recall from previous chapters that SAP HANA a disruptive technology. Consequently, the business benefits it delivers extend far beyond improvements in IT operations. The examination of effectiveness gains makes the assumption that IT is a strategic enabler and value creator, and not just an organizational cost center. Although effectiveness gains are usually more difficult to quantify than efficiency gains, their monetary value is frequently greater. Instead of precise estimates, effectiveness gains can be expressed as ranges of financial value, as illustrated by the following list. Higher customer value Improved product mix (margins) Better sales pipeline conversion ratio

Enhanced customer retention More accurate demand forecasts More successful segmentation Enhanced understanding of real costs Greater production yields More efficient order fulfillment Faster collections Lower production costs Reduced risk/impact of risks More timely anticipation of market changes More efficient asset utilization

3. Transformation Business Transformation is the highest level of business value, but also the most difficult to achieve. Transformation goes well beyond Effectiveness by enabling new business models and processes. Sometimes called “innovation” or “The Art of the Possible,” business transformation can generate extraordinary financial gains. However, the potential monetary value from this level of business value is the most difficult to quantify. By definition, Transformation involves things that have never been done before. Consequently, there are no baseline data to use for comparison. At the Transformation level, the focus is on use cases that involve the invention of new business models and processes by leveraging innovative solutions and technologies, such as SAP HANA. Examples: Identifying and serving new market segments before your peers can Providing personalized customer pricing and services Enabling new products or pricing models Creating new business models Improving time to market Reducing inventory Increasing market share Improving P/E ratio Hopefully you now have a more nuanced understanding of business value. Having covered this topic, we return to our discussion of the three-step process for building effective business use cases. We begin with the first step — creating the storyline.

Creating the Storyline It’s likely that you already have at least one specific use case in mind for SAP HANA — otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this chapter! However, as we mentioned previously, it’s preferable to develop multiple use cases as part of the overall business case. Also, keep in

mind the “Levels of Value” section of this chapter when you’re developing the use cases. Specifically, try to map to each level of business value with one or more use cases. The process of creating the storyline should not be conducted exclusively by IT. Rather, it is critical to involve the business side of the organization up front and throughout the process. SAP HANA is a disruptive technology, so the typical approach to building a technical business case does not necessarily apply here. Here are some questions to get you thinking about potential use cases: What’s happening at other companies in your industry? What elements in your organization’s strategic plan could benefit from high-performance analytics or process optimization? Does your organization own any data that no one else has (and can that data be exploited)? What mega-trends in the industry represent opportunities for new value?

A. Categorization/Business Attributes Sometimes it’s easier to create use cases when you can place each one into a convenient category, or container. Below we list samples of potentially useful categories. Note that these categories may not be mutually exclusive. Some of your use cases can cross boundaries, especially in the case of innovations. Please refer to the SAP HANA Use Case Repository for the most current list of use cases.

Industry-specific Consumer Products:  (Supplier Risk Mgt., Track and Trace, Product Recall, Product Lifecycle and Cost Mgt., EPA Standards Compliance, Real-Time Warranty and Defect Analysis) Financial:  (Fraud Detection, Risk Analysis, Credit Scoring, Program Trading, Customer Profitability) Manufacturing:  (Supply Chain Optimization, Production Planning, Operational Performance Mgt., Real-Time Asset Utilization) Retail: (POS/Fraud Detection, Business Planning, Price and Merchandising Optimization) Telecom: (Investment Planning, Network Equipment Planning & Optimization) Utilities: (Smart Metering, Demand Side Management, Balance and Demand Forecasting, Churn Management, Outage Management, Investment Planning, Grid Management)

Cross-Industry Finance: (Planning and Budgeting, Consolidation) HR: (Workforce Analytics) IT: (Landscape Optimization) Order Management: (Available to Promise, Price Optimization)

Sales and Marketing:  (Marketing Analytics, Customer Segmentation, Trade Promotion Management) Supply Chain:  (Transportation Planning, Inventory Mgt., Demand and Supply Planning, Supply Network Planning)

B. Self-Discovery After reading about the methodology and techniques discussed in this chapter, some customers may feel comfortable building business cases on their own. The SAP HANA Use Case Repository and SAP HANA Value Calculator (described below) can provide invaluable assistance with this task.

C. Assisted Discovery Many other customers, however, will prefer to leverage the expertise of SAP’s Value Engineering (VE) group in constructing a convincing business case for SAP HANA. One of the ways in which the VE organization can help you construct an SAP HANA business case is through a Value Discovery Workshop. Over the course of this workshop, you will have the opportunity to identify, validate, and prioritize a number of SAP HANA use cases. These use cases can describe your organization’s internal usage, and perhaps also how your organization interacts with its external customers. The workshop is intended to address business outcomes as well as technical feasibility. Therefore, the project sponsor, business unit representatives, domain experts, and IT staff  should all participate. The workshop will provide you with detailed information on data, processes, roles, modeling, consumption, clients, and security requirements for your applications. In addition, it will help you identify the “degree of match,” potential value-add, and customer interest for each use case. The figure below reproduces a sample “value map” created during the first portion of a workshop for a customer in the chemical industry.

The next illustration is an example of one of the process analysis outputs created at a later stage in another workshop.

Finally, after you have completed the workshop, VE resources may be available to assist ou in building a formal business case. Please check with your SAP Account Executive for further information on this service.

D. SAP HANA Use Case Reposit ory SAP maintains a centralized SAP HANA website (http://www.saphana.com) that contains an ever-growing number of example use cases for SAP HANA. In the Resources section of the site, you’ll find sample use cases of SAP HANA that have either been implemented by a customer or discussed with a prospect. Perhaps the most obvious way to use this site is to check the category for your industry to determine which of the existing use cases reflect your organization’s needs or strategic direction. You may not find an exact match, but it’s extremely likely that you’ll find one or more themes that closely resemble some of your business issues and/or conditions.

A second — and perhaps more useful — approach is to use the repository as a brainstorming tool. It can be quite enlightening to study use cases from industries that are seemingly unrelated to yours. In many instances, you will recognize a common thread that will encourage you to adopt a broader perspective than if you limited your exploration to use cases in your industry. Whichever approach you adopt, a guiding principle is to focus on things that you can’t do today. In addition, always keep in mind that SAP HANA’s strengths are in applications that have never been built before. If you’re looking to SAP HANA for competitive advantage, then ou are not likely to find a close match in the repository.

1. SAP HANA Use Case Categories Currently, the SAP HANA website has SAP HANA Use Cases categorized by industry and selected process areas: Aerospace & Defense Automotive Banking Chemical Consumer Products Cross-Industry Customer Service Finance Healthcare High Tech Industrial Machinery & Components Insurance Life Sciences Manufacturing Marketing Media Mill Products Mining Oil & Gas Professional Services Public Sector Retail Sales Supply Chain Telecommunications Transportation Utilities Wholesale Distribution

Adding the Financial Dimension Now that you’ve developed a good storyline, it’s time to map it to the expected business value for each and every use case. No matter how captivating your storyline, it must be backed up with hard numbers. Although it is important to have quantitative results, some quantitative measures are more defficult to obtain and monitor than others.

A. Importance of Benefits Quantification It is critical to acknowledge the value of IT investments through benefits measurement and post go-live monitoring. An SAP Value Management study determined that organizations that develop business cases and measure post-go live success are 1.9 times more likely to deliver projects on time. They are also 1.5 times more likely to deliver on budget and to realize upfront benefits. In most current use cases, the business value for SAP HANA is measured in a similar manner to other business analytics investments. The capabilities of SAP HANA are seen across many areas of an organization with an increasing number of benefit scenarios. The one fundamental difference is that analytical use cases for SAP HANA consider how the availability of real-time data impacts the organization’s ability to realize value. The SAP HANA benefits quantification evaluates what the organization can accomplish now that it can better manage data and interpret the resulting insights at lightning-fast speeds. Data volume is exploding, resulting inthe need to store and move significant amounts of data. As a result, it slows down the ability to analyze data. In addition, data variety is continually expanding with the usage of Facebook and Twitter. Therefore, the traditional processes that organizations have used to consolidate and analyze data are no longer sufficient in the new environment of  real-time data. IT research firms have already concluded that investing in business analytics technology generates tangible benefits. Moreover, in 2010, IDC completed a study that concluded that business intelligence investments delivered the following return on investment: 112 % median ROI 54% process benefit improvement (Business effectiveness measures) 42% productivity gains (Business efficiency) 4% technology gains (IT efficiency) In February 2011 Aberdeen completed a real-time business study that found that organizations wanted more accurate operational information. A case study concluded that manufacturing organizations yielded a 2% increase in production efficiencies, returning tens of millions of dollars in savings. The independent study demonstrates that quantitative benefits are being realized with real-time information. Production yield is an excellent example of benefits quantification. Increased yield reduces the cost of operations. This section will help you identify these business areas and quantify the benefits. SAP has come to realize that organizations can struggle with analytics benefits quantification. Organizations utilize various approaches to business case benefit development; however, they may not have the experience to transfer that approach to business analytics and SAP HANA business cases. To address this problem, SAP’s Value

Engineering organization has taken the methodology that has been used for the past eight ears and applied it applied it to SAP HANA benefits quantification. We discuss the value engineering and the value management approach later in the chapter.

B. Types of Quantification SAP Value Management has created a framework for analyzing benefits that also applies to SAP HANA. This framework, which is illustrated below, places benefits in one of four categories: Strategy Enablement Measurable Benefits Risk and Compliance Innovation Financial measurement, known as “hard” benefits, typically falls within the measurable benefit category. However, risk mitigation and compliance can deliver millions of dollars in savings. Strategy enablement and innovation are usually treated as “soft” benefits.

It is important to understand that an SAP HANA business case, like an analytics business case, impacts numerous process areas within an organization. SAP realized that the underlying transactional systems by themselves release only a percentage of the overall benefits. Unlocking the remaining benefits requires information insight. For example, Procuremnt leaders rely on information to understand how an organization

spends money in various categories such as materials, services and IT equipment. The procurement process controls the flow of money going out of the company for materials and services. This critical function ensures that an organization manages its spending strategically. The primary metrics that measure success in this area are overall spending managed centrally and year-over-year annual savings achieved by the procurement team. Spend that is not managed centrally does not leverage contracts negotiated with preferred vendors that include already secured discount levels. Without real-time business insight on spend, organizations are not fully optimizing savings with consolidated spend. The following SAP HANA case study illustrates a procurement business case involving a retail grocer.

National Grocery Retailer — SAP HANA Business Case: The retailer had already invested in an ERP system that drove the procurement process with suppliers; however, it was implemented in a regional format. Thus, the overall spend managed by the organization was not visible at a national  level. Supplier relationships at a regional level ran the risk of not capturing increased discounts and creating redundancies in process.

Objective: Deliver national spend visibility and drive procurement savings Shift from regional vendor relationships and contract terms to a national level 

Challenge: Significant data volumes residing with four regional data warehouses. Data created from regional procurement  systems Four regional warehouses housing ERP structured system data No infrastructure in place to automate the data consolidation for a national view of supplier spend levels

 Approach: Evaluate the SAP HANA solution as the database and analytics technology to enable a single view of consolidated  supplier data Develop a benefits case based on the regional grocer spend performance The four major regions each had consolidated supplier spend 

Business Case Development: The regional procurement spend performance was compared, and the grocer found that certain regions were outperforming others in year-over-year savings and negotiated discounts The grocer utilized SAP’s global benchmarking data to compare year-over-year savings and spend managed  strategically with retail peers The grocer determined that additional savings would be possible if the organization better understood the underlying procurement data  XXX calculated a conservative benefits estimate of $5 0 million in savings over a multiyear period 

Results and Business Benefit: Begin realizing $50 million in savings on supplier spend with one national view of vendor spend  Remove supplier negotiation and contract administration redundancies with one process, managed by a national  supplier 

Significant supplier data compression with transfer of spend and supplier data from four regional systems to one single instance of SAP HANA Real-time and automated data transfer that was previously not possible with four different regional systems Granular reporting analysis resulting in visibility on optimal supplier discounts and redundant buying Elimination of vendor spend with contracts that do not offer maximum discount levels. Renegotiation of national vendor contracts demonstrating higher discount levels on aggregated spend  “

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1. Tangible ( Hard ) Benefits A tangible or “hard” benefit is defined as an outcome that increases revenue in for-profit organizations and reduces cost in all organizations. In addition, hard benefits can increase the cash flow that the organization utilizes to generate additional return on investments. An example of a cash flow benefit is the reduction of aging receivables. Efficiency gains can result in tangible benefits if resulting costs are removed from the gain. An example of a hard benefit efficiency gain is the reduction of people completing a manual reporting task. As we discussed, quantifying SAP HANA benefits follows a similar approach to other traditional benefits quantification. The areas of improvement are derived by identifying areas of value within major business process areas. Common benefit KPIs are broken down within the process areas. A few of the key business benefit KPIs and key metrics are outlined below. SAP’s Value Engineering organization has a full repository of all business benefits. Demand Generation Marketing Benefit: Optimized marketing spend through improved campaign effectiveness

Metrics: Average cost of a marketing campaign launch Current time to measure campaign effectiveness Campaign conversion rate measured in sales or pipeline generated

Outcome: Reduced marketing spend by minimizing the cost of ineffective campaigns Increased annual revenue through campaign execution

Sales Execution Benefit: Increased sales conversion rate, thereby increasing annual revenue

Metrics: Current pipeline conversion percentage Current revenue per sales employee Current sales team efficiency measured by time with customer and administrative time

Outcome: Increased pipeline conversion rate and sales Increased total revenue per salesperson Reduced administrative time

Demand Fulfillment Procurement Benefit: Reduced annual spend with increased visibility on supplier metrics

Metrics: Percent of spend managed strategically by category; direct, indirect and services Year-over-year annual savings Evaluation of vendors utilized and product categories Effort spent currently managing vendor relationships

Outcome: Reduced annual spend by category Reduced efforts by buyers to manage and track vendor relationships

Manufacturing Pro cess Benefit:  Reduced inventory levels and enhanced visibility of the short horizon of stock levels

Metrics: Current inventory levels of finished goods Current inventory carrying costs Percentage of inventory obsolescence

Outcome: Reduced inventory levels of finished goods Reduced annual inventory carrying costs Greater annual cash flow Reduced cost of inventory obsolesce

Information Technolog y Manag ement Information Management Benefit: Improved insight into information and reduced IT effort to prepare data

Metrics:

Cost of data storage Cost and effort of transferring data from source systems to a centralized data repository Effort to prepare data for reporting Effort to build standard reports

Outcome: Reduced cost of information management Improved granular insights delivered in real time

Org anizational Performance Management Profitability Analysis Benefit: Improved profitability analysis by product, region, and segment

Metrics: Current profit level by product, region, and segment Effort required to deliver profitability analysis Current pricing processes

Outcome: Increased profit by product, region, and segment Elimination of unprofitable items Less effort required to monitor profitability

 Wor kforce Management Benefit: Improved worker utilization levels and reduce level of overtime

Metrics: Worker utilization levels Overtime percentage and cost

Outcome: Reduced labor costs Improved worker output measured

Fraud Management Benefit:  Improved fraud detection, thus reducing the costs associated with additional insurance claims

Metrics:

Current combined combined ratio (claims and expense measured me asured against premiums collected) Measured Meas ured fraud investigations

Outcome: Reduced cost of fraud investigations Reduced combined ratio The metrics and outcomes listed in the table span many major business process areas. However, they all have a common theme; namely, to manage information from diverse data sources and to deliver real-time insights for decision making. In each case the results are measured meas ured in revenue, expense, and a nd cash flow flow impacts. “

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2. Strategi Strategicc ( Soft ) Benefits Strategic or “soft” benefits are commonly linked to the tangible benefits measured above. The strategic benefits impact the organization’s overall strategies and can support the tangible benefits. In some cases, productivity or efficiency metrics do not directly result in reduced costs. An example is a scenario in which labor costs are not reduced, but the organization utilizes appropriate metrics to deliver greater throughput with the same staff. The labour budget is not reduced, but the workforce is able to manage increasing workload. Often, improved employee engagement and work-life balance is another soft benefit outcome. Similarly, improved decision-making can generate indirect impacts on the organization, such as better execution of the corporate values for accountability. Many organizations find it difficult to drive accountability with poor information. Department leads can’t drive improvements if  there is no trust in the data comprising the actual results. In creating and evaluating a business case, you need carefully consider both tangible and strategic benefits. 3. New KPI KPIs and Breakthro Breakthrough ugh Innovat nnovatiions SAP HANA is an innovative technology that offers a fresh approach to information management. The ability to deliver innovations by managing complex analysis in real time reduces reduces time to market and generates new revenue revenue streams. These T hese innovations innovations are the most m ost difficult to quantify because no baseline data exist. However, “first mover” advantage may result in the largest payoffs payoffs for a project. SAP is constantly capturing new innovations delivered with SAP HANA to share the impact. We have multiple forums to share the benefits of SAP HANA; the external website mentioned earlier in the chapter capturing use cases and the business transformation studies captured by Value Engineering. A business transformation study is a brief document published jointly with our customers to capture benefits realized along with the story of why the investment was made. It is critical to continually measure the post-implementation impact of SAP HANA to capture benefits. The best recommendation is to simultaneously explore innovative SAP HANA scenarios while developing existing process-improvement scenarios. A simple business case can be developed based on existing processes and then leveraged to fund breakthrough innovations. SAP recommends multiple scenarios by which SAP HANA delivers maximum value to the

organization. These scenarios can be incorporated into an analytics roadmap that prioritizes value and time to value. This strategy will enable IT to jointly manage the implementation with the relevant business functions.

C. Best Practic Practicee Business Business Case Approach Approach Before calculating a benefit, an organization must identify a baseline metric derived from the current state process. After it creates this baseline, it can establish a target benefit range. The simple steps listed below present a framework for calculating a baseline metric. We illustrate illustrate this framework using the example exa mple of a profitability profitability report. Document the current state process (e.g., profitability reporting) Number of business analysts allocated to monthly reporting Effort taken in hours taken ta ken to build monthly package package Associated IT I T effort e ffort to maintain profitability profitability reporting reporting Current state profitability profitability level of the associated item ite m tracked on the report re port As stated above, an organization needs needs to establish baseline metrics me trics before it can ca n calculate calculate the value of a benefit. However, baseline metrics in isolation do not allow the owner of the business business case to comfortably comfortably develop a target improvement improvement range. These metrics are a re simply utilized as a measuring stick of success. The baseline metric allows organizations to know how much they have improved after the technology has been implemented. In order to truly define a benefit beyond the current state baseline, SAP Value Engineering performs this function by providing a triangulated approach to benefits quantification. Specifically, VE provides SAP Benchmarking data that indicate average and best-in-class performance, past examples of measured success by other organizations, and the ability to collect current state processes to best calculate the benefit range. (We discuss the SAP Benchmarking database in greater detail in Section E.) E.) After the analysis has been completed, the next step is to identify the associated value driver outcome(s). The benefit as described in the process areas is typically related to its impact on revenue and expenses. We strongly recommend that when you calculate a benefit ou apply a benefit range with a conservative and likely metric based on the SAP Value Engineering approach described above. One final point: It is commonplace to link benefits to an overall initiative involving process improvements through technology enablement. Benefits are more widely accepted when linked to key business initiatives such as improving spend management or improving pricing within a certain product category. As part of the initial business case development, discussions with the business unit sponsors ensure linkage to strategy and acceptance of the SAP HANA investment.

D. SAP HANA Calculator To make it easier ea sier for people to build build a value-based business business case, SAP SA P Value Engineering Engineering and SAP HANA Solution Management released a web-based SAP HANA benefits calculator to our customers. The tool covers the most common benefit areas that most organizations would

consider. The calculator provides two or three example benefits for each of five megaprocess process areas: are as: Customer Focus Procure to Pay Plan to Produce Record to Report Quote Quote to Cash Ca sh The benefits calculator enables you to customize the revenue include the number of  employees, and key baseline information for your particular organization. The benefit ranges are based on the SAP Value Engineering triangulated methodology we just described. A summary report re port aggregates aggregates all the benefits to determine the overall overa ll financial financial impact. SAP designed this tool to be a great launching point for calculating benefits. It generates ideas on how SAP HANA can impact your business, and it demonstrates how you can calculate these benefits. Your organization can then continue to develop benefits either in partnership with SAP VE or on your own.

E. SA SAP P Benchm Be nchmar arking king One of the most valuable resources available to you when building an SAP HANA business case is the SAP Benchmarking database. SAP Benchmarking is a global program launched in 2004 to deliver empirical e mpirical metrics, bes bestt practices, and high-impact high-impact strategies stra tegies to organization organizations s that choose choose to leverage lever age the program. SAP Benchmarking Benchmarking is managed throug through h a customer portal, SAP Value Value Management Center Ce nter (https://valuemanagement.sap.com https://valuemanagement.sap.com). ). The link takes you right to the portal to sign in and utlize the surveys to capture baseline information and determine how you are performing against best in clauss organizations. This is a significant investment by SAP to allow organizations organizations to measure mea sure performance and build build benefit cases.

This portal offers direct access to complete surveys and analysis of results. The data in the benchmarking resources are collected anonymously from SAP customers who have participated in the program. These data are incredibly deep and rich, and they enable you to benchmark your company’s current state and potential value against real-world experiences from other companies in your industry. SAP Benchmarking Benchmarking program program Facts: Established at the end of 2004 Complimentary service Available to SAP and non-SAP non-SAP customers More than 12,000 participants from more than 3,000 companies Global — in 2010 more than 60% participants of participants were from outside North America Partnerships with ASUG and other user groups groups Studies Studies available in 12 languages languages More than 20 business process assessments including finance, procurement, supply chain, chain, and sales. sale s. More than 700 KPIs More than 1,000 best practices More than 300 peer groups For SAP HANA, SAP offers the Business Intelligence and Enterprise Information Management Manageme nt data sets and surveys. In addition, addition, SAP launched launched a High Performance Analytics

survey to track the importance of complexity and speed in the data management environment. As discussed previously, SAP HANA can impact many business process areas spanning the entire organization. The SAP Benchmarking program allows you to help choose a few key process areas to determine where SAP HANA best fits as a starting point. The program provides the flexibility to create a customized survey to capture the key metrics and best practices identified throug through h the SAP HANA business business scenario develop deve lopment. ment. This process will provide the critical peer comparison that establishes the appropriate range of improvement. An organization can build a realistic benefit range improvement by leveraging peer benchmarking data.

Tying It All Together We now shift our focus to the fourth and most vital stage in the business case process — packaging the business case in a manner that maximizes the likelihood that it will be funded. To accomplish this objective, the storyline and financial impact have to be communicated effectively to the stakeholders stakeholders and decision makers. In addi a ddition, tion, the the presentation needs to be easily consumable by senior business executives, because senior management buy-in and commitment and are critical.

A. Internal Deliverables As mentioned throughout this chapter, SAP HANA is a disruptive technology. Accordingly, previous “rules” about internal business cases may not apply to SAP HANA cases. Fortunately, SAP Value Engineering has significant experience creating successful business cases for SAP HANA, HAN A, and it can assist with your your final presentation. Although there is no set format for final deliverables, successful presentations generally contain certain critical components, which we list below. Use case cas e and business business process scenarios s cenarios Financial and non-financial benefits Strategic align a lignment ment discussion Risk assessment Use case cas e prioritization

B. Ongoing Value Management Management Most companies realize that the successful utilization of information technologies is critical to success in the modern business environment. Despite this realization, however, few companies actually realize the maximum value of their IT investment. SAP addressed this problem by introducing Value Engineering, a practice that focuses on driving the customer value that IT is providin providing g to the business. business. Over the years, ye ars, SAP has learned a great great deal dea l about how the best-in-class companies continuously select, execute, and measure successful business-driven IT projects. Utilizing an ongoing processes called Value Management, SAP Value Engineering has standardized and packaged these best practices to help organizations

deliver value by aligning IT with business goals and processes, and through maximizing return on IT investment.

1. Value Management Value Management is a permanent management process that ensures that investments in information technology are delivered on time, on budget and on value. The discipline of Value Management is a proven way to realize the promised value from IT investments and initiatives. The Value Management methodology is intended to keep companies focused on choosing the right projects, to clearly define ownership and accountability for business results, and to deliver on these agreed-upon commitments. The SAP Value Engineering team helps identify the appropriate strategic areas to enable companies to become best-run businesses.  Value Management Drivers a nd Lifecycle:

Value Discovery: How do you align your business and IT strategies? Value Realization: How can the business value be captured? Value Optimization: How can you maximize the value from your investment?

2. Why Is Value Management Important? Many companies initiate technology projects with a strong focus on their business objectives; over time, however, they lose this focus. As a result, they never fully realize their expected results. Research conducted by SAP indicates that 98% of companies can extract more value from their initiatives, yet only 35% focus on measuring the value of these technologies after

they have been implemented. This “virtuous circle” of proper planning, execution, and ongoing value analysis is critical to building a strategic IT function in successful companies. Failure to realize maximum benefit from IT is a common problem that can understandably discourage executives from making the strategic IT investments needed to compete in today’s unforgiving business environment. SAP’s approach to value management focuses on helping you discover the right projects, measure progress during implementation, and optimize investments across your IT portfolio. This end-to-end process helps to ensure the business value of your IT investments. ’

3. Why Do Custo mers Like SAP s Value Engineering Process? Quick turnaround process that delivers a strategic value proposition to customers in weeks Minimal disruption to customers’ ongoing operations using our collaborative approach Fact-based, structured problem-solving approach that leverages past engagement experiences Hands-on participation from SAP experts — solution specialists, industry practitioners, consultants, and centers of excellence professionals Mature value management methodology based on experience with 25,000+ customers; leveraging comprehensive knowledge about best practices across industries and business processes Scalable, disciplined approach to business value assessments that establishes a common language between business and IT audiences

 4. Role of SAP Value Engineering Utilizing SAP Value Engineering is not a requirement for building a solid business case for SAP HANA. However, it certainly can make the process easier and more efficient. If you’ve already identified several potential use cases for SAP HANA, VE resources can help you create a financial justification for the initiative. However, if you’re willing to invest the time in a more immersive process, VE offers a SAP HANA Value Discovery Workshop, which was described in greater detail earlier in this chapter.  5. Continuo us Value Management At this point, you have completed the Discovery portion of the Value Management Cycle described earlier in this chapter. The remaining stages in the cycle are Realization and Optimization. The Discovery phase resulted in the all-important business case, but the other two phases are no less critical to the process. One strategy to ensure continued success throughout the implementation of the SAP HANA initiative is to maintain (or establish) a “culture of measurement” within the organization.

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6. Establish a Culture of Measurement How serious is your organization about performance measurement? It’s nearly impossible to determine the degree of success of a project unless you have a way to compare the “before” and “after” states. In many organizations, such assessments are mostly subjective opinions that are not easily validated. In contrast, objective assessments minimize the element of personal bias and enable historical comparisons of assessments for different projects. This kind of measurement philosophy needs to be deeply ingrained in the culture of an organization, ideally as a formal methodology. Among other things, here are some of the questions that you should consider when measuring performance: What are some of your most important KPIs? What are some of the underlying metrics that you track? How do you track and communicate metrics and KPIs? What adjustments does your organization make based on regular reviews of KPIs and metrics? Are there any “new” KPIs that would be relevant to your organization but have not been adopted by your industry peers?

Recommendations

The purpose of this chapter is to explain why it is critical to build business use cases and to provide some guidelines to assist you with this process. However, we did not   intend this chapter to be used as a “cookbook” for building business cases for SAP HANA. Different organizations may follow widely varying approaches when building their internal justifications for SAP HANA. Whatever your situation, however, we strongly recommend that you keep the following points in mind during your journey: 1) When identifying use cases, try to go beyond ideas about what you could be doing better. Consider: What you can’t do today What you haven’t even imagined yet 2) Think big, but start small with a quick win to build momentum in business. Initial success will build credibility internally The resulting support may be necessary later when you plan and undertake more ambitious projects 3) Don’t view technology or IT as merely an expense or overhead. When leveraged properly, technology and IT act as a: Strategic enabler Value creator 4) Track both hard and soft benefits during the financial analysis of use cases. Hard benefits are easier to calculate precisely Soft benefits may outweigh hard benefits 5) Ensure senior executive buy-in and sponsorship from Day 1. This is a business case, not a technical justification

Chapter 4

SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA This chapter was written with the expert assistance of Puneet Suppal ( @puneetsuppal   ), Simo Said and Amr El-Meleegy ( @Meleegy   ). SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA Solution Marketing Team

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n early 2006, when the project that would result in SAP HANA was in its infancy, the team proposed several ambitious goals (dreams, really) for the eventual capabilities of an enterprise-scale in-memory database. The most audacious goal was that this new database architecture would eventually be able to power the largest, most mission-critical enterprise systems in the world. In many ways, this was SAP’s “moon shot” declaration. On January 10th, 2013, less than two years after the first shipment of SAP HANA, SAP realized the completion of this dream with the announcement of the availability of the SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA (SoH). SAP thus became the first software company to provide its customers with an integrated, real-time business process platform that unifies both analytic and transactional data into a single architecture. It might appear that with the delivery of SoH in 2013, SAP had reached the end of its ourney. But, just as NASA didn’t stop innovating and exploring after the first moon landing more than 40 years ago, SAP is simply transitioning into its next phase of innovation and renovation. For the first time ever, SAP has created an exceptionally performant database platform that was engineered to its exact specifications and that provides a myriad of  incredible new capabilities that previously were unavailable to its 20,000 programmers. Having created this modern platform to power its flagship applications such as ERP, SAP has begun a multiyear effort to achieve three basic objectives: (1) Become an innovation-driven enterprise: SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA will help organizations become an innovation-driven enterprise by allowing you to rethink business processes as and when needed and invent new business models SMARTER. (2) Become a data-driven enterprise: SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA will help organizations become a data-driven enterprise by allowing you to collect, consolidate and consume real-time data FASTER. (3) Become a people-driven enterprise: SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA will help organizations become a people-driven enterprise by providing your business users with actionable insights — on any device — to decide and act SIMPLER. In a nutshell, SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA enables its customers to drive their business “smarter, faster and simpler” and do amazing new things that could never be done in a disk-based architecture. In this chapter, we’ll 1. examine the architectural implications of running a mission-critical SAP Business Suite landscape on SAP HANA,

2. discuss several scenarios for adding SAP HANA to SAP Business Suite landscapes, 3. review some technical and operational aspects of this switch, and 4. provide some details on several of the enhanced business processes/scenarios that will immediately benefit from the power of SAP HANA.

Overview SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA (SoH) delivers a modern, integrated suite of  business-critical applications that unify analytics and transactions into a single in-memory, real-time data platform. The SAP Business Suite can now provide real-time planning, execution, reporting, and analysis across end-to-end business processes. It can also provide business users with unified, 360-degree views of real-time information, such as machine sensor data and social media feeds, on many devices, across SAP applications as well as non-SAP systems.

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 SAP SRM is not included in the scope of applications powered by SAP HANA yet.

Because SAP HANA provides a unique ability to deal effectively with both transactional (OLTP) and analytical workloads (OLAP), companies can rapidly simplify their IT infrastructures — and reduce the total costs of ownership — by consolidating analytics and transactions into a single database. In this integrated scenario, companies can utilize SAP HANA as their primary database for SAP Business Suite applications and provide real-time analytics on live transactional data. Employing the same database to address a company’s analytical and transactional needs eliminates the necessity to replicate data and/or integrate additional reporting/analytics landscapes. The SAP HANA platform provides the foundation for companies both to dramatically increase the performance of their existing SAP Business Suite applications and to continue to

innovate without disrupting their current systems by leveraging a new generation of real-time applications natively built on the platform. It is the perfect starting point to begin taking advantage of a true real-time data platform.

Architect ural Implicat ions of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA Over the years, technical limitations in the database layer have forced companies to build two separate software/hardware landscapes to provide both OLTP and OLAP systems to address two different business needs: transaction processing and reporting/analysis. It was simply impossible for disk-based databases to efficiently handle both row-based transactional “writes” and column-based analytical “reads” at the same time. As a result of this “performance dichotomy,” database management systems currently on the market are typically optimized for either transactional workloads or analytical workloads, but not both. Compounding this problem is the fact that data have to be copied between the two systems. This inefficiency not only generates significant costs, but it forces organizations to adopt measures to ensure data integrity and usability between multiple systems. A final issue is the inevitable lag time that occurs when transactional data are exported to analytical systems on a daily or weekly basis. SAP HANA is the first commercial database system that successfully eliminates this false performance dichotomy as well as the resulting need to develop and maintain separate OLTP and OLAP systems. Because SAP HANA can process transactional and analytical workloads fully in-memory, it combines the best of both worlds. You don’t need to take the time to load data from your transactional database into your reporting database, or even to build traditional tuning structures to enable that reporting. As transactions are happening, you can report against them live, from the same database tables. By consolidating two landscapes (OLAP and OLTP) into a single database, SAP HANA provides companies with massively lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) in addition to mind-blowing speed. With all the relevant transactional and analytical data integrated in a single system that is updated in real time, companies can truly become “real-time businesses.” Beyond the architectural simplification and cost savings that SAP HANA can bring to enterprise architectures, another, more transformational shift is underway. Nearly every application in operation today was constructed in a programming approach where data are transmitted from the database to the application, where they are then transformed for calculation by the application logic or algorithm. This “bring the data to the algorithm” approach was necessary because a disk-based DBMS has very limited capability to do anything more complex than rudimentary calculations.

In contrast, SAP HANA enables application developers to completely flip that model on its head (see Chapter 8) and begin to leverage the system’s incredibly powerful engines inside the database. Developers can now extract data-intensive operations and algorithms from the application layer and insert them into the database layer for execution. Applications thus become much “leaner,” and they focus on business logic. In essence, the database becomes a “data engine” that spits out the “answers” whenever they are needed, rather than simply serving up chunks of data to the apps. This new “bring the algorithm to the data” approach is much more elegant than the old way of programming, and it significantly reduces the amount of data being moved in and out of the database. Not only do these new apps increase performance by having fast access to data in memory, they also gain additional exponential speed by executing core application logic and algorithms inside the database, on the raw data. This is when companies begin to realize process performance increases of 50,000 to 200,000 times. Going forward, SAP will deliver “HANA-fied” versions of multiple transactions in the SAP Business Suite through regular Enhancement Packs. Not every transaction will receive this treatment because not every transaction will be able to take advantage of these new database capabilities or the value of renovating the transaction won’t be justified by the performance improvements. Significantly, SAP has made the migration to SAP HANA as painless as possible. All “HANA-fied” reports and transactions can be activated via the switch framework, so they will not modify the existing business logic when a company adopts the new system. Going further, all of these switches are reversible and can be activated independently. These features ensure maximum flexibility in the consumption of these optimizations while minimizing business disruptions for the companies that implement them. Here are a few of the benefits this new architecture provides to existing SAP Business Suite customers:

 Applications You no longer have to run dialog processes in batch (i.e., “Batch is dead”). Remaining batch processes run faster, essentially turning them into “on demand” jobs. For details on SAP HANA optimized ABAP programs, please see the latest release notes

for SAP SAP HANA Live Operational Reports Operational reports now run in real time inside the SAP Business Suite. The new architecture removes the need for Operational Data Stores. It eliminates the necessity to transfer (ETL) for performance reasons. It eliminates the need to reconcile source data with copies. Interactive reports allow users to trigger OLTP transactions from the report.

Next-generat ion Applications Embedded Analytics can now be performed on a single system.

Custom ABAP code Existing core code modification limitations apply (i.e., “bad code is still bad code, it just runs faster”). Regression tests for custom code are recommended after SAP HANA migration. A lot more information on this topic is available in the Application Development with SAP HANA chapter.

Operational Topics with SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA By now it should be obvious that adding SAP HANA to an SAP Business Suite landscape provides several major benefits, ranging from increased performance to reductions in cost and complexity. You might be asking yourself, however, “OK, but what’s the downside?” More specifically, what do I have to change in my current SAP Business Suite system to get all this goodness? You might be surprised that the answer to that question is “very little.” In simplistic terms, there really isn’t much more involved in migrating to this landscape than copying the data from your old database into SAP HANA and then turning on the new system. SAP has invested a huge amount of effort and resources to ensure that the migration process is as painless and risk-free as possible. The company has even provided a one-step migration wizard and an RDS package  to manage the entire process (check the RDS site  for more details). The new deployment approach, provided within the Rapid Database Migration of SAP Business Suite to SAP HANA package, leverages out-of-the-box accelerators and predefined scope that will help accelerate your adoption of SAP HANA to supercharge the SAP Business Suite. The simplified process eliminates any migration guesswork and uncertainties regarding realization timeline, due to automation of steps as well as planning security due to standardization of the approach.

One-St ep-Migretio n via S AP HANA Migret ion Wizard (HMW)

Several of the features of your existing system remain the same: Configuration — IMG stays the same. Customization — Stays the same. ABAP Workbench — Stays the same. Modification — Same upgrade requirements as with any new release. BADIs still supported. Connectivity — Stays the same. Security — Stays the same, with enhancements. SAP HANA Enhancements Dynamic analytical privileges Reuse of same analytic privilege for several users with different restrictions Support for complex logic and situational security derived at runtime Roles as design time objects Offering full lifecycle management capabilities New “Support Role” Secure and enhance compliance process for productive systems.

Audit logging improvements New audit events (e.g., ALTER USER) Data access logging Audit configuration in SAP HANA Studio Transports — CTS stays the same Delivery via standard transport tools, SAP HANA specifics as TLOGO objects (ABAP based) CTS+ transport integration ready for custom SAP HANA code Monitoring — DBACockpit and Solution Manager stay the same

SAP Solution Manager o ffers co mplete solution for operat ions SAP HANA monitoring and alerting integrated into SAP Solution Manager 7.1, Support Package 4, see note 1747682 End-to-end workload analysis for SAP HANA planned for Support Package 8 in Solution Manager 7.1 High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) scenarios

HA and DR scenarios are supported Introduction to High Availability for SAP HANA: http://www.saphana.com/docs/DOC-2775 SP7 includes new features supporting high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) deployment, such as replaying logs on snapshots as well as cascading system replication for up to three locations. New unified install/patching tools and enhanced monitoring of  operations continue to simplify the administrative experience.

Flexible a ppliance platform Third-party tools (e.g., agents for monitoring and scheduling, antivirus) allowed to run on appliance Third-party backup tools supported with SAP HANA (ongoing)

Migrat ing to SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA Another question you might be asking yourself is, “How do I get to SoH from where I’m at today?” SAP will continue to provide customers with choice of database platforms, as it always has. Customers who choose to migrate to SAP HANA must take three steps to incorporate their existing SAP Business Suite on top of SAP HANA: 1. Update to the latest non-SAP HANA enhancement package and the latest version of  the SAP NetWeaver technology platform 2. Update to the latest enhancement package version for SAP HANA 3. Migrate from any database to SAP HANA

These requirements notwithstanding, however, SAP remains committed to supporting its customers’ choice of database technologies and vendors. The company will continue to offer the SAP Business Suite on all currently certified databases and to collaborate with its database partners to support continuous innovation of its applications on a variety of  databases. The major downside to staying on an “old” database on your “new” SAP Business Suite — besides the costs and complexity inherent in disk-based databases — is that the “HANA-fied” transactions that SAP delivers with each enhancement package won’t work with our “old” database. You’ll continue to receive new transactions and industry functionality, but they will run much more slowly than they would on the new system. In addition, you won’t be able to use any of the HANA-fied transactions that SAP delivers.

That said, migrating to SoH isn’t an “all or nothing” proposition. Companies can add SAP HANA to their SAP Business Suite systems in several ways. However, a few caveats apply, because not all of the enhanced functions that were designed for SoH are compatible with non-HANA databases due to their disk-based architecture and lack of in-memory capabilities.

Current restrictions: SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA — SAP Note 1774566

General Requ irements Optimizations for SAP HANA require all relevant systems to run on SAP HANA (i.e., Development, Quality Assurance, and Production). Implementing an SAP HANA-based ABAP correction requires an SAP HANA-based correction system. Testing an SAP HANA-based ABAP correction requires an SAP HANA-based test system. SAP HANA-based systems interact with non-SAP HANA-based systems. In mixed ERP landscapes (several ERP’s) transports from non-HANA systems into HANAbased systems are supported.

Non-SAP HANA-based d evelopment can be transpo rted t o SAP HANA-based syst ems SAP HANA-based development can be transported into non-SAP HANA-based systems, if the development is activated only after the system is manually activated. All optimizations specific to SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA require a

dedicated Business Function activation to be enabled. During upgrade, all code pertaining to SAP Business Suite, powered by SAP HANA is deactivated and is running smoothly on non SAP HANA-databases.

Dual-Stack Systems SAP Business Suite, powered by SAP HANA is based on SAP NetWeaver 7.40, and it does not currently support dual-stack (ABAP/JAVA) installations. Dual-stack systems have to be split prior to an SAP HANA migration. Java stack stays on the current database, because Java is not yet supported to run on SAP HANA (in a Business Suite app server).

Minimizing Downtime Near-zero downtime approach: Use additional shadow database to keep DB downtime to a minimum (available on request; see SAP Note 1680769) Several parallel processes for data export and data import, table split for parallelized export of large tables Combined Unicode conversion and database migration Reduced downtime for system copy (e.g., relevant for Unicode conversion): Find more details on system copy and migration: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-14257 .

Unicode SAP HANA runs natively on Unicode only. Unicode conversion can technically be performed during the database migration, but certain preparatory steps are required.

SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA: Resources http://help.sap.com/soh

Enhancement Pack Info (SAP Note 177 4566)

   

SAP enhancement package 6 for SAP ERP 6.0, version for SAP HANA SAP enhancement package 2 for SAP CRM 7.0, version for SAP HANA SAP enhancement package 2 for SAP SCM 7.0, version for SAP HANA SAP ERP powered by SAP HANA Release Notes for SAP EHP 6 version for HANA, please subscribe for the latest updates: https://websmp202.sap-ag.de/~form/sapnet?  _SHORTKEY=01100035870000755177 SP0: Release Notes SAP EHP6, version for SAP HANA SP1: Release notes SAP EHP6, version for SAP HANA, SP01

EHP 6 for HANA Optimizations by transactions and ABAP programs — please see attachment in this SAP Note: 1761546 Current Restrictions SAP EHP 6 for SAP ERP 6.0,version for SAP HANA — 1768031 Release Restrictions for SAP Netweaver AS ABAP 7.40 — 1789659 Overview Suite on HANA Restrictions: 1774566 SAP CRM Customer Relationship powered by SAP HANA http://help.sap.com/crmhana Release Notes for SAP EhP 2 for SAP CRM 7.0, version for SAP HANA Optimizations and current restrictions, please see SAP Note: 1768032 SAP SCM Supply Chain Management http://help.sap.com/scm_hana Current restrictions: SAP EhP 2 for SAP SCM 7.0, version for SAP HANA — 1768043

Scenarios for Adding SAP HANA to SAP Business Suite Landscapes Companies can utilize several methods to integrate the power of SAP HANA into their existing SAP Business Suite environments. These methods can range from simply adding a SAP HANA Live deployment in side-car mode to fully migrating their entire landscape to SAP HANA as the primary data store.

New SAP HANA Live for SAP Business Suite The new SAP HANA Live for SAP Business Suite provides an open environment that enables business users to perform operational analytics and reporting on real-time SAP Business Suite transactional data. Based on analytical views in a virtual data model (VDM), SAP HANA Live provides users with new strategies to analyze operational data to build their own reports and documents. The current offering contains predefined analytical content for SAP Business Suite applications (e.g., SAP ERP, SAP CRM). SAP HANA Live also serves as the foundation for a new class of analytic applications including SAP Working Capital Analytics, DSO scope; SAP Invoice and Goods Receipt Reconciliation; SAP Supply Chain Info Center; and SAP Access Control Role Analytics. Please note: SAP HANA Live is available as a separate package for SAP Business Suite. SAP HANA Live provides the following benefits: Views for easy analysis of SAP Business Suite data with SAP HANA Open for a wide variety of reporting frontends Maintained by SAP Operational reporting based on real-time Business Suite data Foundation for a new class of analytics applications The SAP Live enables you to very efficiently build operational reporting on SAP Business Suite data. Going further, in spite of all these great capabilities, it does not   make SAP BW

obsolete, which remains SAP’s core enterprise datawarehouse for consolidating data from SAP and Non-SAP sources. Think of this new capability more as an upgrade or a real-time evolution of standard ABAP and ALV reports. It is basically a pipeline directly into the transactional tables under an SAP Business Suite system that allows you to display real-time operational data in a very flexible and user-friendly format. The SAP Business Suite application data models — enhanced for real-time data throughput and top performance in transactional scenarios — are optimized for analytic purposes using views in the SAP HANA database. These views form a virtual data model that customers and partners can reuse. Not only does this model benefit current users, but it serves as a foundation for future SAP analytic development. Data provided by the virtual data model can be presented through multipurpose analytical UIs such as SAP BusinessObjects BI Suite UIs and domain-specific Web applications. SAP HANA Live for SAP Business Suite provides the following advantages compared to regular reporting solutions: Open Any access to the reporting framework is based on standard mechanisms such as SQL or MDX. No BW modeling or ABAP programming is required. Uniform A single approach is chosen for all Suite applications, enabling a common reporting across application boundaries. Intuitive The virtual data model will hide the complexity and customizing dependencies of  our Suite data model to make data available without requiring users to possess a deep understanding of the various SAP models. Fast The suite features SAP HANA as the underlying computing engine, enabling fast analytics on high data volumes and high levels of data. Real-time Because all reporting is based on primary data (or a real-time replication of it), there is no need to wait for data warehousing loading jobs to finish. Thus, the cycle time from recording to reporting is dramatically reduced. The SAP HANA Live rapid-deployment solution enables real-time reporting on operational data from SAP Business Suite software. The rapid-deployment solution provides prebuilt BI reports in the areas of finance, controlling, sales and distribution, governance, risk, and compliance, global trade services, customer relationship management, insurance, and more on SAP HANA. SAP HANA Live rapid-deployment solution can be deployed on SAP Business Suite running directly on SAP HANA, but it is also possible to deploy it on a Business Suite system running on your existing database with data being replicated into a side by side HANA Appliance. Additionally, customers and SAP partners can extend the solution through flexible HANA models and business intelligence reports

More Details: http://www.sap.com/solution/rapid-deployment/software/hana-live-businesssuitereporting/index.html SAP HANA Live for SAP Business Suite English SAP HANA Live Browser Last Update: February 2013 SAP HANA Live for SAP CRM English SAP HANA Live for SAP CRM Last Update: February 2013 SAP HANA Live for SAP ERP English SAP HANA Live for SAP ERP Last Update: February 2013 English SAP Invoice and Goods Receipt Reconciliation Last Update: February 2013 SAP HANA Live for SAP solutions for GRC English SAP HANA Live for SAP solutions for GRC Last Update: February 2013 English SAP Access Control Role Analytics Last Update: February 2013 SAP HANA Live for SAP GTS English SAP HANA Live for SAP GTS Last Update: February 2013 SAP HANA Live for SAP SCM English SAP HANA Live for SAP SCM Last Update: February 2013 English SAP Supply Chain Info Center Last Update: February 2013 Real-Time Solutions powered by SAP HANA SAP and its partners are delivering a new class of solutions on top of the SAP HANA platform that provide real-time insights on “Big Data” as well as state-of-the-art analysis such as machine learning, pattern recognition, and predictive capabilities. These solutions can help transform the way you run your business, from enabling rapid, sense-and-respond processes and targeted actions, to even rethinking business models in your industry. Furthermore, you can continue to utilize the SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) component — also powered by SAP HANA — as your enterprise data warehouse. SAP HANA apps can also help customers extend their SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA investments by providing them with a wide array of complementary use cases beyond their traditional business processes. They also provide a low risk low cost opportunity for customers to test the SAP HANA Platform with tried and tested applications that solve specific industry business problems. From a business value perspective there are 3 broad categories of In memory based application that are available today from SAP. 1. Customer Engagement Applications First and foremost there are the Customer Engagement Applications categories. These are applications that help our customers build personalized 1-on-1 sales and marketing engagements with their customers and do things like run targeted and personalized marketing campaigns and deliver automated selling recommendations to their Sales Force. These Customer Engagement applications can also help you understand the present and future value of your customers and be able to segment and stratify them into core, opportunistic, marginal and service drain customers and develop distinct and targeted sales and marketing strategies for each of them. This was not possible in the past because

customers could only rely on Revenue and Margin numbers to analyze their customers. But with SAP HANA you can now look into the full picture and bring in other factors like cost to serve, order frequency, loyalty, and buying power into the equation all based on real time information.

SAP Custo mer Value Intelligence

SAP Account Intelligence

2. Sense and Response Applications The second category is Sense and Response  Applications. These are apps that are built around helping customers’ capture and analyze large amounts of both external and internal data to help them detect hidden trends and capture deviations and respond to market changes in real time. One example in this category of applications is SAP Demand Signal Management which helps Manufacturing companies in Consumer Products, High Tech, and Automotive industries enterprise their downstream market and demand data-like Point of Sale data, syndicated data and social media data — to develop a consolidated view of market demand information that they can then leverage across their organization whether that is in Sales, Marketing or Supply Chain to optimize trade promotions, and inventory planning and launch new products. So if you are a Consumer Product company for example running a trade promotion instead of waiting for weeks after the trade promotion is over to understand how it performed in the market you can do that today in near real time by accessing and analyzing Point of Sale data directly from your retailers and understanding how your products are performing on the retail shelves, which retailers are complying with your promotions and detecting critical issues like out of stock to reduce lost sales.

SAP Demand Signal Manag ement powered by SAP HANA

3. Planning and Business O ptimization Apps Finally there are Planning and Business Optimization Apps, which are applications that leverage the Planning and Calculation Engine and Simulation capabilities in the SAP HANA platform to help companies leverage their big data to do things like better forecast their cash flows, manage their liquidity risk and optimize their working capital. One example of application in this category is SAP Liquidity Risk Management which helps banks manage their liquidity risk in real time. One of the problems that large banks face today is that they execute millions of cash transactions each day in different countries, with different currencies and across different and complex financial products. Building a solid real time understanding of their liquidity becomes a huge challenge when operating in such an environment. Adding to that challenge there are new and stricter regulatory requirements that are being put into place after the recent financial meltdown that require banks not just to report on specific liquidity metrics but also to simulate these results based on different future economic stress scenarios. SAP HANA allows banks to consolidate large numbers of cash flows and run stress simulations so they can get a better understating of their liquidity risk profile. SAP Liquidity Risk Mana gement

Another example in this category is SAP Fraud Management. It’s estimated that trillions of  dollars are lost every year by governments and corporations in fraud abuses. SAP Fraud Management uses the power of the SAP HANA platform to detect, investigate and prevent fraud. The application helps minimize false positive signals through real-time calibration and simulation capabilities on very large volumes of data. With that, the workload (and cost) of  the investigation team can be significantly reduced. For instance, the user can run simulations by testing fraud detection criteria, to determine the right level of severity and avoid excessive load of false positives to be sent to the fraud investigation team. In addition by combining rules and predictive methods SAP Fraud Management users can optimize fraud scenario analysis, and adapt measures to changing fraud patterns to better prevent fraud situations from happening.

SAP Fraud Manag ement powered by SAP HANA

Below are a few more examples of new and existing SAP applications that are now powered by SAP HANA.

SAP BW powered by SAP HANA

Want a super-charged data warehouse?

SAP Predictive Analysis powered by SAP HANA

Real-time, in-memory predictive and next-generation visualization and modeling

SAP Visual Intelligence with SAP HANA

Gather, analyze, and present the facts to solve your most pressing business questions.

SAP Sales and Operations Planning

Integrated business planning to align your business to profitably meet future demand

SAP Collect ions Insight

Turn revenue into cash faster with real-time mobile collaboration tools and collections information.

SAP Accelerated Trade Promotion Planning SAP Planning Maximize trade with deeper and faster trade promotion plannin planning g

S AP In Invoice voice Receipts and Goods G oods Receipts Accelerate your financial close while ensuring compliance with your corporate rules S AP Working Working Capital Analytics Analytics Monitor and analyze analyze your Days Sales Outstanding Outstanding in real time S AP Supply Chain Info Info Centre Fully exploit your Demand and Supply Planning data for better decision making, S AP Acces Accesss Control Role Role Analytics Analytics Quickly Want a super-ch s uper-charged arged data warehouse? warehouse? SAP BusinessObjects Explorer with SAP HANA

Analytics and business business intelligence intelligence at a t blazing speed

My GreenSpot

SAP is teaming up with the World Wildlife Fund (the world’s leading conservation

organization) to preserve and protect endangered forests and their ecologies with SAP HANA One.. One

Preserve Your GreenSpot SAP HANA for Humanity

We provide the necessary technology and the associated technical resources to help nonprofits and governmental agencies analyze and visualize their large data sets to solve pressing global problems.

Learn More Care Circles

Find and deliver the best care. Care Circles is a free service that helps patients and their families find best practices in caregiving car egiving from from experts e xperts and caregivers around the the world. world.

Learn More Recalls Plus

We track product and food safety so you don’t have to. Make a list. Receive alerts. Keep your kids safe.

Learn More

SAP Busi Business ness Suite Suit e Powered by SAP HA HANA NA — Business Scenari Sc enarios os SAP has set up an automated automated tool call Business Business Scenario Recommendations Recommendations for SAP Business Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA HAN A to help you find find and assess asse ss the areas ar eas where SAP HANA will bring bring the most value to your company’s SAP Business Suite implementation. This tool provides a report that includes tailored recommendations for optimizations and scenarios based on your actual current production system usage data.

To obtain your personalized assessment, you need to fill out the form at suiteonhana.com and then upload a screenshot of your ST03N-Workload Monitor screen in your production system. The entire process takes about 5–10 minutes. SAP will then input your actual workload data into the tool and prepare a customized report that highlights the various scenarios that will benefit from adding adding SAP HANA HAN A to your SAP Business Business Suite landscape. landscape.

You can view an example of a typical business scenario recommendation report at this site: http://suiteonh http ://suiteonhana.com/assets/business_scenario_recomme ana.com/assets/business_scenario_recommendatio ndations/en/cross-ind ns/en/cross-industry.p ustry.pdf  df 

SAP Business Business Suite appli a pplicat catiions using SAP HAN HANA A as (the ( the only) d ata base In this scenario, applications including SAP ERP, SAP CRM, and SAP Supply Chain Management (SAP SCM) can fully run on top of SAP HANA in an integrated manner *. As part of this first wave of innovations, SAP delivers optimizations for 23 business value scenarios across key lines of business (e.g., finance, sales, marketing, service, procurement, and HR) and more than 400 industry-specific reports to achieve unprecedented performance. See the details below for for examples of scenarios in the SAP Business Suite that leverage SAP HANA. The available ava ilable SAP Rapid-deployment Rapid-deployment solutions solutions in these these areas are: CRM rapid-deployment solution with SAP HANA, HANA , is bringing together software and services to give you essential esse ntial marketing, sales and service function functionality. ality. With SAP ERP powere powered d by SAP HANA HAN A Rapid-Deployment Solutions, Solutions, SAP  SAP is simply sim ply combinin combining g together the best suite of applications and the next generation best performing platform for doing doing real-time rea l-time business: SAP ERP for Finance & Controlling Rapid Deployment Solution powered by SAP HANA With this rapid-deployment solution, you can implement a financial and management accounting solution quickly and affordably. SAP ERP for Trading Rapid Deployment Solution powered by SAP HANA With this rapid-deployment solution, you can quickly and affordably implement functionality to enable predefined business scenarios that are crucial for companies active in trading

industries. SAP ERP for Manufacturing Rapid Deployment Solution powered by SAP HANA With this rapid-deployment solution, you can quickly and affordably implement functionality to enable predefined predefined business scenarios that are crucial for companies active in the process, process, discrete, and a nd repetitive manufacturing manufacturing industries. industries.

Business Scenarios Scenari os that t hat direc d irectly tly benefit benefit from runnin running g on SAP HAN HANA A In this section se ction,, we will review the current SAP HANA–e HAN A–enabled nabled business business scenarios included included in the SAP Business Suite. A business scenario, scenario, in this context, consists of a comprehensive set of business processes that are enabled by one or more applications within the SAP Business Suite. For example, Strategic Purchase Optimization utilizes data from multiple areas including Supply Chain Management and Procurement, and Accelerated Organizational Changes Publishing draws primarily from HCM data. Irrespective of the data source, the critical point conveyed in the following scenarios is that many of these business functions can be performed much faster — and, consequently, much more frequently — by utilizing SAP HANA. For many business, this capability represents a wish that was difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill in the pre-HANA days. In some cases, the ability to perform certain scenarios more frequently enables businesses to perform more “what-if” type analyses, which in turn help key personnel make better decisions in a more timely manner. This ability to perform complex transactions and reports in “real time” is a significant boost to driving value within the enterprise. Fast Financial Close Real-Time Financ F inancial ial Performance Efficientt Receivables Management Efficien Ma nagement Efficientt Payables Management Efficien Ma nagement Central Treasury Treas ury Exposure Exposure management Access Contro Controll Role Analytic A nalytics s Automated Cross-System Process Proces s Control Optimized Optimiz ed Quote Management M anagement Real-Time Inventory management Efficientt Procurement Efficien P rocurement Strategic Purchase Opti Optimization mization Maximized Asset A sset utili utilization zation and Uptime Uptime Accelerated Accelera ted Organi Organizational zational Changes Publi Publishing shing Insight-Driven InsightDriven Workf Workforce orce Cost Management M anagement Real-Time material Planning Instant Material Mate rial Flow Control Comprehensive Engineer-to-Order Engineer-to-Order Project Management M anagement Maximized Produc Productivity tivity and Profitability of Complex Projects Pr ojects

Fast Financial Close A financial close defines the financial results of a group as required for presentation to

external and internal stakeholders by valuating business activities from an accounting perspective. It closes the books for all individual companies. A corporate close for the group and subgroups and financial disclosures combine quantitative data with comprehensive qualitative information. A fast financial close is a core element of financial excellence. Support for real-time, fast financial close offers a single multi-dimensional database and shared functionality for accounting and consolidation, providing governance, compliance, and transparency throughout financial close management. With deeper and faster insight down to the lowest level of detail, it delivers quality at the source, process efficiencies, a common view across financials (invoices) and logistics (goods receipts), and faster reconciliation. Drill-through for simulation of organizational changes is available.

Real-Time Financial Performance Managing performance from a financial perspective is becoming more crucial every day. Ontime results for all audit- and analysis-related inquiries and an ability to react to risks and opportunities exemplify the need for a transparent and efficient process to deliver financial information on time and accurately. You need to manage operations and related performance successfully in today’s volatile business conditions: Integrated planning uses a case-driven environment that allows new planning scenarios and user-interaction scenarios. Real-time close helps ensure accelerated closing activities through faster processes, reporting without data latency, and heterogeneous consolidation landscapes. Product costing enables the modeling and simulation of design-to-cost product cost in real time, management of the impact of product and production cost across an organization for volatile resource and commodity prices, and comprehensive productcost management analytics.

Efficient Receivables Management Receivables management is a core finance function to manage the payment of customer invoices. By reducing the number of days sales outstanding (DSO) and bad-debt write-offs and by managing billing disputes and collections activities, you can constantly monitor the credit risk of your customer base. The goal of receivables management is to optimize the working capital to enable investment and growth. Support for increased effectiveness of receivables management offers algorithms to match incoming payments and invoices, freeing headcount to focus on value-added activities and processes such as collections, dispute, and credit management. All information is in real time, not batch, to increase the transparency of the working capital provided in the payment and working capital dashboard. Exceptions in the process can be pushed to a mobile device to offer immediate action from everywhere. Efficient Payables Manag ement Payables management focuses on evaluating, validating, posting, and managing payments, and archiving of an invoice. Key elements of the accounts payable process include integration, automation, standardization, and workflows. Close collaboration with the treasury

team optimizes DSO. In addition, e-invoicing becomes more prominent, but paper-based invoices remain. Support for this business scenario combines reports in payables and cash position to help payables clerks make the right financial decisions. Real-time and accurate insight into vendor-opened receipts leads to better scheduling of payment runs and provides flexible and automated payments in real time through parallelization of different payment runs.

Central Treasury Exposure management Treasury and financial risk management involves a variety of processes, from cash and liquidity management to the management of financial transactions like money market, foreign exchange, derivatives, debt instruments, securities, and commodity paper deals. You need a holistic view of these processes to be able to respond to changes in a quick, efficient, and compliant manner, taking into account data from past, present, and future planning. The treasury exposure hub powered by SAP HANA is part of support for the comprehensive process of treasury and financial risk management. It enables global financial risk management on the ERP software system at headquarters as the central integration platform. The platform offers a lower total cost of ownership, central monitoring, data consistency, and traceability of business events for financial and external auditing. The treasury exposure hub is the starting point for analytical applications that provide key performance indicators.  Access Contro l Role Analytics As a result of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the United States and similar legislation in other countries, nearly all publicly listed companies now have a dedicated compliance function. Elimination of segregation of duties was initially a main reason to implement a solution to identify access risks. But companies are now striving to evolve many risk and compliance tools, from bottom-line savings and risk avoidance to top-line strategic advantage. Using SAP HANA, role administrators can perform real-time analysis on the roles, their usage, similarity with other roles, and options for reuse to advise business owners about the most efficient usage to avoid creating new roles. Business executives can analyze roles to uncover hidden downsides and reduce the uncertainty of many financial and operational planning decisions, such as reorganization.  Aut omated Cross-System Process Contro l You need process control to perform automated testing (focused on compliance) and continuous control monitoring (focused on compliance and on process efficiency and effectiveness). Because of increasing regulations and policies, you must deliver traceable monitoring and remedial activities to demonstrate compliance. Using queries, reports, events, and analytics, you keep business processes and systems under control. Using SAP HANA, you can centralize all data from multiple systems into a single repository with excellent performance and gain the ability to use complex business rules for detailed analysis. SAP HANA increases the usability and power of automated testing and monitoring. Optimized Q uote Management

Informed customers expect a superior sales experience, and internal stakeholders want to use the almost unlimited amount of Big Data on sales. It is essential to embrace these trends early in the order-to-cash business. Quote management thus gains importance as a step in this business process. A huge amount of customer data from diverse categories must be captured in one quote. SAP HANA enables smart and context-based recommendations based on historical customer and sales information. Individually tailored offers can be made to fulfill customer needs in a fast and user-friendly way. The recommendations also embrace predictive information, such as the conversion rate and time from quote to order and the likelihood of  paying on time based on sales volume. Recommendations can also take into consideration orders and materials for sales representatives to offer the best quote in real time to customers when serving them.

Real-Time Inventor y management Inventory management handles the recording and tracking of stocks of materials on a quantity and value basis. It covers the planning, entry, and documentation of stock movements like goods receipts and issues, internal physical stock transfers, and transfer postings. These movements lead to a large volume of business documents. Inventory management is also responsible for the performance of physical inventory control. Real-time inventory management provides stock insight and monitoring with high performance to support demand-driven procurement. It increases process efficiency in adjacent procurement processes such as purchase order or invoice processing. An analytical monitor for inventory management, including various dashboards and performance improvements, is available to enhance the user experience and improve the efficiency of the process. Efficient Pro curement Because of intense competitive pressure, you often absorb increased costs for commodities, goods, or services to avoid passing them on to your customers. You aim to boost productivity and drive innovation to lower additional costs. To drive cost-effective, competitive global supply chains, you leverage procurement software to relieve slow and costly paper-based processes, disproportionately high transaction costs, frequent errors, and maverick spending. Because SAP HANA lets you analyze massive quantities of data in local memory, the results of complex inquiries and transactions are available at your fingertips. You can update plans, run simulations, and execute decisions based on real-time data. Accelerate lengthy processing of purchasing documents that arises from a multitude of line items and a long purchase order history. Provide top business intelligence reports in procurement side by side to help ensure that you get real-time data with high performance and a modern user interface. Support fast business decisions and user adoption with flexible configuration options for procurement analysis, and provide complete visibility into end-toend procurement activities. Strategic Purchase Optimization

Pressured to reduce supply costs while maintaining high-quality output, you seek greater efficiencies and savings from your procurement operations. You know that high-performance organizations employ spend-analysis tools, sourcing and process automation, and standardized procurement operations. A centralized model facilitates negotiations and better supplier relationships. Provide the purchaser with a comprehensive, complete, and real-time working environment and view of business transactions and business data related to the strategic suppliers. Offer company-wide search for purchasing business documents to influence actual payment conditions and rebates. Influence contract negotiations proactively by getting insight into sales planning and sales orders.

Maximized Asset u tilization and Uptime In asset-intensive industries, you need to handle multiple maintenance plans that must be scheduled frequently. SAP software streamlines planning such activities with maintenance work orders. In traditional systems, this transaction is triggered at regular intervals using a batch program. To remain competitive, you look for new ways to get the most out of your assets by ensuring that they stay up and running. With scheduling transaction IP30H, based on SAP HANA, you can schedule all existing maintenance plans within a specific time frame. The software now uses the power of SAP HANA to automatically preselect maintenance plans that are due. The feature avoids the need for any parameter restrictions. This approach helps ensure that the software processes only maintenance plans that are due and that no call objects are missed. It delivers the results much faster and in a user-friendly transaction.  Accelerated Org anizational Chang es Publishing The performance of HR applications and related reporting, analytics, and planning depend to a large extent on how quickly the software can work through hierarchies in any given context. More important, the resulting wait times have a direct bearing on the overall user experience and satisfaction. Push HR structural evaluations and authorizations to SAP HANA to accelerate the definition of structural authorizations (who gets access to what), organization and cost center hierarchy, and reporting hierarchy. Determine which manager is responsible for the organization hierarchy and define logical views in the learning catalog to provide reporting and analysis without degrading performance. Insight-Driven Workforce Cost Manag ement Time and payroll processes create immense amounts of valuable operational data that can bring positive and negative trends to light. The data can provide insight into the fully loaded cost of employees and real-time costs associated with operations, projects, campaigns, and so on. An inability to tap this information source quickly and easily counteracts your efforts to drive HR efficiencies and introduce agile business processes. Effective and efficient payroll exception handling is based on real-time data through provision of rapid insight into payroll-related workforce costs and trends in core HR functions. The functions include drill-down to employee and earning details for the fully loaded cost of 

employees, remuneration and overtime based on master data, and time management data stored in payroll results. Hierarchical structures are based on organizational management or cost center in reporting and analysis.

Real-Time material Planning Material requirements planning (MRP) determines material shortages by comparing sales orders, forecast demand, and stock-transfer demand with inventory and expected material receipts. It creates planned orders or purchase requisitions for the missing material. MRP is typically performed in time-consuming batch mode, so that decisions can be based only on the data derived from periodic runs; production and sales suffer as a result. Faster re-planning allows more frequent MRP runs in shorter cycles by providing global, cross-plant planning where demand information is propagated faster through the supply chain. Faster reactions to demand changes reduce the risk of stock-outs and allow reduced safety stocks. This lets users run what-if scenarios in real time to make decisions faster regarding reallocation and outsourcing. This functionality instantly updates supply network collaboration with the latest demand information to help suppliers react much faster. Instant Material Flow Control The results of MRP are stored in MRP lists. Material receipts and requirements for selected materials can be checked in the stock and requirement list. Production planners can select MRP lists with problems and stock and requirement lists with a short range of coverage (when critical to performance). Production planning and purchasing departments often make decisions based on outdated information from batch runs. Early identification of critical materials (such as range of coverage below threshold, unconsumed forecast, overconsumed forecast, inventory without demand, and so on) and a feasibility check of production orders can be done on the fly. This functionality enables better production-order sequences to help determine the fraction of demand needed for sales orders, leading to lower work in progress, shorter lead times, and better due-date performance when only the required quantity is produced. Comprehensive Engineer-to-Or der Project Management Project-driven procurement and progress monitoring are vital to executing complex projects successfully. The huge volume of real-time data and time-consuming transactions for maintaining or analyzing project data constrain project and program engineers in making decisions when needed. Waiting for the relevant data to be provided slows engineers down significantly. Support for this business scenario combines the speed and acceleration of SAP HANA and the integrated processes in the SAP ERP application for complex projects. Real-time progress monitoring along the project lifecycle, including version comparison and combined analysis of  financials and logistics data, enables faster decision making so you can act and react to real project execution work. New project line-item reporting with acceleration and improved user experience is available to support in-depth analysis of complex projects. Maximized Prod uctivity and Profitability of Complex Project s

Monitoring of progress is a key to successful execution of complex projects. The main challenge is the volume of data. Project analysis and progress monitoring are timeconsuming due to high volumes of data for complex, lengthy projects. Project or program engineers cannot provide the information needed to decide on natural deviations (time, quality, and costs) in project execution. Cross-project or program monitoring is even more challenging. Support for monitoring and analysis of large projects and programs in real time lets you decide faster, mitigate risks, and deliver the best resource productivity and project profitability. Progress monitoring along the project lifecycle can include version comparison, and a combined analysis of financials and logistics data enables decisions to be made for acting and reacting within a window of opportunity. Indirect improvements through SAP HANA arise in production planning, materials management, controlling, and financials because of tight integration.

Chapter 5

SAP Business Warehouse Powered by SAP HANA This chapter was contributed by Storm Archer III (@stormarcher3). Product Expert, SAP  Business Warehouse Product Management 

Introduction SAP Business Warehouse (BW) is the first SAP application to be “HANA-fied” to take advantage of the power of SAP HANA. With more than 14,000 SAP BW implementations globally, SAP BW has become a critical piece of the IT landscape, and it is particularly well suited to benefit from the speed and simplicity that SAP HANA can provide to applications. To discuss the benefits of SAP BW Powered by SAP HANA, a brief introduction to SAP BW and some recent history of its evolution is in order. Given the scope of this book, we’ll have to assume that readers are already familiar with SAP BW concepts. Also, we’ll refer to many online resources for deeper technical details. With this background, we’ll then illustrate the additional power and functionality that SAP HANA adds to SAP BW.

SAP Business Warehouse (BW) SAP BW is an application that SAP developed in the 1990s. It is essentially an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) application that includes many built-in functions to create an end-to-end EDW solution. In addition, SAP BW includes a substantial amount of content based on best business practices. Many SAP customers work with SAP directly through influence councils and the global SAP User groups to define new features and validate content additions Customers frequently inquire about the differences between SAP BW and their existing EDW solution. To answer this question, we need to be familiar with the fundamental features common to all EDWs. All EDW systems include a database and a data modeling tool. Many companies that implement an EDW will choose an alternate modeling tool based on features and functionality. In addition, there are a number of other tools that companies need to add to complete their enterprise-ready data warehouse. Specifically, they will need a contentmanagement tool, a metadata-management tool, security software, a master data manager, workflow capabilities, and many more. The challenge most companies face is integrating all of  these software tools into one seamless operation. As you might suspect, this is often easier said than done. SAP BW provides many of the functions needed to install an enterprise-ready EDW. The major difference between SAP BW and these other EDWs is that the additional software elements that are “add-ons” in a traditional EDW are included in SAP BW, and they work together right out of the box. In addition, SAP BW offers solutions to customers who need to expand the included functionality. An example is a scenario in which the included security is adequate, but the customer needs to participate in a greater identity management solution (e.g., SAP Identity Management Services.)

SAP BW and In-Memory Computing One of the fundamental aspects of EDW systems is their ability to manage multidimensional data (cubes) and to conduct analytical operations on those data. As previously mentioned, one key element of an EDW is a database. A major limitation of most databases is that they were designed and optimized to manipulate transactional data stored in a relational database management system (RDBMS). More specifically, they were configured to provide the best performance for row-based inserts imported from OLTP applications. EDWs are a different breed of application entirely. As OLAP rather than OLTP applications, their primary role is to read data from the database and display them in reports or analytical views. EDWs almost never insert data into rows as an OLTP application does. Therefore, many of the performance issues (and related technical solutions) in the EDW are a direct result of this mismatch between the needs of the application for OLAP workloads and the OLTP design of the underlying databases. For an EDW to operate with the complex data needed for advanced analytics, the data warehouse application has developed functionality that circumvents the basic limitation of  the database and provides better performance. This structure is referred to as the Layered Scalable Architecture (LSA) model. Although the LSA model provides a foundation for developing data models, the additional layers of functionality that are designed to work around the limitations of relational databases cause performance issues as the amount of data increases. Specifically, these additional layers limit the flexibility of the system and place heavy workloads on the hardware. To combat this problem, SAP introduced the SAP BW Accelerator (BWA) in 2005. BWA is an inmemory appliance that can be added to the SAP BW system landscape to provide query acceleration and to offload some SAP BW functions to the appliance. Basically, an index of a slice of data from the BW system, such as a cube, is copied to BWA and stored in RAM. This function is very similar to the way that Google indexes websites. Next, user queries are directed to the in-memory columnar index of the data, rather than to the physical data arranged in rows on physical disks in the BW system. SAP designed this shift to in-memory indexing for queries as a workaround to avoid the performance penalties that must be paid when users attempt to read large datasets off a disk-based database. SAP BWA provided an in-memory, columnar system that allowed queries to operate up to 100 times faster than a disk-based system. This development was an important leap for many SAP BW customers who were experiencing difficulties due to the limiting nature of the RDBMS. In many ways, the introduction of BWA was the first real proof point for SAP that in-memory databases could provide the “magic bullet” to eliminate the horrible performance issues inherent in diskbased databases while simultaneously reducing the costs and complexity of the application that had to be built around these performance bottlenecks.

Evolving In-Memory Footprint in SAP NetWeaver BW 

Figure 1: SAP BW and In-Memory Technolog y

This description of SAP BWA sounds very similar to SAP HANA. There is, however, one fundamental difference between the two systems; namely, BWA is a caching engine rather than a database. SAP HANA can now take the place of a traditional RDBMS and an SAP BWA appliance. This chapter will examine the benefits of replacing an existing database with or without SAP BWA with SAP HANA as the database.

SAP HANA — Specific Enhancements for SAP BW  Companies typically implement SAP HANA to enhance their system’s performance and to process voluminous amounts of data. When companies evaluate their performance, they generally identify specific areas that need improvement; most commonly, query performance, data loading, and software add-on/application performance. Below we provide examples of  how in-memory computing both enhances performance and accelerates applications. SAP BW 7.3x offers a substantial number of improvements over traditional RDBMS configurations. Some of these improvements also reduce both administration costs and total cost of ownership (TCO). With each release, SAP BW introduces new innovations to better support customers’ business operations.

Query Performance Over the past decade, the amount of data that businesses need to query and analyze has grown exponentially. Unfortunately, as we’ve already discussed, relational databases were not designed around multidimensional data models in the EDW. To overcome the limitations of the transactional-based databases, EDW systems incorporated functionality — aggregates, fact tables, and other features — into the LSA model. Today, however, the availability of columnar databases and in-memory technologies has made these additional elements obsolete. In 2005, SAP introduced the SAP BW Accelerator as a query accelerator. As SAP BWA matured, SAP provided additional engines and features. Specifically, SAP BW on

SAP HANA has incorporated the query acceleration and engines from BWA, along with other valuable columnar database features. As with the SAP BW Accelerator, performance is one of the key drivers for in-memory computing. In-memory computing improves performance in a number of areas. From the end user perspective, query response time is often one of the primary elements in system performance. SAP BW Accelerator delivered approximately 100 times the query performance compared to a relational database alone. SAP BW Powered by SAP HANA provides similar results for end user query response times. Of course, customer results have varied and will vary based on configuration and content. Some customers have reported query performance greater than SAP BWA. The general rule, however, is to expect similar query performance. In an SAP BW with SAP BWA implementation, customers have to maintain two systems. This is one area where this architecture can reduce both TCO and administration costs. Further, when companies utilize an SAP BWA appliance, they must obtain separate licenses for the relational database and for SAP BWA. They also need to maintain two sets of  hardware and data. In contrast, implementing SAP HANA as the database for SAP BW involves only a single hardware appliance and license model. From an administration point of  view, then, the customer no longer needs to manage multiple data sets. By reducing redundancy, improving data lifecycle management, and eliminating hardware and license duplication, SAP HANA dramatically reduces a company’s TCO.

Figure 2: Migrat ion from SAP BW & BWA to SAP BW on SAP H ANA

Figure 3: SAP BW on SAP HANA Architecture

Data-Loading Performance In contrast to SAP BWA, SAP HANA provides much more functionality to the SAP BW than simply query acceleration. In the business environment for many SAP customers, the need for real-time or near real-time data reporting has dramatically increased. With their existing systems, the time required to extract data from a source system is fairly static and predictable; it generally comprises about 20% of the data load process. The remaining 80% is spent on data activation and updates. This is where the intelligence and deep integration of  the SAP HANA appliance and the hardware are able to reduce this time considerably.

Figure 4: In-Memory Exec ut ion in S AP BW 

The process of data activation requires business logic from the application to perform activation actions on the data updates. When this business logic exists entirely in the application, potentially millions or billions of round trips occur between the database server and the application server. With SAP HANA, the business logic for the activation is passed to the SAP HANA appliance along with the data. This arrangement reduces the number of round trips between SAP BW and the SAP HANA appliance to only a few. When SAP was tested, the data-loading improvement was 10 times that of an RDBMS alone. Customers have reported improvement rates ranging from 6 times to more than 20 times. Of course, the actual customer performance is dependent on a number of factors. Overall, then, we can safely use an average of 6 to 10 times as a guideline.

Data Loading

Figure 5: SAP BW on SAP HANA DSO Acceleration

By utilizing the enhanced data-loading and analytic capabilities of SAP HANA, customers have been able to provide their businesses with more rapid results to data and analytics use cases. In addition, the reduced load times enable them to run updates and analysis operations more often without severely affecting SAP BW operations. Many IT departments currently have severely limited windows for regular updates due to the global nature of  business operations. By reducing data-loading times, SAP BW and SAP HANA enable IT operations to provide greater support to the business.

Data Model Efficiency As mentioned earlier, EDW systems added specific functionality to enable the RDBMS to process analytic operations on vast amounts of data. SAP HANA makes it possible for users to eliminate many of these artifacts, thereby making the data model more efficient. This process is known as “flattening” the LSA model. SAP BW 7.3x delivered programs to convert existing data store objects (DSOs) and info cubes into SAP HANA-optimized DSOs and info cubes. While the old structures continue to operate with SAP HANA as the database, the performance is improved by converting to the SAP HANA-optimized structures.

Figure 6 : Conversion of SAP BW Dat a S t ructures

In this new structure, the most common question is whether info cubes are still needed. The answer is that SAP HANA still utilizes info cubes, but their role and use are more defined. Customers have been able to reduce the need for info cubes dramatically and report directly against a DSO. In general, info cubes are utilized only in certain specific scenarios: (1) when multiple DSOs are consolidated, (2) when additional transformations are needed, or (3) when an add-in application requires an info cube for specific operations. The lighter LSA model structure that allows for more flexibility makes data modeling easier and more efficient. This efficiency generally leads to a further reduction in TCO, although quantifying these savings is problematic.

Application Improvement There are a number of add-in applications for SAP BW, including Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM), Integrated Planning (BI-IP), and Corporate Performance Management (CPM). As with data-activation processes, these applications utilize complete business logic as an integral part of the solution. When the application server has to host the business logic, the number of round trips to the database server can be extremely large. These add-in

applications are now being “HANA-fied” to fully utilize SAP HANA to process the business logic inside the database rather than up in the application layer. The result is much improved performance from multiple areas within the application.

SAP In-Memory Planning

Figure 7 : Planning in S AP BW on SAP HANA

SAP BW Operational Efficiency and SAP HANA Model Interoperability SAP BW 7.30 SP8 and SAP HANA SP5 have delivered new efficiency and flexibility capabilities. As database sizes in SAP BW landscapes have increased, SAP has been reevaluating which data need to be in memory — that is, “active” data — and which data can be loaded as needed — that is, “non-active” data. Significantly, SAP has configured SAP BW 7.30 SP8 and SAP HANA SP5 to flag all PSA tables and write-optimized DSOs as non-active. Consequently, the non-active data will remain on disk persistence until they are needed. In addition, they will be the first data to be flushed from memory when they are no longer needed. Customers who have implemented these new systems have reported that SAP HANA memory utilization has been reduced by roughly 20%. In addition to the features discussed above, SAP has incorporated greater flexibility in utilizing SAP HANA data models with native SAP BW models. Some of these innovations provide a database connect (DB connection), virtual provider, transient provider, and open hub services to consume SAP BW and SAP HANA data. This flexibility allows for maximum options in data consolidation and reporting.

Figure 8 : Open Hub Services

SAP BW on SAP HANA Performance & TCO Benchmarks SAP HANA Performance Benchmarks: Customers frequently ask SAP about benchmarks to verify performance claims for both SAP BW on SAP HANA and SAP HANA standalone. Below you will find several links to the various performance benchmarks relevant to SAP BW and SAP HANA. Recently, SAP has released a formal benchmark test called BW EML (Enhanced Mix Load) benchmark, which considers: Near real-time reporting Ad-hoc reporting capabilities Reduction of TCO. Please see these links for more details and results: http://www.sap.com/campaigns/benchmark/appbm_bweml.epx http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/bweml-results.htm

In addition you can access the SAP HANA One Petabyte Test with a similar data model to what many SAP BW customers are using: http://www.saphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2012/11/12/the-sap-hana-one-petabytetest Whitepaper — SAP HANA Performance https://www.experiencesaphana.com/docs/DOC-1647 Whitepaper — SAP and HP Breaking Analytic Performance Barriers with SAP HANA and HP AppSystems https://www.experiencesaphana.com/docs/DOC-1769 Performance Test Report — SAP HANA https://www.experiencesaphana.com/docs/DOC-1755 SAP HANA Performance: 100TB Performance Test Results http://www.experiencesaphana.com/docs/DOC-2381 TCO for SAP BW on SAP HANA https://www.experiencesaphana.com/docs/DOC-1769 https://www.experiencesaphana.com/docs/DOC-1755 SAP has also conducted individual benchmarks with SAP customers who migrated their BW systems on RDBMS to BW on SAP HANA. Please contact your account team for results from SAP reference customers.

Implementation and Migration SAP customers who are looking to implement SAP HANA in the SAP BW environment have several choices to make as to the most effective way to carry out that deployment. Customers with a mature SAP BW environment typically consider an OS/DB Migration. Other customers perceive an SAP HANA deployment as an opportunity to cleanse an existing environment by setting up a new landscape and manually transferring the configurations from an existing implementation to a new installation. Both options have their benefits and their challenges. MUST READ: Upgrade/Migration/Implementation — SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse 7.3 and higher The purely technical aspect of the implementation or migration is generally only a portion of the overall project plan. Customers who choose to manually move configurations from an existing installation to a new implementation will need to address a number of challenges. These customers often have to reach the minimum requirements (listed below), object optimization, and implementation of new features. In contrast, customers who implement new installations will not experience many problems in these areas. As a general rule, before selecting a project course of action, all customers should perform an in-depth project scoping

and system analysis to determine whether migration or re-implementation is the better option. Once the project direction has been fixed, the next step is to determine what additional functional changes can be implemented as part of the initial project scope. Customers often choose to break up the technical and functional phases of the implementation into different projects. Project scoping generally defines the initial technical phases where customers can determine what functional elements need to be included in the migration. Often, the various business units will request and require specific functionality as part of funding the overall project. In general, the greater the functional scope, the greater the required project resources, time, and costs. Customers who have migrated have determined that functionality can be implemented in a number of areas without significantly impacting their existing system.

Figure 9 : SAP BW Migrat ion Process

For customers who decide to perform an OS/DB migration, SAP has provided some additional tools they can utilize to expedite some of the technical steps. When a customer performs a migration, SAP requires that a Certified Migration Consultant execute the production system activities. This person does not have to be an external, SAP, or consultant. Companies often employ staff who are certified in migrations. Even in these cases, however, it is often still advisable to work with a specialist who has been specially trained and is proficient with the following SAP BW-specific tools: Dual-Stack Split Tool Combined Unicode conversion and Database Migration Post-Copy Automation (PCA) tool Software Update Manager http://service.sap.com/sltoolset In addition, all migrations should include an Archiving/Near Line Storage review, sizing, and post-migration review. The PCA tool provides a wizard-style interface that details the post-copy and post-migration steps to deliver an optimized system. Every installation is unique and has specific areas that require attention. When these items are documented and addressed, the overall project will run more smoothly and with a greater certainty of 

achieving the expected results. Customers who are looking for a predefined service offering either delivered by SAP Consulting or their preferred implementation partner can leverage SAP Rapid Deployment solutions for a smooth migration based on best practices. The database migration of SAP BW to HANA is subject of the “rapid database migration of SAP BW to SAP HANA”. SAP BW Near-Line Storage rapid-deployment solution helps to reduce your amount of data stored in underlying database of BW by archiving them into SAP Sybase IQ as near-line storage solution.

Software Prerequisites for SAP BW on SAP HANA Now that we have defined the basics of SAP BW and the associated architecture, it is time to consider what it takes to run SAP BW Powered by SAP HANA. Below we list the minimum software requirements: SAP BW 7.30 Service Pack 5 (Ramp-Up Release) SAP HANA 1.0 Service Pack 3 (Ramp-Up Release) SAP BW 7.3x Central Instance installed on separate hardware. No sharing with SAP HANA Appliance. Additional System Requirements: SAP BW => 7.3x Unicode Only SAP BW =>7.3x Analytic Authorizations (Upgrade Requirement) SAP BW Add-on software packages support confirmed. Not all add-on software had initial support for SAP BW Powered by SAP HANA. At the time of this writing, most add-ons are supported with release-level requirements. Always check the SAP notes. SAP BW and BW JAVA must be a split-stack implementation. SAP HANA does not currently support SAP JAVA Usage Type. Check SAP Business Objects 4.0 support. SAP BW provides installation options for both clean installations and upgrades. Upgrades can require additional steps. Going further, these steps frequently involve additional time, planning, and system downtime.

Check your SAP BW system for SAP HANA Readiness — free Checklist tool! Use the Checklist Tool developed by SAP Customer Solution Adoption (CSA) and SAP Development to automate the check of best practice guidelines for operations and prerequisites for migrating an existing SAP BW deployment to the SAP HANA platform. Please see SAP Note 1729988  for detailed how-to documentation, and review the corresponding ABAP code to run the check on your own system.

Scoping/Sizing Topics for SAP BW on SAP HANA

In any implementation, there are several inputs that affect the project timeline and budget cycle. Project planning should lay out the scope, resources, and TCO benefits. Although some of these TCO improvements will be soft in terms of business efficiency, they can be categorized as elements of the overall expected results. These areas will be identified throughout the rest of this chapter. Sizing  — Any project, whether a new installation or an upgrade, should include a sizing exercise to determine what resources will be required for a successful productive go-live. These resources are CPU, memory (SAP BW and SAP HANA), and disk storage. Customers who are performing new installations need to determine how much volume and what scenarios they will implement. Their SAP account executive can assist them in determining what initial sizing is required. The SAP Service Market Place also has a quicksizer available that will help customers approximate their system requirements. That link is http://service.sap.com/quicksizer. In addition, SAP has provided an ABAP-based sizing tool. Please see SAP Note 1736976 for the program and more details.

Figure 10: SAP BW on SAP HANA Landscape Optio ns

Upgrade project sizing can be a bit more challenging. Customers need to take into consideration the scope of the upgrade to determine the resource requirements. One example is whether the upgrade scope includes a phase to perform a Unicode conversion. Typically, the SAP BW system will require more CPU and memory when running Unicode. Disk storage requirements for Unicode conversions can vary. When a Unicode conversion is performed, the database is re-organized, and all empty space between data blocks is eliminated. In some cases, this process reduces the database size. When a company upgrades to SAP HANA, the size of the data on their existing system is a direct input as to what sizing they require for the appliance and the disk storage. SAP HANA

uses sophisticated compression algorithms to compress the data. This compression affects how much RAM is required for the data. Because SAP HANA is an in-memory database, additional RAM is required for work processing space. The current rule for working space is twice the amount of data RAM. The amount of RAM required for a system depends on the amount of source data and the brand of database in the current system. Some RDBMS already have some amount of  compression. This will reduce the effective overall compression that SAP HANA will achieve after migration. Through the course of many implementations, SAP has observed varying levels of compression. In general, the basic rule is to expect a 6:1 compression rate. When applying the working RAM space required, the expected compression is 3:1. Some customers have reported much higher compression rates, but the makeup of the data and the source RDBMS plays a significant role in determining the effective compression rate. One additional consideration for SAP HANA appliance size is based on two additional factors: 1. Data-archiving strategy (Archive and Near Line Storage) 2. SAP BW and SAP HANA releases. SAP recommends that customers create a data-archiving strategy. Archiving and near line storage (NLS) follow a fairly similar process. Archiving is the process of exporting older data into offline storage. Near line storage solutions also export older data, but to a compressed online  storage facility. NLS solutions have the benefit of reducing the size of the online database while still allowing queries to access the archived data if needed. The archive solution requires that the data are restored to the system before queries will show the archive data. The sooner a company develops an archiving strategy, the more manageable their system will become. With SAP BW 7.30 Service Pack 8 and SAP HANA 1.0 Service Pack 5, SAP introduced new functionality. This functionality is referred to as Active/Not-Active data. With the release of  the updated SAP BW and SAP HANA, certain data are not loaded into memory by default. In addition, customers can elect to flag certain content as not-active. The not-active data are loaded into memory only when they are needed. They are also the first to be flushed when they are no longer being used. By default, BW now automatically marks all PSA tables and all write-optimized DSOs as not-active. According to initial customer reviews, the not-active data concept reduced the SAP HANA system size by approximately 20%. The size of some SAP BW systems will require a “scale-out” implementation of the SAP HANA appliance. As with all SAP HANA implementations, the configuration has to be certified by the hardware partner. In addition, SAP provides extended monitoring for all scale-out projects. Some elements of the system require specific tuning and configurations to provide optimal functionality. SAP recommends that all customers implementing SAP BW Powered by SAP HANA in a scale-out scenario register for extended monitoring with SAP Active Global Support. For more technical details on scale-out for BW/HANA:

SAP BW Powered by SAP HANA Scale-out — Best Practices

Customers who create an effective archiving strategy and implement the latest SAP BW release will be better able to estimate the required initial system size. Note that SAP HANA Appliances must be certified by both SAP and the hardware vendor prior to implementation.

Landscape Options When implementing SAP BW Powered by SAP HANA, customers need to consider some specific configurations. For example, they need to understand what software elements need to be run on dedicated hardware and when they can combine scenarios. SAP recommends that each system utilize dedicated hardware. This is specifically important in Productive environments. In an SAP BW Powered by SAP HANA landscape, the applications servers and central instance systems are separate from the SAP HANA Appliance system. Below we discuss a number of configurations that SAP often observes at customer sites. From the SAP HANA appliance view, there are a number of possible configurations. SAP has defined some limitations on these configurations, as we explain below.

DEV/SANDBOX/TRAIN Systems that fall into the DEV/SANDBOX/TRAIN groups are those that tend to have lighter workloads. The most common question that SAP receives is whether multiple existing systems can be consolidated into a single physical system to minimize hardware/system costs. As stated above, SAP still recommends that customers utilize separate hardware for each system. Nevertheless, customers frequently combine SAP SIDs on one server. Customers are technically able to put multiple SIDs on a single SAP HANA appliance. The challenge in this scenario revolves around the software lifecycle and system management. If  the SAP HANA system has to be restarted, then all systems that utilize that appliance will be affected. Further, if a process runs away for one SID, then the other connected systems will slow down dramatically or even stop. To avoid this problem, SAP support generally recommends separating the systems.

QA/TEST The Quality Assurance and test systems usually perform multiple functions in a project. Besides the QA/consolidation functions that are the purpose of the system, customers often will utilize this hardware as a load-testing environment. The configuration will be similar to a production system so that load testing will produce representative results for the live production hardware. In some cases, this hardware is specified as fail-over equipment for production. In this configuration, both the SAP BW system and the SAP HANA system have to be considered. SAP recommends that ONLY ONE system be running actively on both the SAP Application and the SAP HANA system.

PRODUCTION Customers often will configure servers in non-productive systems to make maximum use of  the hardware. In production, the focus should not be on maximum use of resources, but,

rather, on system performance for the business. Based on this foundation, production application servers should be dedicated, and they should have more-than-sufficient resources to support business operations. Customers utilize their hardware vendor’s SAP competency center to determine the appropriate configuration. The SAP HANA appliance can be more complex. SAP HANA was originally released as a data mart platform. When SAP made SAP HANA support available for SAP BW, it released an SAP HANA Database Only Edition specifically for the BW system. From a licensing perspective, this system supports SAP BW only as a use type. From a technical perspective, it is possible to run other scenarios on the same SAP HANA appliance that is the database instance for SAP BW. However, SAP has limited this combination use (license permitting) to a single application and a single data mart. The application can be SAP BW, SAP ERP, or SAP Business Suite applications. Production is limited in two specific areas: performance and lifecycle management. Performance — When customers utilize SAP HANA, they select the amounts of CPU and memory that provide the maximum system performance for their business. When operations are run against the SAP HANA appliance, the system uses as many resources as possible to return the best performance. This scenario could cause other processes to become very slow or to stop completely and wait for resources to become available before they continue. This delay could cause unpredictable performance behavior within the system. Lifecycle Management — The other major production issue is software lifecycle management. Applications as well as the SAP HANA system have to be updated, patched, or restarted at various points in the process. If one application needs to be patched that requires a SAP HANA system restart, then all of the connected systems will be affected, even those that are operating effectively. At the time of this writing, backup and restore of an SAP HANA system were restricted to ALL schemas. If a system restore was required, then all schemas in the databases would be restored, even if only one schema restore was necessary. This limitation could result in unplanned data loss.

Figure 11: SAP BW on S AP HANA Landscape Opti ons

Implementation teams from SAP and partners will help design and guide the optimal landscape design based on customer input. Their recommendations will provide a system layout that will generate the performance the business requires.

SAP BW on SAP HANA Administration As with all software systems, SAP HANA implementations require administration. Every software system has tools and functionality for operating, maintaining, and protecting those systems. SAP has made available a number of tools to make administering the system easier and more consistent, regardless of the database platform. The following list identifies the primary focus areas of most IT organizations: Database Administration High Availability Disaster Recovery Backup/Restore Security To assist organizations in readying the operations for SAP HANA, SAP has provided a Technical Operations Manual (TOM) that contains a variety of topics for managing SAP HANA as an appliance (http://help.sap.com/hana_appliance). As a general rule, SAP HANA needs less administration than other databases. Regular administration duties include: Regular backups (Database, Bare-Metal software, and configuration backup) Patches; usually on demand in case of problems or known issues (DB, OS)

Monitoring (automated or manual) The appliance model breaks up the traditional roles that are housed primarily as part of the internal IT Operations. Many of the hardware tasks are provided, managed, and maintained by the hardware provider. Other areas are the customer’s responsibility. On the whole, SAP will assist customers in monitoring all areas to best support the solutions. The table below should provide an overview of where the various administration duties are defined.

SAP has updated and enhanced its database management tools to provide a consistent and proactive interface for managing SAP HANA systems. For example, SAP has updated its SAP DBA Cockpit and SAP Solution Manager to support SAP HANA and provide alerting and monitoring (Solution Manager 7.1 SP4). Solution Manager SP8 will further extend SAP HANA Support with End-to-End Workload Analysis. Additional administration for SAP HANA is performed via the SAP HANA Administration/Modeling Studio. Database administrators have a selection of tools to choose from to manage the SAP HANA system. Within SAP BW, all support tools continue to operate normally independent of the underlying database. High availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) scenarios are generally considered to be critical to production implementation. The SAP system includes functionality that provides these services. The implementation and details of these services are the responsibility of the hardware partner. When sizing the system for implementation, the vendor should be taking advantage of the most up-to-date SAP-delivered enhancements (e.g., New with SAP HANA SPS5: SAP HANA synchronous system replication formerly known as warm standby solution). Below is an overview of the current HA/DR solution.

Figure 12: SAP BW on SAP HANA Data Cent er Architec t ure

SP7 offers new features supporting high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) deployment, such as replaying logs on snapshots as well as cascading system replication for up to three locations. Backup and recovery is an area that customers will routinely test to ensure that all systems are protected. As with HA and DR, SAP provides the necessary system features and functionality within the software delivery. Partners work with SAP to develop and deliver solutions that integrate with the SAP HANA system. Today, partners deliver agents and tools that provide for backup, recovery, monitoring, scheduling, antivirus, and more. Meanwhile, SAP are developing and delivering additional solutions as an ongoing initiative to meet the needs of the SAP customer base. Security is also a critical element in any system implementation. Many customers have to

comply with both reporting and regulatory requirements. SAP has delivered additional security functionality in SAP HANA SP5. This latest support release contains the following additions: Dynamic Analytical Privileges Reuse of Analytic Privileges for several users with customizable restrictions Support for Complex Logic and Situational Security Roles as Design Time objects New “Support Role” Used to secure and enhance compliance processes Audit logging enhancements New Audit Events Data Access Audit Configuration via SAP HANA Studio

Summary SAP BW Powered by SAP HANA offers a number of advantages over traditional Relational Database Management Systems. SAP HANA provides a similar query performance as the SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator, and it extends that performance to data-loading and software add-on performance. It also reduces TCO by combining the RDBMS and the SAP BWA Appliance into a single platform. This architecture reduces redundancy and complexity in the system landscape. As SAP BW is enhanced and extended to utilize the power and functionality of SAP HANA, SAP will continue to provide regular updates to its customers at regular intervals. The most common channels for obtaining enhancement updates are through ASUG Webinars, SAP TechEd, SapphireNOW and ASUG Annual conference , saphana.com, and the SAP Developer Network (SDN). The content delivered through each of these channels is updated regularly to be as current as possible.

FAQ area for SAP BW Powered by HANA

Figure 13: SAP BW on SAP HANA Roadmap

Chapter 6

Introduction to SAP Big Data Technologies “Hiding within those mounds of data is knowledge that could change the life of a patient, or  change the world.” — Atul Butte, Stanford 

T

his chapter was written with the expert assistance of John Schitka and David Jonker, SAP Big Data Marketing.

What is big data? Big data is more than just data volume or size. It is about generating valuable real-time insights from raw data, no matter the size, the type, or the rate at which it is generated. Leveraging big data, organizations are successfully uncovering new insights from all of  their data, creating opportunities to transform businesses, industries, and even the quality of  our lives. Big data is not an intrinsic good in and of itself. It is useful as a stepping-stone to business value. Many organizations see the opportunities for big data and understand some of the use cases. The problem is that there are challenges in getting to that business value. In attempting to integrate big data with their existing data sources, organizations face questions and concerns such as: Lack of skills—Where can I find the resources to make this project a reality? Slow deployment—How do I speed up the implementation time, reducing the effort to implement a solution or application? Complex IT environments—How do I rationalize new big data technologies in an already complex IT environment? Integrating many data sources—What is the relationship between all of my data sources and how do I normalize that relationship? To work with big data you need to be able to acquire it, analyze it, and act on insights derived from it. The SAP HANA platform provides these capabilities. It delivers in-memory processing of  data with tiered, petabyte scale storage and integration with SAP IQ and Hadoop, both of  which will be touched on in this chapter. This chapter explains what big data is and how you can leverage it as part of your system landscape. It describes how three groups can benefit from the big data capabilities inherent in SAP HANA: BI analysts. These analysts have been used to working with traditional data sources such

as data warehouses and systems of record and helping organizations support a single version of the truth using SAP BusinessObjects and other BI tools. Analysts and data scientists using advanced analytics. Analysts and data scientists are trained to work with the variety, volume, and velocity of big data. Everyone through operationalized insights. Everyone in an organization benefits when insights are automatically delivered in context. Through embedded analytics, insights from big data and traditional data sources are integrated into the context of business processes and applications. In this way, the entire organization becomes more datadriven as a matter of course, capable of repeatable victories based on the latest information. This chapter provides an introduction to SAP’s big data technologies, with, as you would expect in this book, a focus on SAP HANA. Links to further resources will be provided for those interested in learning more.

Big Data Characteristics The journey to big data has taken us into a world where data sets are growing in size and complexity and where there are ever-increasing demands for query execution speed. These three driving factors of volume, variety, and velocity were first enumerated by Gartner ’s Doug Laney in 2001, and the ensuing decade has only brought them into sharper focus. The volume of data generated by modern computing systems, sensor networks, and social media streams is ever growing. What was once considered digital exhaust, only to be collected for audit or regulatory reasons, has now become a treasure trove of information. Data storage costs have been reduced to the point where it is more cost effective to save anything that you’d ever expect to need and sort through it later rather than spend scarce resources up front assessing its ultimate worth. Data is being collected in a wide variety of formats, ranging from simple relationships collected by tiny machines up to complex multimedia. The modern data center houses an ever-growing range of data formats as more and more systems come online, producing transactional and analytical data in a plethora of data structures including bulky and complex voice and video formats. The most important aspect of big data has been the need for velocity in all aspects of data management. It has long been possible to store immense volumes of data in relational systems, but query times were so slow as to be unusable for real time operations. Thus, in practice many relational databases never stored more than several terabytes of data because response times would degrade too much. Inserting even more varieties of data into that database would further degrade response times, causing IT staff to keep the database clean of all but the most important transactional information. In other words, big data is a velocity problem that is exacerbated by greater volumes and varieties of information. Immense data stores with widely varying data need to have fast performance so that complex analytical tools can turn around insights and help inform decisions quickly. http://blogs.sap.com/innovation/big-data/big-data-is-not-about-big-data-028590

The Ultimate Goal: Faster, Dat a-Driven Decisionmaking Big data is important because ultimately it can improve decisionmaking. However, time is of  the essence. Figure 1 shows how decision making works and the delays inherent in it. It comes from a 2003 paper by Dr. Richard Hackathorn called Minimizing Action Distance.

Figure 1. Minimizing Act ion Distance

Hackathorn shows that there are three types of latency in the decision making process: Immediately after the triggered event, there is data latency,  where data is integrated and made ready for analysis. Sometimes this also involves several steps of  preprocessing. After the data is prepared for analysis, there is analysis latency, the time involved in initiating the analysis, packaging its results, and delivering it to the appropriate person. After the information is delivered, there’s a certain amount of time that organizations and people take to actually take action and execute a decision. That introduces decision latency. These latencies mean that we are losing time, getting farther and farther away from the point at which the event occurred. The farther away an action is from the point of the triggered event, the more the value of that action diminishes. We must respond and respond fast to the events happening around us. In today’s high speed, highly connected world, the window of opportunity to respond to events is shrinking, so we need to make sure that we are able to react quickly and reduce the amount of value erosion. We can reduce action time by reducing each phase of latency, by making the data available and ready for analysis as close to the event as possible, by making sure that information is

delivered fast, and therefore, enabling a faster decision through human collaborative systems.

Meeting the Challenges of Big Data “The enterprise data warehouse is dead!” That was the title of a 2011 article that ran in Business Computing World   in the UK. But that vision is short-sighted. Successful companies will wed old and new together, creating a synergistic, greater whole. The enterprise data warehouse is not dead, but traditional approaches to managing data are dead. We live in a different world from the one that existed when the traditional relational database was first architected. Back then the database dealt with recording and storing transactional data only and reporting happened for decision support. It was high value, highly structured data—not the mounds of data that may or may not have value that we face today. It was an era when time was measured by the calendar, not the stopwatch. Today we face a completely different world. We generate vast amounts of nontransactional data—whether documents, Facebook posts, tweets, or log information coming off of our phones, web servers, and other connected devices. We no longer want to report just against operational activities, but we also want to analyze, explore, predict, visualize and inspect in ways never imagined by those early database engineers. Back when databases were designed, memory was extremely expensive. Just one terabyte of RAM cost over $100 million dollars. Today, we can get it for less than $5,000. Because memory was expensive, database engineers built a database architecture centered on disk. The problem is, disk is just too slow. Reading 1 petabyte of data off a disk sequentially would take 58 days using the fastest hard disk available today (according to Tom’s Hardware website http://www.tomshardware.com/). SSD speeds that up to 2 days using the fastest SSD RAID, but the price is hefty: 1 petabyte of SSD RAID disk costs $12.5 million dollars. That’s why innovators have been finding new ways to store and process data, all in an effort to get around the disk bottleneck and improve response time.

Distributed Databases Distributed computing moved around the disk bottleneck by spreading the data across many disks that can be read simultaneously. In a perfectly balanced environment, a distributed database would have an equal amount of data across each machine. As a result, the maximum time to read the data would be a fraction of the time of a database stored on a single disk. For instance, if we split 1 Petabyte of data evenly across 10 disks that are read simultaneously, then the response time would be theoretically one tenth of the time of a single disk. Of course, in practice there is a cost to moving the data between the machines and coordinating a single result back to the user, but overall a database distributed across multiple disks can reduce response time.

Enter Hadoop Hadoop builds on the concept of distributed computing but opens up the platform to handle

arbitrary data sets that do not necessarily follow a predefined schema and to analyze that data with any arbitrarily designed algorithm. This flexibility comes at a cost of course, such as the need for specialized programming skills. However, the Hadoop project has been evolving over the years to include subprojects that move beyond Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and MapReduce. Hadoop was originally developed at big Internet companies as a flexible tool to process Web logs. Based on its heritage, the original Hadoop HDFS and MapReduce projects made different assumptions than relational databases about how data is processed. In particular, the early Hadoop projects assume you want to read all (or at least most of) the data stored on your disks, which is why the MapReduce framework is designed to look for a predefined pattern within all of the data stored in HDFS. Furthermore, MapReduce algorithms are coded in Java or C/C++ in order to give the programmer the flexibility to define the search pattern as well as the schema of the result set. This combined capability ensured that the original Web companies could store any or all of the Web logs without having to do a lot of costly preprocessing of the data typically done with ‘enterprise data.’ Furthermore, as business analysts at the firms had a new idea for the fast evolving business, they could easily run a program to search for a new pattern. This flexibility meant that MapReduce queries usually took time to execute, forcing many companies to run them as a batch process.

Columnar Databases Moving database architectures from row-oriented storage models to columnar storage models helped to reduce the amount of data accessed on a single disk. This is fundamentally different than the original Hadoop project, which assumed the user wanted to read all of the data on a disk. The columnar database architecture assumes that any given query will need to read only a subset of the data on a disk. The columnar database architecture assumes that the user typically will only want to access a small number of the attributes or columns within a database table. Imagine you have a table storing historical sales transactions with 8 columns: Year, Quarter, Country, State, Sales Representative, Customer, Product, Revenue. At the end of the year each department may ask different questions. For example: Finance: What was total revenue by year and quarter for last 3 years? Marketing: What was total revenue by product and by country? Sales: What was total revenue by sales representative? In each case, the user is only accessing a subset of the columns. While this is a simplistic example, in practice many of the questions that people ask use only a small subset of the sometimes hundreds of columns in a table. A columnar database stores all of the data associated with a particular attribute or column in the same physical space on the disk. In this way, when only 3 of the 8 columns of data are needed to answer a question, the database only needs to read 3 segments of the database from the disk instead of the entire thing. Furthermore, by storing all of the data for a given column together, columnar databases can exploit the repeating patterns within a column’s data in order to highly compress it, further reducing the number of bits read off disk. Consider the Country column from our

example above. Storing the name “United States” as text would take at least 13–26 bytes of  data depending on the encoding used. There are less than 256 countries in the world, which means that each country can be uniquely identified by using only 1 byte (8 bits) of  information. So ‘United States’ could be replaced with, say, the number ‘1’ compressing the column entry from 13–26 Bytes into 1 Byte. This form of compression is called tokenization. It is very common for the rows to have a lot of repeated information. Building on our example, imagine that the ‘country’ column contains ‘United States’ for first 15 rows of the table, which has been replaced with the number ‘1’ stored in a single byte in each row. This essentially means we have 15 entries in a row, each containing the number ‘1’. On disk then it looks like this ‘111111111111111’. This duplication can be replaced with the value, ‘1’, and a count of the number of duplicate entries — something conceptually like this: ‘1D15’, which says number ‘1’ duplicated 15 times. This form of compression is called run-length encoding. In summary, then, our first 15 rows of the ‘country’ column gets compressed from 195– 390 bytes down to potentially 3 or 4 Bytes. Compression is important because it reduces the amount of data that gets read from disk. In our example above, reading 4 bytes from disk represents 200 bytes stored in other databases, which dramatically accelerates response time. In summary, the data storage architecture organized around columns, which reduces the amount of data that needs to be scanned and also makes it easy to compress the data, makes columnar databases ideally suited for BI and analytic workloads.

In-Memory Databases In-memory databases take response times to a whole new level. They remove the disk from the equation for data access altogether, and only use it for logging and backup. In-memory databases leverage the power of today’s processors to read and analyze data 1,000 times faster than reading data off disk. Combine columnar data stores with in memory to highly compress the data, and soon you can see performance gains of 1,000, 10,000 … and in some cases customers have experienced results 100,000 times faster. In-memory is the future of data management, and so the real-time SAP HANA platform for big data platform has SAP HANA at its core. Nonetheless, technology like Hadoop  has a critical, complementary role to play. A complete big data solution is end-to-end in nature. It handles everything from low-level data ingestion, storage, processing, visualization, and engagement to analytic solutions and applications. A complete big data solution has another characteristic as well: it handles all kinds of data. Location aware applications and applications that support mapping have made spatial data more important than ever, both operationally and in targeting customers. SAP HANA Spatial Processing helps process this important type of big data. So much of big data is text, and text analytics, whether sentiment analysis of social media data or analysis of doctor’s notes to help drive better healthcare, is another key to big data. Text analysis is another key capability of SAP HANA (see the text analytics webinar to learn more). Predictive analytics, largely the province of the data scientist, is another feature supported in SAP HANA through the Predictive Analytic Libraries or PAL.

Streaming analytics is another key area supported by SAP HANA and Sybase Event Stream Processor (ESP). Analytics where the velocity of the data is especially critical, such as in financial services, as well as in contexts like manufacturing where machine or sensor data is used and analyzed, an area referred to as the Internet of Things.

Making Big Dat a Real Since talking about big data in the abstract can’t provide a clear vision of its benefits, this section offers concrete examples related to BI, data science, and real-time insights.

Business Intelligence Big data technology is needed not only for the many new types of data, but for large scale data warehouses. Case in point: the largest data warehouse in the world, as attested by the http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/5000/largest-data-warehouse , holding 12.1 petabytes of data. To explore another example, consider ARI, the largest fleet management services company in the world. In conjunction with its partners, ARI accounts for more than 2 million vehicles worldwide. Maintenance management for the entire lifecycle of a single vehicle can involve more than 14,000 data points, including everything from information on minor repairs to regular preventive maintenance information and manufacturer updates and recalls. ARI’s data warehouse was straining under the load of the data. Its in-house ETL solution could not keep up with the growth in data, and analysis was taking far too long. After a proofof-concept, ARI migrated its data warehouse to SAP HAN A. ARI is able to perform deeper data analysis in less than four seconds (previously a manual process that took over 24 hours). The company also increased efficiency in call centers and improved first-time call resolution, resulting in higher customer satisfaction. “We have a 360degree view of the data with our SAP solution,” says Steve Haindl, EVP Technology and Innovation at ARI. “We can see what’s working, where the opportunities are, and what customers no longer need. We can also tailor conversations about requirements to the interested party: CEO, fleet manager, or mechanic. All of this helps us to drive revenue, but most important, it helps us to keep our customers happy.” As ARI’s Director of Information Management, Bill Powell explained, “There was a sea of  information coming in and it could take up to two days to pull together, which affected our service levels. In-memory HANA means we can answer questions in seconds.” ARI’s Keith Allen added, “Our goal has been to drive greater efficiencies. The business can ask questions [of the data] and get responses directly. Customers can also build their own dashboards. It is self-service BI.” Many companies are considering moving their data warehouses and BI initiatives to SAP HANA and SAP IQ to speed up their analytic capabilities and drive faster value from their data.

Data Science and Advanced Analytics

Healthcare is one of the most exciting big data stories there is, as seemingly intractable problems are beginning to find solutions through genomic analysis. Invasive cancer is the second leading cause of death in the US. In 2008, approximately 7.6 million people died of cancer worldwide. The path to more successful cancer treatment lies in human DNA. More and more physicians are not only searching for changes in human tissue that signal cancer but are increasingly interested in the alterations of the human genome itself. Mitsui Knowledge Industries (MKI) is working on http://www.saphana.com/docs/DOC1799. They begin by pre-processing DNA sequences from normal cells and comparing them with cancer cells. Processing is done against large volumes of data. This pre-processing is run against data in Hadoop clusters and can take anywhere from several days to a week. Next, they move relevant data into SAP HANA, where they perform complex analytical processes to identify variants from the pre-processed sequences. They also analyze what medicines might work against the mutated genes. With SAP HANA, they take advantage of built-in predictive algorithm libraries (PAL) and integration with the open source R statistical tool to create predictive models to assess best treatment options for the patient. Initially, MKI was using only Hadoop and R for analysis, but decided to add SAP HANA to reduce processing time so that they could deliver personalized results more quickly. Imagine being a patient in a doctor’s office — being told that you have cancer — and that you have to wait for days before a treatment plan can be set. Now, imagine how you would feel if a customized treatment plan were provided to you the same day. This is MKI’s goal — to provide personalized treatments to patients as quickly as possible. MKI still uses Hadoop to pre-process large volumes of DNA (normal and cancerous) so that they have a strong foundation of existing sequences. But they now use SAP HANA to analyze a particular patient’s DNA against related sequences from Hadoop to better predict the best medicines and treatment for the patient. Hadoop is used to align the patient’s DNA sequence with the normal sequence, because the data is in a semi-structured format, can be parallelized across multiple machines. Also, the MKI team is able to use an open source package for aligning genomes. Identifying the mutations and predicting the best treatment requires a lot of highly iterative analysis. This is ideally done in SAP HANA. As a result MKI has been able to accelerate the overall time from 2 to 3 days to 20 minutes. Furthermore, MKI believes they can get it under 10 minutes when they deploy a 64 node Hadoop cluster and a 40-core HANA machine.

Real-time Insights Arguably, big data can be most important where you need to analyze real-time data as it streams. Let’s look at one such use of big data. McLaren Formula One  cars run up to 350 km per hour on powerful V8 engines. These cars are loaded with sensors. About 120 sensors transmit data every second and some transmit even more frequently. Organizations like McLaren collect all this data to analyze it, and the pit crew uses it to make real-time decisions. Sensors provide information about wheel alignment, tire pressure, suspension, and so on and all of these parameters play a critical role in winning or losing a race. McLaren Applied Technologies leverages what it learns from this technology to drive other

innovations, such as improvements in air traffic control  and monitoring the vital signs of  professional athletes. These are just a few examples. Businesses can use big data to gain a 360-degree view of  the customer by combining enterprise data with customer sentiment gleaned from social networks, customer service interactions, and web click-stream data. Service providers can proactively reach out to customers and keep them satisfied, loyal, and coming back for more.

Who Uses Big Dat a? A big data platform should meet the needs of all your stakeholders, from BI and analytic professionals to data scientists, to IT staff who help bring actionable insights to executive leadership, middle managers, and frontline workers, sometimes by even embedding those insights directly into business processes. It is helpful to classify the different users into essentially three categories shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. An IT landscape for big dat a, broken down by role

Business Analyst The business analyst provides the organization with precise, repeatable, accurate reporting on the data stored within the organization. They are supporting business operational decisions; it’s all about the statements of fact, answered instantly. The business analyst is focused on reporting on the one and only truth. Normally, the information analyzed comes from data generated in transactional systems, data that is highly structured. There is an

emphasis on data quality so that standardized reports can be executed with confidence that all of the numbers will line up. The information views of the data have well understood meanings and there is a focus on unambiguous determinations. The Business Analyst is in essence looking for an enterprise data warehouse and the rigor that entails. However, current data warehouses don’t handle large datasets extremely well. As a result, many data warehouses contain summary data with much of the detailed information thrown away or stored in a highly complex BI landscape with many data marts, data caches, and generally many layers of technology. With SAP HANA, users can store all of  the data without causing query response times to grind to a halt. This also makes it possible to remove the many data marts and data caches originally put in place to compensate for poor performance, greatly simplifying the data warehouse. In some cases Business Analysts may benefit from access to Hadoop environments. If the data in Hadoop needs to be reported on, you may want to bring it into your enterprise data warehouse. Otherwise, it should be carefully structured and stored in Hadoop. Here’s the key. The BI analyst uses GUI-based tools to access information and to generate reports. This requires data to be organized and structured in order to make it easily accessible and generated using forms. Projects like Hive and Pig help to do that for your Hadoop environment. SAP BusinessObjects BI can now access Hadoop environments through Hive. With Hive, you define table structures to data stored in Hadoop. BI analysts can use the SAP BusinessObjects BI tools to create reports, dashboards, and explore data all inside Hadoop. BusinessObjects translates the users’ actions into HiveQL commands, a language modeled after SQL. What is particularly powerful with BusinessObjects is that if the BI administrator has created the right universes, or access layers, the BI analyst can query data across various systems. In other words, you can take data from Hadoop and combine it with data from other data sources. SAP IQ is an important platform to support the BI analyst. IQ is a disk-based bulk data store optimized for analytics. It can be used along with or even in place of Hadoop. Of course, a critical step to providing the BI analyst access to Hadoop is to define what tables, columns, and so on are accessible and the relationships between them. SAP BusinessObjects BI gives the administrator the tools needed to do just that, including for a Hive implementation. Here’s the key: BI analysts need carefully controlled, structured access to Hadoop environments from their GUI tools.

Data Scientists In contrast, data scientists work at the other end of the information certainty spectrum. They deal with the uncertainty inherent in any large, complex organization and seek to draw conclusions that are statistically relevant but not completely certain. One example is predictive analytics, where large amounts of data are fed into models in order to predict what the future may hold. The data scientist may create custom systems to explore and probe the corporate data store and must be equipped with tools that interpret unstructured data and make sense of it for the organization and the problem domain. The data scientist therefore requires as much flexibility as possible. The business analyst

is skilled at using BI tools and understanding how the data applies to the business while the data scientist usually has very technical skills. Data scientists typically decide which tool to use based on the data that offers the most promise. They may choose a data mining technique, or techniques, and then select the tools that support the technique, such as the R statistical language, which is supported in SAP HANA. While the BI analyst needs structure in a controlled environment, the data scientist wants a lot of freedom and flexibility. Depending on the analysis performed, they want to be able to run their algorithms in Hadoop using MapReduce algorithms, in-memory, or in the database using in-database analytic algorithms.

Operational Users Operational users are involved in the day-to-day operation of core business processes. They are the frontline workers such as call center operators, marketing campaign managers, warehouse personnel, and sales representatives. Operational users can benefit from information that helps them make decisions in the moment, often based on insights uncovered by business analysts and data scientists. This information is often delivered in the form of dashboards, daily reports, or even predictive models embedded in enterprise applications. The challenge of real-time analysis is to feed automated insights back into the decision loop fast enough to guide the action of the human or the machine making crucial decisions. Operational users typically are not technical nor do they have experience in using analytic and reporting tools. In essence, the solution requires development of user interfaces suited to how operational users need to consume the information. ’

SAP HANA: The Heart of SAP s Big Data Ecosystem Like most things in the real world, the big data landscape is complex. Competitive advantage doesn’t come from having one tool, but from having the right toolset to support business needs. SAP provides an integrated set of data management solutions for big data: HANA for realtime analytics on operational and transactional data, SAP IQ for petabyte scale storage and analytics of less time critical data, and Hadoop as a massive data lake where data can be stored and explored. SAP does not market its own Hadoop distribution, but provides an open platform to work with a variety of Hadoop distributions. Lastly, SAP provides a suite of  Information Management solutions to integrate systems, ensure data quality, and manage the overall data landscape. The heart of SAP’s big data platform is SAP HANA. At its core SAP HANA provides an inmemory, columnar, distributed database architecture designed to handle massive datasets. Since the SAP HANA database resides entirely in-memory all the time, additional complex calculations, functions, and data-intensive operations can happen on the data directly in the database, without requiring time-consuming and costly aggregations. SAP IQ was the first commercial column store, which is designed to scale to petabyte scale database size. While it is not in-memory like SAP HANA, it has excellent performance characteristics with a rich SQL layer, patented indexing, and a disk-backed store. SAP IQ and

SAP HANA are integrated to work well together through smart data access, which allows remote tables to be queried as though they were local tables. This provides real-time analytics along with data scalability. Smart data access in effect creates a logical data warehouse. In essence, SAP HANA smart data access enables the creation of a logical data warehouse, where data in HANA, IQ, and Hadoop can be mapped at a higher level, freeing the analyst from understanding exactly where in the landscape data resides. This solution amplifies the value of big data across your data fabric by enabling working with data sets stored in a variety of places including Hadoop. For more information, see the Data Virtualization webinar. SAP HANA can access data in other data sources such as Hadoop to extend the reach of its processing power. Hadoop provides vast and flexible storage for data objects, independent of  their structure and size. Hadoop is perfectly positioned to store the very large data sets that are too big to fit into memory and that require a preprocessing step before they can be easily analyzed. By connecting SAP HANA to Hadoop, you can run jobs in Hadoop that load information into HANA and then provide super-fast final analysis, as described in the section on personalized cancer treatment earlier in this chapter. When you put SAP HANA, SAP IQ, and Hadoop together, you have three data processing domains with different strengths that combine to form a big data processing backbone. Together, these three components provide real-time capabilities along with extreme scale. Data can be processed with the appropriate technology depending on its characteristics — hot data in HANA, warm data in IQ, and a vast data lake in Hadoop — where data can be stored, processed, and aggregated without constraints on size, format, or cleanliness. SAP Data Services is a sophisticated ETL and text processing tool, and ESP can capture streaming sources of machine generated data. SAP BW is a rich data warehouse layer on top of SAP HANA. SAP BusinessObjects BI universes can pull Hadoop and database sources together to serve up information to business applications. All of this technology works together to bring big data into the enterprise (see Figure 3). SAP ® Event Stream Processor (SAP ESP) is a mature and high throughput complex event processing engine that allows for integration of real-time data streams into the big data environment. It is a key tool for building real-time applications that help to formulate a response to real-time data. Figure 3 shows the SAP HANA architecture in the context of big data.

Figure 3. The The S AP HANA Plat form

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The World s Biggest, Big Data Database In early 2014, SAP generated a new world record  record   for the world’s largest data warehouse using the SAP HANA ®  platform and SAP ®  IQ software. This independently audited 12.1PB data warehouse has been recognized by Guinness World Records , and is four times larger than the prior record.

This new world record demonstrates the ability of SAP HANA and SAP IQ to efficiently handle extreme-scale enterprise data warehouse and Big Data analytics. SAP and its partners had previously set a world record for loading and indexing Big Data at 34.3 Terabytes Tera bytes per hour. hour.

Conclusion SAP’s big data technology simplifies the IT landscape. SAP HANA provides speed for dealing with big data in real-time. It can also speed up traditional enterprise data warehouse applications, putting them on steroids. This chapter has touched on many points that are deserving of their own chapters, and we hope you will explore the links to learn more as well as checking out SAPHANA.com. The complementary nature of SAP HANA, SAP IQ, and Hadoop supports every big data use case, whether it’s driven by BI analysts, data scientists, or IT seeking see king to help big big data inform inform the real-time re al-time enterprise. e nterprise.

Chapter 7

Data Modeling with SAP HANA “Make everything everyt hing as simple as possible but no simpler.” — Albert Einstein

S

ince SAP HANA is a radically new database “underneath the hood,” SAP had to provide DBAs, data architects architects and a nd others others a familiar fam iliar way to interact with the the tables ta bles while maintaining maintaining a level le vel of abstraction to ensure that people wouldn’t disrupt the tables. That’s how you get the “virtual” data modeling capabilities of SAP HANA. Although people can log in and “see” the tables, they aren’t really there, like they are in a traditional disk-based database. What you’re seeing is a virtual representation of the tables since the actual tables aren’t physically persisted on the storage medium as they would would be in a disk-based database. This T his virtual data model allows people incredible flexibility when manipulating the data and protects them from some of the more nasty effects of playing around with physical tables in the database. In the context of SAP HANA, data modeling can be viewed as the construction of different types of views of the data tables maintained in the SAP HANA database. Modeling defines how you are going to access the data that’s physically stored in HANA tables. Views can be thought of as “virtual” tables that are built up from underlying data structures in memory or from other views. From an SAP HANA perspective, data modeling defines how you’re going to store and access your data. By creating views, you build new layers of access to your data that are derived from what’s in physical RAM storage, but that is calculated or adapted based on your application needs. Views are built on demand and are always up to date, and they can contain complex calculations that are computed within the database. Because SAP HANA is a fast, in-memory database, you can build virtual models that are more flexible and powerful than those found in typical disk-based database designs. HANA is optimized for aggregating mass data on the fly, and thus it allows you to build models on top of raw transaction data without first doing pre-aggregation or creating materialized views. The concept of a logical view in a database is pretty universal. The logical structure points to where the physical data is stored. What’s different in HANA is that operations on large quantities of data are so fast that it’s not necessary to build a persistent additional physical view or an additional index on the data to make it go fast. Rather than building redundant tables for speed, you aggregate data on the fly. The key in there is that HANA is not repersisting the data multiple times for every different view of data that we want to do. It is stored once and then we can create a lot of different logical views that point to the data that is physically in the database for different use cases and different application uses without having to make copies of the data to support additional views.  Another  Another upside upside to logical logical views: Extending Extending data data modeling modeling to more stakeholders. stakeholders. Data modeling is typically reserved for data modelers, data wranglers, and application developers. But what about 

business analysts and others who want to create views of the data for their own use cases?  The great thing about creating logical views of the data is that you can allow more people to create those views because their views don’t change anything about the underlying data store. You might never allow less technical people to access a traditional database, but with the ability to create logical views of the data that don’t change the underlying data store (let alone corrupt it), you can allow as many people as are interested to get involved with modeling in SAP HANA.

With HANA, you’re not modeling to get around disk space constraints, and you aren’t needing to model and keep in mind where your data’s partitioned and where it’s coming from and how to best access it from different storage pieces to reduce the lag time of disks. With HANA you can create create queries that are mor m ore e complex and a nd still achieve achieve high high performance using straightforward SQL statements. If you’re coming from a legacy system with maybe a hundred different types of models that draw on different master data, you may find that you need only a tenth that many in HANA because you are no longer having to design models with regard to disk or data volume constraints. You can blend models together and get a broader view of what’s going on with the the data, data , with more granularity gra nularity than you could before before.. Becoming pro proficient ficient at data modelin m odeling g for HANA is one of the key elements ele ments of extracting e xtracting all of the performance out of the system. syste m. Understanding Understanding how the the system s ystem works, works, where where its speed advantages are, and how to get the best performance from from the system are all best done done with hands-on experience. If you’re ready to get started at the detail level, see the SAP HANA Modeling Guide, Guide , which talks in depth about data modeling in HANA. And if you’re eager to get our hands dirty, see the SAP HANA Developer Center  Center  where you can set up your HANA environment and download SAP HANA Studio!

Tools for Data Dat a Modeling SAP HANA Studio is used for creating data models within SAP HANA. It can be used to explore and analyze existing data models, make modifications, and build new data models from scratch. The modeler generally uses the Administration Console and Modeler perspectives and a nd tools tools of SAP HANA HAN A Studio.

Figure 6 -1. SAP HANA Studio: Modeler Perspec t ive

Packaged applications for SAP HANA come with their own data models. You can inspect them with SAP HANA Studio and tailor them to your needs. BI clients use data models directly for reports. Views that are created inside SAP HANA can be treated by BI tools as any other table, allowing for direct access for reporting. If you calculate net sales in your data model and have the HANA engine execute the calculation of  net sales in memory and then just send the result set up to your query tool, it’s much more efficient than having the query tool pull up all the raw data and then having the BI query execute what the net sales difference is. Think of HANA like a Formula 1 race car and let it do the calculations for you. That’s why modeling in HANA takes a bit of an adjustment in mindset in order to maximize all the speed that HANA can give you. Application developers use the output of data models as inputs into their applications (for more information on this topic for application developers, see Chapter 8). For best performance, application developers will want to maximize the number of calculations that are done in the database and to reduce the amount of data that’s transferred back up to the application. That can allow the application developer to offload the bulk of the calculation logic into the database, making it possible for application logic to be greatly simplified and for views to be useful across a range of tools.

Views in Data Modeling in SAP HANA There are three types of views in data modeling in SAP HANA: attribute views, analytic views, and calculation views. Understanding how each of these different views provides additional

value on the raw data in the database will help you figure out how to model your data for maximum flexibility and performance. Attribute views provide descriptive data about the characteristics of data in your database. This is “master data” that defines things like hierarchies that describe relationships between data elements. By constructing attribute views, you create dimensions from which subsequent views can be constructed. Analytic views in SAP HANA are optimized for aggregating mass data. Because the database is so fast, it’s not necessary to store aggregates in the database; rather, you aggregate on the fly in memory. Analytic views construct a central master “fact table” with key figures. You can use expressions, operators, and functions to analyze this data. Calculation views provide a way to do flexible, complex logic in the database. They are built on top of one or more analytic or attribute views and allow you do to calculations after aggregation and grouping. Calculations are generally done after grouping at the attribute level and after aggregation at the analytic level. Figure 6-2 shows a summary of the three types of views in SAP HANA.

Figure 6-2. SAP HANA Modeling Views

 Views and ELT versus ETL In order to work with data more effectively, Accounting may need a different transformation on its data than Sales does. Traditionally transformation comes before loading data into the database (ETL). With HANA, it makes sense to load data, and then do transformation (ELT). Because of the power of HANA, you can store (load) one version of the truth in the database and then use views to support transformations for different lines of business. This eliminates redundancy as well as the potential for data getting out of sync.

Attribute Views Suppose your transaction database has a customer ID that links to all the information about a customer who purchased a given product. By itself, the customer record allows you to compute simple measures, like total sales by customer. But what if you want to group related customers together to measure sales by some other metric, like sales by customer region? Attribute views allow you to join relationships together that further describe the data that ou’re working with. By joining your “customer ID” to data in your customer database, you can further subdivide and analyze sales data according to conditions and relationships not present in the original transaction. Because these joins run in memory and are not limited by disk speeds, you can explore even more complex relationships than you could in traditional database models and still maintain performance.

Figure 6 -3. SAP HANA Att ribute View

Using attribute views allows you to bring data analysis down to size before running complex calculations. In HANA, it makes sense to apply attribute views as filters, which pull out just the data you need before handing it off to a complex calculation. The SAP HANA Modeling Guide provides details of how to define joins between tables and to select a subset or all of the table’s columns and rows. Use it as your guide to the details of  how to implement attribute views in your model. HANA Academy also offers courses on creating attribute views and creating hierarchies within attribute views.

Analytic Views

Analytic views operate on key figures in your database. They are used to model data that includes measures and to compute operations based on those measures. An SAP HANA database may have a very large number of records in it, corresponding to individual transactions. In a typical disk-based database, you’d compute and store a separate table for aggregated data, so that something like “total sales by day” would be updated periodically and stored separately on disk. In HANA, this is not necessary since the database is very fast and aggregates are best computed on the fly. Because these aggregates are computed very rapidly, you can explore a much broader set of queries than if you had to decide up front which aggregation approach you would be using and commit those records to disk. The end result of this for modeling is that the analytic views that you build on top of these measures are also key for reducing the amount of data passed along to subsequent views. Do the aggregation in your database before you pass that data up to the next level so that the computations happen at the right level. You’ll gain a lot of performance when the BI tool or the application can deal with data that’s already been aggregated rather than giving it a firehose dump of data to aggregate.

Figure 6-4. SAP HANA Analytic View

The SAP HANA Modeling Guide provides details about how to set up analytic views, and a course from SAP HANA Academy provides a video on the same topic.

Calculation Views One of the exceptional features of SAP HANA is the ability to do calculation views in the

database. These views offer a level of programming flexibility that goes beyond the aggregations found in the analytic views, and they can bring in data from multiple analytic and attribute views to express complex logic. Calculation views can have layers of calculation logic, can include measures sourced from multiple source tables, and can include advanced SQL logic, R code, and more. What’s the difference between the analytic view and the calculation view? Think of it like Excel. Many of us use functions in Excel (that’s the analytic view). But only Excel ninjas write Visual Basic scripts and embed them in Excel. That’s the level of user who will be interested in the calculation view.

Calculation views are visible within HANA as virtual tables, and applications and BI tools can access them in the same way that they consume other views. Like other views in HANA they are computed as needed, and intermediate values and aggregates are built on the fly rather than being stored on disk and updated periodically. To obtain best results, the modeler should use the full power of the attribute and analytic views before passing data into the calculation view. Calculations will work best with data that has already been reduced in size. If your database has a billion records in it, but you only need the calculations to run on a few thousand of them, you should build your models so that the aggregation and grouping has already occurred before your calculations run.

Figure 6-5. SAP HANA Calculation View

The SAP HANA Modeling Guide  has detailed information on how to create and work with calculation views; SAP HANA Academy also covers creating a calculation view.

Principles of Data Modeling Data modeling in SAP HANA should be very familiar to those who are used to data modeling in other database environments. The biggest difference is the exceptional performance of  HANA’s in-memory database, which makes a number of traditional database performance tuning techniques unnecessary and introduces its own set of performance considerations. Figure 6-5 summarizes some of the principles of data modeling with SAP HANA.

Figure 6 -6. SAP HANA General Modeling Principles

People doing database work normally bring all of the data they are working with up to the application layer for analysis. When the database can’t handle that, they have been trained to work around the problems. With HANA, you rethink your approach to data modeling. The more work that gets done in the database, and the less data that makes its way to the application, the more power you have in the system and the bigger the performance gains over traditional disk-bound database applications. We call that “HANAfying” your application. Use views to filter out the data at the lowest level. If you don’t need a field for a subsequent computation, don’t build it out in a view. Similarly, if there are records that can be aggregated before they are provided to a calculation view, do the aggregation first. Compact views will always perform better than views with lots of unneeded data in them. Finally, look at ways of moving application logic into the database. Whenever possible, move calculations that would have been once part of the design of the application into a database calculation view. You’ll find that they will run faster inside the database, and that by providing these results in views you can reuse them in other contexts. (Application developers can see Chapter 8 for more details.)

Gett ing Your Feet Wet The best way to understand how to adapt your data to use within HANA is to experience it first hand. This chapter is just a level one explanation of modeling. You’ll want to read the SAP HANA Modeling Guide  and the SAP HANA Studio Overview, and watch the presentations on the SAP HANA Academy to step through the fine points. Here are just some of the HANA Academy resources you may want to access: Creating an attribute view Creating an analytic view Creating a calculation view Creating hierarchies in an attribute view Using the Create View GUI in SAP HANA Studio Using calculated columns in an analytic view Using calculated columns in an attribute view Using variables in an analytic view Using decision tables with update values Using decision tables with return values only Creating row store or column store tables Example of using calculated columns and calculation views

Chapter 8

 Application Development with SAP HANA This chapter was contributed by Thomas Jung (@thomas_jung). Director, Product  Management, SAP HANA-Data and Analytics Engine Product Management 

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iven the high-level focus of this book and the growing inventory of technical knowledge that we will link to, we’ll avoid getting into too many code samples or deep technical discussions in this chapter. Instead, we’ll focus on some of the most salient features of programming applications for SAP HANA that can maximize its speed and computational power. In addition, we’ll present examples of some of the new capabilities that SAP HANA provides to developers. Before we proceed, we need to make two important points. First, this chapter discusses how to use ABAP and SQL programming concepts in the new SAP HANA programming paradigm. Therefore, we composed this chapter with the assumption that ou’re familiar with these concepts. Second, the chapter focuses specifically on development in SAP landscapes. Nevertheless, most developers should obtain value from the chapter content regardless of their programming language experience. We plan to incorporate additional languages and programming approaches in subsequent revisions.

Basic Concepts SAP HANA is an ACID-compliant database, conceptually similar in most ways to every other database you’ve ever worked with. It speaks SQL and MDX, it has JDBC and ODBC libraries, it stores data in tables, with rows and columns, and it requires administration and backup. However, there are quite a few key philosophical differences and cutting-edge development concepts that you need to consider when you’re writing apps that leverage SAP HANA as a database. Most importantly, you’ll have to let go of some of the “rules of gravity” that existed in the “old world” order to take advantage of all of the new capabilities that SAP HANA provides. SAP HANA is compliant with the standard interfaces of all databases. Therefore, to implement this system, you could simply keep your existing applications, redirect the ODBC or JDBC configuration, and then run them as-is with SAP HANA as their new database layer. The problem with this scenario is that SAP HANA offers capabilities that other databases simply don’t. Some of these advantages involve the core technical capabilities of the database, which are superior to those of other databases. In addition, SAP HANA goes well beyond the traditional database to offer a full application and development platform as well as to extend capabilities in areas such as search, predictive analysis, and so on. Therefore, building an application with these SAP HANA-specific advantages in mind will provide you with the maximum opportunities for innovative and responsive applications.

No Constraints The primary philosophical difference between developing apps in the “old world” and developing apps for SAP HANA is probably the mindshift that is needed to program in a world without constraints. Several of the early developers who worked with SAP HANA referred to this psychological shift as “taking the red pill.” Developers are taught from their very first “hello world” application that they have to achieve a compromise between maximum utility of  the application and maximum usage of the base infrastructure supporting the app. There are numerous books that teach these “best practices” (including quite a few from SAP) to help developers achieve this shaky balance. In a traditional disk-based architecture, writing a complex algorithm that calls raw data from 200 large (100 million rows), unique tables simultaneously and performs an on-the-fly oin would be considered foolish and impossible just a couple of years ago. But, what if it wasn’t foolish or impossible? What if that algorithm in the app would provide a huge amount of business value to the users? What if there were no “penalties” for writing that algorithm? What if you could get an answer to that calculation in a few milliseconds instead of several hours? What if you had a supercomputer dedicated to calculating that algorithm whenever ou needed it? What if, in addition to performing these operations in the database, you could collapse all of the other application and presentation layers down into the database to provide a simple, low-complexity platform to run the entire application? This is the type of philosophical shift required to make the leap from programing in a world of constraints into the new world of SAP HANA. In the SAP HANA world, the old constraints of  database I/O and computational power become largely irrelevant . The boundaries as to where the database ends and the application server begins are also strongly challenged.

Abstraction In the SAP world (ABAP especially), developers are taught to abstract their applications completely from the database and treat them as a “black box.” The ABAP engine is the primary location for all application logic and SQL generation, so the database is used only for data storage. ABAP developers literally have no idea what database their app is going to be run on, so they have to assume the “lowest common denominator” and write to NO specific database. JAVA, PHP, .NET, and various other development platforms often utilize very similar abstraction approaches, thanks to ODBC/JDBC. Unfortunately, these platforms often sacrifice capabilities for compatibility. This extreme separation of application logic and data storage has been one of the cornerstones of ABAP application development for the past 20 ears, primarily because this was the most effective strategy for SAP to compromise between broad support for many databases and performance of the applications. In contrast, in the SAP HANA world, the ABAP engine knows EXACTLY which database it is going to interface with. It also knows that SAP HANA has been optimized to meet its needs. Consequently, the ABAP engine not only can take advantage of the native speed of memoryto-processor, it can also take advantage of all of the “under-the-hood” capabilities that SAP HANA offers for calculations and business functions. Abstraction is also present in the JDBC interface for Java apps and ODBC for various other development platforms. This “buffer” between the app logic and the data it needs works well

to insulate the developers from the database engine. However, it also prevents the developers from utilizing many of the database functions. With SAP HANA, many of the performance-related processing tasks are actually carried out deep inside the database (like stored procedures on steroids). Thus, SAP HANA enables developers to get deep inside the data model. In addition, SAP HANA functions inside the database to program data-intensive operations at the data level, not inside the application as they do in disk-based databases.

Figure 1: New Programing Paradigm

In the old programming paradigm, developers would design the application and write the app logic, data transformations, and algorithm/calculations while leaving the database largely untouched. When the app ran, it would fetch whatever data it needed from the database, bring it up to the app, transform the data, and then run them through the algorithm or calculations to present the results to the user. In SAP HANA, that process is flipped upside down. The app contains only the business logic. A function call is inserted to fetch the ANSWER from the database. The data transformations, algorithm, and calculations are all executed INSIDE the database, and only the result is passed up to the application. Offloading all of the data-intensive operations to the database and calling those operations as functions

from the application makes the entire architecture significantly more elegant and efficient. In fact, companies that employ SAP HANA have seen their application performances improve by hundreds of thousands of times.

Figure 2: Paradigm S witch in Prog ramming Models

This shift from data manipulation at the application level to data manipulation at the database level is necessary to take advantage of all of the power contained in SAP HANA. Of  course, you can keep your old apps the way they are and obtain slightly faster response times simply because the database sits in memory. If you delegate the data-intensive operations down to SAP HANA, however, you’ll not only simplify the architecture and streamline the application, you’ll also see SAP HANA really let loose its horsepower for supercharged performance in the applications.

ABAP Programming for SAP HANA Because ABAP is the primary application programming language and application server foundation for the SAP Business Suite, it plays an important role in SAP HANA’s adoption into SAP’s current customer base. Consequently, many people are interested in how they can utilize SAP HANA within the SAP Business Suite and, by connection, how they can use ABAP to access SAP HANA logic and constructs. In the next few sections we will look at various architectures where ABAP and SAP HANA work together to create innovative opportunities in the SAP Business Suite. See Chapter 4 for more details on the SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA. In this section, we will discuss several scenarios for leveraging the power of SAP HANA with both new and existing SAP Business Suite applications. These scenarios range from very

simple, non-disruptive applications to accelerate a handful of problematic transactions or reports all the way to running the entire SAP Business Suite natively on SAP HANA as the primary database.

SAP HANA as a Secondary Database In this scenario, you install SAP HANA as a secondary database instead of as a replacement for your current database. You then use replication to move a copy of the data into the SAP HANA system. Your ABAP applications can then be accelerated because they will read data from the SAP HANA copy instead of the local database.

Figure 3: SAP HANA as a Secondary Database

BAP Secondary Database Connection ABAP has long possessed the capability to make a secondary database connection. This capability allows ABAP programs to access a database system other than the local database, even a database from a completely different DBMS vendor. This functionality is extended to support SAP HANA for all the NetWeaver release levels from 7.00 and beyond. Service Note 1597627 lists  the preconditions and technical steps required to connect to HANA systems, and it should always be the master guide for these preconditions. Below we summarize the current state of SAP HANA Development tools at the time of publication of this book.

Preconditions

The SAP HANA Client is installed on each ABAP Application Server. The ABAP Application Server Operating System must  support the HANA Client. (Check the Platform Availability Matrix for supported operating systems.) SAP HANA DBSL is installed. (This is the Database-specific library that is part of the ABAP Kernel.) The SAP HANA DBSL is available only for the ABAP Kernel 7.20 and higher. Kernel 7.20 is already the default kernel for NetWeaver 7.02, 7.03, 7.20, 7.30, and 7.31. Kernel 7.20 is backward compatible, so it can also be applied to NetWeaver 7.00, 7.01, 7.10, and 7.11. Your ABAP system must be Unicode or Single Code Page 1100 (Latin 1/ISO-8850-1) — See Service note 1700052 for Single Code Page Support instructions. Next, you must configure your ABAP system to connect to this alternative database. You have one central location where you maintain the database connection string, username, and password. Your applications then need only to specify the configuration key for the database, thereby making the connection information application independent.

Secondary Database Connection Via Open SQL The easiest solution for performing SQL operations from ABAP to your secondary database connection is to use the Open SQL statements that ABAP developers are already familiar with. If you supply the additional syntax of CONNECTION (dbcon), you can force the Open SQL statement to be performed against the alternative database connection. For instance, let’s take a simple Select, and perform it against our HANA database:

The advantage of this approach is its simplicity. By making one minor addition to existing SQL Statements, you can redirect your operation to SAP HANA. The downside is that the table or view you are accessing must exist in the ABAP Data Dictionary. That isn’t a huge problem for this Accelerator scenario, however, because all of the data reside in the local ABAP DBMS and are replicated to SAP HANA. In this situation we will always have local copies of the tables in the ABAP Data Dictionary. Note, however, that you can’t access SAP HANA-specific artifacts like Analytic Views and Database Procedures. You also can’t access any tables that use SAP HANA as their own/primary persistence.

Secondary Database Connection Via Native SQL ABAP also has the ability to utilize Native SQL. In this situation you write database-specific SQL statements. This process allows you to access tables and other artifacts that exist only in the underlying database. In addition, Native SQL contains syntax that allows you to call Database Procedures. If we take the example from above, we can rewrite it using Native SQL:

One disadvantage of using Native SQL via EXEC SQL in this example is that the statement contains significantly more code than the Open SQL option. It is also a little less elegant because it utilizes database cursors to bring back an array of data. The upside is that it provides access to features you wouldn’t otherwise have. For example, you can insert data into a SAP HANA table and use the SAP HANA database sequence for the number range or for built-in database functions like now().

The other disadvantage of using Native SQL via EXEC SQL is that there are few, if any, syntax checks on the SQL statements you create. Errors aren’t caught until runtime, which

can lead to short dumps if the exceptions aren’t properly handled. This limitation makes testing absolutely essential when you’re using Native SQL.

Secondary Database Connection via Native SQL — ADBC  There is a third option that provides the benefits of the Native SQL connection via EXEC SQL but also eliminates some of the limitations. This is the concept of ADBC — ABAP Database Connectivity. This approach is essentially a series of classes (CL_SQL*) that simplify and abstract the EXEC SQL blocks. For example, we could once again rewrite our SELECT *FROM SFLIGHT example:

In this iteration we remove the step-wise processing of the Database Cursor and instead read an entire package of data back into our internal table all at once. The initial package size will return all of the resulting records by default. However, you can specify any package size ou wish, thereby tuning processing for large return result sets. Most importantly for SAP HANA situations, however, is the fact that ADBC also lets you access non-Data Dictionary artifacts including SAP HANA Stored Procedures. Given the advantages of ADBC over EXEC SQL, SAP recommends that you always try to use the ADBC class-based interfaces. This is really just the beginning of what you could accomplish with this secondary database approach to ABAP integration into SAP HANA. We’ve deliberately used very simplistic SQL statements in these examples so that we could focus on the details of how the technical integration works. However, the real power comes when you execute more powerful statements (SELECT SUM … GROUP BY), access SAP HANA-specific artifacts (like OLAP

Views upon OLTP tables), or database procedures.

SAP HANA as a Primary ABAP Database Of course, SAP HANA can also be used as the primary DBMS under any ABAP-based system. With the SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA offering, ABAP-based Suite applications like ERP can be run with SAP HANA as the primary DBMS — no replication or other databases is needed. Likewise, ABAP has evolved to provide new tools and techniques that enable developers to directly access certain distinguishing features of SAP HANA. These features come with ABAP 7.40-based systems. We’ve already examined how secondary database connections can be accessed via both Open SQL and Native SQL in ABAP. We also learned that ABAP Open SQL is limited to objects that exist in the ABAP Data Dictionary. To address these limitations, ABAP 7.40 has introduced a new concept known as Data Dictionary Proxy Views. Proxy Views allow a developer to create an ABAP Data Dictionary entry for SAP HANA-specific view types — Analytic, Attribute, and Calculation views. Developers can utilize Proxy Views to leverage the power and ease of use of ABAP Open SQL against these SAP HANA-specific view types. This capability is particularly useful when it is combined with ABAP range types — that is, SelectOptions and Parameters. Going further, ABAP 7.40 has introduced a parallel concept for Stored Procedures called Procedure Proxies. Procedure Proxies generate both an ABAP interface and parameter data types for a SAP HANA Stored Procedure. A new ABAP syntax (CALL PROCEDURE) was also introduced, which makes calling Stored Procedures very similar to calling ABAP Function Modules. Both Proxy Views and Procedure Proxies make it unnecessary to drop into Native SQL within ABAP to leverage database-specific features. They streamline the amount of work the developer must perform to design applications for code push down into SAP HANA. They also improve the data transfer efficiency between the ABAP Application Server and SAP HANA. Transition Closer t o t he Database Regardless of whether you are utilizing SAP HANA as your primary or secondary database connection, ABAP developers have to adopt different design strategies if they wish to take advantage of its full power. ABAP developers tend to shy away from deeper aspects of SQL in favor of processing the data on the application server in ABAP. For ABAP developers who are reading this, when was the last time you used a sub-query or a join in ABAP? Or even a select sum? ABAP developers have been taught from early on to abstract the database as much as possible. Therefore, they tend to trust the processing on the application server where they have total control instead of the “black box” of the DBMS. This situation has been exacerbated in recent years because ABAP contains a greater array of tools that will generate the SQL for us. This approach has served ABAP developers well for many years. Let’s take the typical situation of loading supporting details from a foreign key table. In this case we want to load all of the flight details from SFLIGHT and also load the carrier details from SCARR. In ABAP we could write an inner join:

Figure 4 — ABAP Open SQL with Inner Join

Many ABAP developers, however, would adopt an alternative approach where they perform the join in memory on the application server via internal tables:

Figure 5 — Typical ABAP Coding of Joining at t he App Se rver

This approach can be beneficial when it is combined with ABAP table buffering. Keep in mind that we are comparing developer design patterns here, not the actual technical merits of these specific examples. If we now added SAP HANA to the mixture, how would the developer approach change? In HANA the developer should strive to push more of the processing into the database. The question might be, why? To answer this question, we need to keep in mind that SAP HANA is an in-memory database. Almost any developer can appreciate the advantages of consolidating all of your

data in fast memory as opposed to relatively slow disk-based storage. If this were the only advantage that SAP HANA offers, however, we wouldn’t notice a huge difference compared to processing in ABAP. After all, ABAP has full table buffering. Ignoring the cost of updates, if we were to buffer both SFLIGHT and SCARR, our ABAP table loop join in the previous example would be pretty fast, although it still wouldn’t be as fast as SAP HANA. The other key points of SAP HANA’s architecture are that in addition to being in-memory, it is designed for columnar storage and parallel processing. In the ABAP table loop, each record in the table has to be processed sequentially, one record at a time. The current version of  ABAP statements, however, just isn’t designed for parallel processing. Instead, ABAP leverages multiple cores/CPUs by running different user sessions in separate work processes. SAP HANA, in contrast, can parallelize blocks of data within a single request. The fact that the data are consolidated in memory only further supports this parallelization by making access from multiple CPUs more useful, because data can be “fed” to the CPUs that much faster. After all, parallization isn’t useful if the CPUs spend most of their cycles waiting for data to process. The other technical aspect at play here is the columnar architecture of SAP HANA. When tabular data are stored in columns, all of the data for a single column are stored together in memory. In contrast, row storage — as even ABAP internal tables are processed — places data in memory one row at a time. Thus, for the join condition mentioned above, the CARRID column in each table can be scanned faster because of the arrangement of data. Scans of unneeded data in memory aren’t nearly as expensive as performing the same operation on disk (because of the need to wait for platter rotation), but there is a cost all the same. Storing the data columnar reduces that cost when performing operations that scan one or more columns as well as when optimizing compression routines. For these reasons, developers (and especially ABAP developers) must re-think their applications designs. To extract the maximum benefit of SAP HANA, they will also need to push more of the processing from ABAP down into the database. To accomplish this task, developers need to write more SQL and to interact more frequently with the underlying database. The database will no longer be a “bit bucket” to be minimized and abstracted. Rather, it will become another tool in the developer’s toolset to be fully leveraged.

SAP HANA Extended Application Services (XS) With SAP HANA SP5*, SAP has introduced an exciting new capability called SAP HANA Extended Application Services  (sometimes referred to unofficially as XS or XS Engine). The core concept of XS Engine is to embed a full-featured application server, Web server, and development environment within the SAP HANA appliance itself. However, this technology isn’t just another piece of software installed on the same hardware as SAP HANA. Instead, SAP has decided to truly integrate this new application services functionality directly into the deepest parts of the SAP HANA database. This architecture will enhance the performance of  the app and enable it to access SAP HANA differentiating features that no other application server has. Before SAP HANA SP5 was introduced, if you wanted to build a lightweight Web page or REST Service that consumes SAP HANA data or logic, you would need another application

server in your system landscape. For example, you might use SAP NetWeaver ABAP or SAP NetWeaver Java to connect to your SAP HANA system via a network connection and use ADBC (ABAP Database Connectivity) or JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) to pass SQL statements to SAP HANA. Because of SAP HANA’s openness, you might also use NET or any number of other environments or languages that support Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) as well. These scenarios are all still perfectly valid. In particular, when you are extending an existing application with new SAP HANA functionality, these approaches are very appealing because you can integrate this SAP HANA functionality into your current architecture easily and with minimal disruption. When you are building a new SAP HANA-specific application from scratch, however, it makes sense to consider the option of the SAP HANA Extended Application Services. This architecture enables you to build and deploy your application completely self-contained within SAP HANA. This approach can lower your costs of development and ownership while providing performance advantages because the application and control flow logic are located so close to the database. Applications designed specifically to leverage the power of SAP HANA are frequently designed to push as much of the logic down into the database as possible. It makes sense to place all of your data-intensive logic into SQL, SQLScript Procedures, and SAP HANA Views, because these techniques will leverage SAP HANA’s in-memory, columnar table optimizations as well as massively parallel processing (MPP). For the end-user experience, we are increasingly targeting HTML5 and mobile-based applications where the complete UI logic is executed on the client side. Therefore, we need an application server in the middle that is significantly smaller than the traditional application server. This server needs to provide only some basic validation logic and service enablement. The reduced scope of the application server lends further credit to the approach of a lightweight embedded approach like that of the SAP HANA Extended Application Services.

Figure 6 — Paradigm Shift in Runtime Layers

SAP HANA Stud io Becomes a Development Workbench To support developers in creating applications and services directly within SAP HANA Extended Application Services, SAP has enhanced the SAP HANA Studio to include all of the necessary tools. SAP HANA Studio was already based upon Eclipse; therefore, SAP was able to extend the Studio via an Eclipse Team Provider plug-in that sees the SAP HANA Repository as a remote source code repository similar to Git or Perforce. This arrangement empowers the SAP HANA Database to manage the entire lifecycle of all of the development resources (everything from SAP HANA Views, SQLScript Procedures, Roles, Server Side Logic, HTML and JavaScript content, etc.). These management capabilities include versioning, language translation export/import, and software delivery/transport. The SAP HANA Studio is extended with a new perspective called SAP HANA Development . As Figure 7 illustrates, this new perspective combines existing tools (e.g., the Navigator view from the Modeler perspective) with standard Eclipse tools (e.g., the Project Explorer) and new tools specifically created for SAP HANA Extended Application Services development (e.g., the Server Side JavaScript editor shown in the figure or the SAP HANA Repository browser). Because SAP HANA Studio is based on Eclipse, SAP can also integrate other Eclipse-based tools into it. For example, the SAP UI Development Toolkit for HTML5 (SAPUI5) is a standard feature in SAP HANA Extended Application Services. SAP HANA 1.0 SP5 comes preloaded with the 1.8 version of the SAPUI5 runtime, and the SAPUI5 development tools are integrated into SAP HANA Studio and managed by the SAP HANA Repository, like all other XS-based artifacts.

Figure 7 — SAP HANA Development Perspect ive

These extensions to the SAP HANA Studio include features that enhance developer productivity; for example, project wizards (Figure 8), resource wizards, code completion and syntax highlighting for SAP HANA Extended Application Services server side APIs, integrated debuggers, and so much more.

Figure 8 — SAP HANA Spec ific Project Wizards

These features also include team management functionality. All development work is performed based on standard Eclipse projects. The project files are then stored within the SAP HANA Repository along with all the other resources. Team members can utilize the SAP HANA Repository browser view to examine existing projects and import them directly into their local Eclipse workspace. Developers can then work on these projects offline. In addition, multiple developers can work on the same resources at the same time. Upon commit back to the SAP HANA Repository, the tool will detect any conflicts, and developers can access a merge tool to integrate the conflicts back into the Repository. The SAP HANA Repository also supports the concept of active/inactive workspace objects. This feature allows developers to safely commit their work back to the server and store it there without immediately overwriting the current runtime version. The new runtime version isn’t created until the developer chooses to activate the Repository object.

SQLScript As we have described, the cornerstone of the architectural optimization for applications designed for SAP HANA is the concept of code push down. Execution of data-intensive logic

within the database begins with the usage of standard SQL and views. Developers, however, also need semantics that exceed the capabilities of SQL if they wish to create business logic within the database. To this end, SAP delivers just such an extension to SQL, called SQLScript. SQLScript is the primary language for creating stored procedures and functions in SAP HANA. The extensions that form SQLScript allow the developer to push down more of the data-intensive logic into the database. Typical SQL statements are often well suited to parallel processing because of their declarative nature. The primary weakness of SQL becomes apparent when you need to pass the result set of one SQL operation into the input of a second operation. In this scenario, developers traditionally had only two options: copy the result set to the application server, or write complex, nested SQL statements utilizing sub-queries or multiple join conditions. SQLScript solves this problem by providing a feature that describes the data flow from one SQL operation to another. This feature enables developers to continue to write logic as they would with an application server and also to declare and use intermediate result sets and variables. Yet it SQLScript often can be compiled down to database joins and sub-queries. This feature offers developers a syntax that is easier for a person to read and write while still providing a logic flow that is well suited to database execution. At the same time, SQLScript avoids [sending] massive data copies to an application server, [thereby] leveraging sophisticated parallel execution strategies within the database. In addition to all of these benefits, SQLScript provides enhanced control flow capabilities as well as some limited procedural logic constructs. These features make it possible to rewrite some of the more complex parts of the application logic and push them down into the database layer as well. Overall, SQLScript will improve the readability and structure of your data-intensive logic (compared to complex SQL alone) by passing the results of one SQL statement to another and by breaking complex SQL into smaller chunks. It also brings the data-intensive application logic close to the database by combining the existing Declarative logic of SQL with its own built-in functions as well as with orchestration logic such as Data Definition Language (DDL), Data Manipulation Language (DML), and imperative logic constructs. When compared to standard SQL, SQLScript has several advantages. Procedures can return multiple results, whereas an SQL query can return only a single result set. Going further, SQLScript can decompose complex functions into smaller chunks. This capability enables modular programming, reuse, and a better understandability by functional abstraction. For structuring complex queries, standard SQL allows only the definition of SQL views. These views have neither parameters nor a fixed interface. Another advantage of  SQLScript over SQL is that it supports local variables for intermediate results with implicitly defined types. With standard SQL, globally visible views have to be defined even for intermediate steps. Going further, SQLScript has control logic such as if/else that is not available in the SQL standard. Finally, SQLScript can increase overall performance by utilizing parallel processing within most of its executions.

R  Stored Procedures serve a second purpose within SAP HANA: They are the mechanism that

integrates other programming languages and interfaces directly into the database execution layer. The best example of this integration of third-party languages is the introduction of R Language within Stored Procedures. R is an open-source software language and environment for statistical computing and graphics that includes more than 3000 add-on packages. R covers a wide range of topics from Cluster Analysis to Probability Distributions to Graphic Displays to Machine Learning — to name just a few. With the R integration into SAP HANA, developers can write their R Scripts directly within a stored procedure. During execution, the R script, along with any input data, are sent to the remote, open-source R server. The execution takes place on the R server, and the results are sent back to SAP HANA. SAP provides the interfaces in both SAP HANA and the R server to make this integration completely transparent to the application developer.

Figure 9 — R Language Int egrat ion

L In addition to SQLScript language for the implementation of Stored Procedures, SAP also has the language L. L is a robust, low-level, high-performance programming language located inside SAP HANA that allows code to be created at runtime. The L language is based on concepts from the C/C++ world; it can be roughly characterized as a safe subset of C/C++ that is enriched by SAP HANA data types and concepts to simplify the manipulation of and interaction with database objects. L provides direct access to the table and column objects that are utilized in the Calculation Engine. However, the direct access that makes L very powerful also makes it rather dangerous. Therefore, L is currently restricted to SAP internal usage. Customers and partners should use L only   in close cooperation with SAP development resources. SAP’s long-term goal is to

safely wrap the most useful abilities of L and integrate them into the SQLScript language. At this point, direct access to L will become unnecessary.

 AFL AFL stands for Application Function Library. It represents multiple function libraries — like Business Function Library (BFL) and Predictive Analysis Library (PAL). BFL is a prebuilt, parameter-driven, basic building block library of calculations delivered at high performance, including depreciation, capacity optimization, and time-based functions such as year over ear (YoY) and delay. The AFLs are written in C/C++, and they become closely linked with the database kernel itself. Significantly, only SAP can write these libraries. Because the AFLs interact so closely with the database kernel, they operate without a virtual machine abstraction. Nevertheless, customers and partners can easily access and reuse these libraries because, with the introduction of SAP HANA 1.0 SP5, SAP can now generate a Stored Procedure interface for them. Therefore, consuming one of the powerful functions of the Application Function Library is now as easy as working with any other SQLScript procedure. In time, SAP plans to release additional tools that make the consumption of these AFL-based procedures even easier. SAP may even open up development of new AFL functions to select partners.

Working with Large Teams The SAP HANA Change Manager, new in SP7 and a part of SAP HANA XS, includes enhancements aimed at facilitating multi-developer/multi-project environments. Enhancements include changes to the repository interface, enabling interactive artifact testing, and a new change manager interface that helps pinpoint code changes between versions.

Next Steps By this point, you’re probably sick of reading, and want to get your hands dirty playing with SAP HANA. Luckily for you, SAP offers FREE developer instances of SAP HANA as well as all of  the development tools you need to experiment with everything discussed in this chapter (and more). Simply head over to the SAP HANA One Developer Edition site to get started. It takes about 15 minutes to sign up, provision your instance on the cloud, and start writing code. When you download the SAP HANA Client, it includes SDKs for JDBC, ODBC, ODBO and Python DB API. While the Client is downloading, you can pop over to the SAP HANA Academy to watch hundreds of tutorials on how to build your first “hello world” application or to do any number of other things with SAP HANA — for free. And, if you’re not sick of reading, check out the SAP HANA Developer Guide for a lot more information.

Additional Resources Application development with SAP HANA is such a huge topic that it could fill up several books. In this chapter we’ve tried to cover some of the most critical aspects of working with SAP HANA as an application developer. We highly recommend that you continue learning

about development topics at the following sites: SAP HANA Developer Center SAP HANA Documentation (help portal) ABAP for SAP HANA SAP HANA Academy (educational videos) The Road to HANA (the ultimate link collection for beginners and experts) Development Resources on SAPHANA.com SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA

Chapter 9

SAP HANA Administration & Operations

COMING FALL 2014

Chapter 10

SAP HANA Hardware Overview

S

AP 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 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 into 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 opensource 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 open-source and easily 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 in-memory 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 inmemory 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 in-memory computing to Intel’s executives, and the two parties discussed the level of co-innovation that would be needed to jointly engineer both an in-memory database and optimized processors that could handle the unique needs of this new architecture. The top executives from each company agreed that the they would have to establish a new level of co-innovation 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 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 sizes in SAP HANA, which is delivered  on the Intel ® Xeon® processor. 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:  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.

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 (again, 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. Huawei, VMC and Lenovo joined in 2013. 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.” In May of 2013, SAP made a major step forward in providing an even lower cost, highervalue deployment option for customers by announcing the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. The SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud offering is a comprehensive RAM-optimized cloud infrastructure combined with managed services. Customers can now run their SAP HANA applications, including SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA and SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA, in a managed cloud environment. It delivers the power of real-time in-memory technology with cloud simplicity and elastic economics. SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is a fully scalable, enterprise-ready, mission critical, secure, and high availability cloud offering with a full-managed services approach. For more information on the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and other cloud deployment options, please see the comparision at http://www.saphana.com/community/abouthana/deployment-options.

General SAP HANA Hardware Specifications SAP HANA is sold as a pre-configured, pre-installed appliance that is delivered directly from the hardware partner. SUSE Linux SLES 11  and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA are the only supported operating systems, and Intel E7 processors  are the primary supported chips. Samsung RAM is currently the primary memory used by most 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, availability, 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) SAP has recently made the SAP HANA supported hardware matrix available on an open website. Since the supported configurations are changing so rapidly, we’ll simply insert the link to the site here so you can always get the most up-to-date listing.

SAP Certified Appliance Hardware for S AP HANA

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 several vendors for multi-node scale out. Literally, you ust 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. In 2012, SAP recently completed the first 100TB 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 is 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. For more information on HA and DR with SAP HANA, refer to the documentation on SAPHANA.com. Also see the great overview documentation about SAP HANA in data centers.

Tailored Data Center Concept for SAP HANA deployments In addition to SAP HANA as standardized and highly optimized appliance, SAP now offers the opportunity to run the SAP HANA server with a customer’s preferred storage solution. This option enables a reduction in hardware and operational costs at installed base customers through the reuse of existing hardware components and operational processes. This approach not only helps to mitigate risk and optimize time-to-value by enabling existing IT Management processes for SAP HANA implementations, it also affords additional flexibility in hardware vendor selection by leveraging the existing ecosystem. IT departments will benefit from staying within IT budgets, shorter implementation cycles, and better consumption of  hardware innovations to drive the SAP HANA adoption.

Many SAP HANA customers have existing investments in shared storage architecture, and since the in-memory architecture of SAP HANA does not require Tier 1 storage, SAP would like to allow customers to take advantage of their existing investments in skills and technology to make the transition to in-memory computing with SAP HANA easier and more cost-effective. To help customers that want to manage their own storage, as of SP7, SAP HANA tailored data center integration is now provided as a flexible configuration option for enterprise customers. SAP HANA customers can plan and validate customized storage configurations for SAP HANA with SAP partners for enterprise storage and the SAP HANA appliance. Essentially, this gives large customers the freedom (and responsibility) of deploying HANA with their own storage rather than deploying it as an appliance. To understand the implications of this, see “What’s New? SAP HANA SPS 07 SAP HANA tailored data center integration.”

SAP Hardware Partner 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 valueadded 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 Huawei IBM NEC VCE

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 sizes 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 latest Intel Xeon® processor E7 v2 family  with up to 15 cores per socket deliver rapid data analysis that discerns patterns and trends so you can adjust your ust-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 v2 family such as 37.5MB of L3 cache, Intel ® QuickPath Interconnects, and quad-channel integrated memory controllers with max memory speed of up to up to 1600MHz deliver extraordinary capabilities for businesses of all sizes that implement SAP HANA for functionality such as business intelligence and data analytics. Especially the up to 24 DIMMs per socket with 64GB max DIMM density which allow up to 6 TB in 4-socket, up to 12 TB in 8-socket or 24 TB in 16-socket servers provide SAP customers significant improvements for large transactional workloads e.g. BusinessSuite on HANA.

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 e.g. Intel ®

AVX. 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© 2014 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.

Figure 1. Cisco UCS SAP HANA Architect ure

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 for BW and 512 GB for SAP business suite on HANA. 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 for BW and 1024 GB for SAP business suite on HANA. 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 by a literally infinite number of Cisco B440 M2 blades servers each and the correspondent storage from EMC or NetApp. The beauty of Cisco’s scale out architecture that it can be extended by additional blades and storage units without shutting down the HANA system as we have proven at eBay where an existing HANA system with 4 TB was extended to 12 TB on the fly without any downtime.

High Availabilit y 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. Synchronous Disaster recovery (DR) scenarios up to 50km and asynchronous over infinite distances 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 or the SAP HANA system replication feature.

SAP HANA 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, interchassis 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 Cisco 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. Customers who don’t want to run into the hassle of reading a high number of interlinked SAP notes before any HANA patch can use the Cisco HANA remote operation service which will that on systems which keep sensitive data on premise will be managed in a cloud like style without compromising security.

Customer Success Story Medtronic dramatically improved reporting performance, increasing the value of its customer information, with the SAP HANA™ platform and Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS™) server platform.

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 non-SAP 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 additional information on SAP on Cisco UCS please email [email protected]

Dell SAP HANA Solutions Dell has collaborated with SAP for more than two decades to deliver hundreds of solutions to customers across many industries. Dell helps organizations achieve rapid and sustainable business results with end-to-end solutions that are high-performing and standards-based. In addition to innovative, leading edge hardware platforms, Dell offers access to thousands of enterprise computing solutions consultants. Our knowledge experts incorporate lessons learned and best practices into an enterprise solution delivery model that spans hardware, consulting, implementation, hosting and application management services designed to enhance value for customer investments in SAP solutions. Dell offers customers a portfolio of end-to-end solutions and services in support of SAP HANA applications. Our complement of assessment, implementation, management, data modeling and use case assistance services help reduce IT costs while helping organizations transform their business. Dell’s innovative platforms can dramatically increase the availability and speed of business information which in turn drives insightful decision-making using SAP HANA.

The Dell Advantage 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, scalable and offered in multiple configurations to address your specific business needs and gives your organization full access to the power of SAP HANA. Dell’s SAP HANA appliance solution includes: Powerful technology: Single server configurations, ranging in size from 128GB to 2TB, are based on the Dell PowerEdge R920 server platform and provide a consistent experience and a solid base for future expansion. Dell’s PowerEdge R920 incorporates Intel E7 v2 technology, is certified for SAP HANA single server solutions, and includes everything needed to support your SAP HANA solution. The forerunner of the R920, the PowerEdge R910, will continue to be offered in scale out configurations until the PowerEdge R920 is certified by SAP for scale out solutions later this year. Virtualization for development: Dell single server solutions are also certified by SAP to run SAP HANA virtualized using VMware VMs. A virtualized HANA implementation allows for a more economical application development environment and is ready for deployment in production environments when SAP and VMware enable it. Enterprise class availability: The Dell scale out solutions for SAP HANA are engineered to provide resiliency and easy expandability from 1TB up to 16TB and beyond using both fibre channel SAN technology and a highly available multi-node design. High performance: Automated tiering of data with Dell Compellent storage software provides the quickest access to the data sets most needed for analysis. Disaster recovery: Dell solutions for SAP HANA leverage unique features found in Dell Compellent SAN storage to provide remote disaster recovery through SAP HANA system replication and/or storage replication. Modular growth: The Dell scale out solution is designed to grow from 1TB up to 16TB

(available later this year with the certification of the PowerEdge R920) in modular increments and to grow without disruption to the existing system. SAP applications in-memory: Application deployment is now supported on Dell solutions for SAP HANA, enabling production business applications to enjoy the speed and performance of in-memory computing, without the need for multiple compute environments. The combination of Dell’s PowerEdge server platforms and SAP HANA software allows users to conduct analytics and operations in a single system. Together, the solutions help enable a business to react faster to events impacting operations. Dell is your one source for all solution components, including SAP HANA software licenses, engineering, and Dell Services that provide end-to-end solution support and consulting expertise. Dell’s portfolio of SAP full lifecycle services leverage industry best practices to offer better business outcomes for SAP clients, and Dell’s ProSupport™ and Mission Critical Services help keep your SAP HANA solution running smoothly. Dell also offers SAP HANA Managed Services that provide comprehensive management and support for your SAP HANA landscape. Dell’s SAP HANA solution positions an organization to identify and analyze data trends and patterns that can 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 can increase availability and reduce risk.

Dell SAP HANA configurations — a complete portfolio The Dell Solution for SAP HANA is offered in a wide variety of pre-configured and optimized sizes to meet virtually any customer need. Dell and SAP have worked together to provide solutions that are right sized for each data analysis environment. The Dell PowerEdge R920 server platform is the new flagship, foundational platform for the Dell solution for SAP HANA. The R920 immediately replaces its generational predecessor, the PowerEdge R910, for all single server configurations and will be certified for scale out configurations later this year. Dell’s commitment to a consistent platform across all configuration sizes delivers a stable environment for SAP HANA that can evolve and adapt as customer needs grow. The Dell PowerEdge R920 provides: Performance and reliability in a scalable 4U, four-socket server allowing large workload consolidation and scale for the SAP HANA in-memory database. Integrated diagnostics and system management with the Dell LifeCycle Controller and iDRAC integrated management adapter. Processing power  using high performing Intel E7v2 Series processors, with up to 60 cores of processing power with Intel ®  Advanced RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) Technology. 96 DIMMs of memory (max.) that support up to 6 terabytes of DDR3 RAM and providing a massive memory footprint with room to expand as SAP HANA capabilities expand. SAS drives for internal storage with high capacity and performance  to permit higher

speed (multi spindle) data access and support all SAP HANA single server performance requirements. Hot swappable, front load NVMe Express Flash drives for faster transaction rates for even better SAP HANA performance and reliability than earlier generations.

Scale-out HANA appliance configurations The linear scalability of our SAP HANA software platform makes growing to meet larger workload demands a very straightforward and non-disruptive process. Dell combines the superior scalability and RAS features of the PowerEdge R910 platform into a multi-node configuration, utilizing 10GbE networking, and sharing data across Dell Compellent SAN Storage. Designing for modular scalability creates a system that grows seamlessly, without requiring a hardware change when expansion is needed, without disrupting the existing functionality. The coming certification of the PowerEdge R920 platform for scale out systems will allow for even larger and higher performing configurations. Dell Compellent SAN Storage complements the power, performance, and manageability of  the Dell PowerEdge servers and offers the additional benefit of the Fluid Data storage system — a virtualized environment that provides tremendous flexibility in storage management. Automated tiering of data — standard with Dell Compellent storage software — manages persistent storage to provide the quickest access to the data sets most needed for analysis, and high availability features that simplify backups, expansion, and data migration provide tangible enhancements to the SAP HANA analytics engine infrastructure. Dell engineered its scale out solutions for SAP HANA to provide resiliency and easy expandability. This modular scalability is an important feature for IT departments deploying a mission critical solution for their business. The Dell Active Infrastructure solution lets you start with high availability at 1TB, and grow your system as your data processing needs grow, 512GB at a time, without disruption to the operation of the system. Above all, there is no requirement to change architectures or remove existing system components to facilitate expansion. Dell engineers each of these components, end-to-end, to provide a completely integrated and fully supported ecosystem for high performance data analytics, and the architecture design supports additional applications as they are released by SAP. This model provides even more investment protection over the life of the SAP HANA implementation.

Dell PowerEdge R920 (with Intel E7 v2 processors) based scale-out certification is underway, and will enable configurations from 1-16TB RAM. The scale-out information provided is based on current Dell PowerEdge R910 server building block.

Dell’s SAP Single-Node HANA Appliance The SAP Single-Node HANA appliance from Dell is fully contained in the PowerEdge R920 server, making use of fast internal disk and Dell PowerEdge ExpressFlash NVME PCIe SSDs for data and logs. Solid state PCIe storage technology offers high IOPs and low latency performance for maintaining the SAP HANA system logs, while an array of internal 10Krpm SAS disks is used to maintain a copy of the data image. Dell offers several different sizes of HANA appliances that are all based on the Dell PowerEdge R920 server. These single server configurations also support SAP HANA Virtualized on VMware vSphere 5.5 to support the virtualization of multiple pre-production environments on a single server. Dell offers a 2TB 4 processor server configuration that supports SAP Business Suite applications running on SAP HANA and supports the transactional capabilities in SAP HANA. This configuration allows SAP Business Suite environments as large as 4TB can take advantage of the acceleration offered by the SAP HANA in-memory database environment. Dell was one of the first SAP partners to certify a 4 processor configuration.

Built-in High Availability  The Dell™ PowerEdge™ R920 is designed for reliability and scalability for mission-critical applications. High availability features include: Built-in reliability features at the CPU, memory and hardware 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 Dell’s focus on reliability starts with product design, and ends only when it has delivered a solution that meets strict testing and quality control standards.

Support infrastructure Dell’s SAP HANA appliance is delivered as an all-inclusive solution that comes as a preintegrated unit with all necessary hardware, storage and networking capabilities.

dditional software needed  Dell’s SAP HANA appliance is an end-to-end and all-in-one solution that comes pre-loaded with all of the software and management tools necessary. SAP HANA Virtualized configurations also include pre-installed VMware vSphere 5.5 software.

Services and Support  SAP HANA services are also available to assist you with implementing the solution. Dell offers a complete solution to support your SAP HANA environment. The Dell SAP HANA appliance is delivered fully installed and configured with all the required software for Dell SAP Service engineers to connect it to customer source system(s). Dell provides the following HANA services: HANA Quick-Start Service  that enables installation, configuration and validation of the hardware, software and post-install documentation.

HANA Managed Service  providing ongoing management and support for SAP HANA landscape. This service includes 24x7 monitoring, ongoing remote health-checks, firmware and software upgrades, including application patching, as well as assistance with problem tracking and resolution. Rapid Deployment Solutions for BW to HANA Migration  that provide rapid database migration of SAP BW 7.3 to SAP HANA using SAP tools & best practices, as well as RDS services for profitability analysis and operational reporting on HANA. Dell HANA Services coupled with Dell HANA Scale-Out Solutions provides the optimum in HANA capabilities, delivery and support.

Support Services — the Dell Assurance Dell’s SAP HANA appliance comes with three 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 are designed to accelerate rapid resolution by offering quick delivery of on-site parts and or labor and providing access to Dell’s Critical Situation Process. Key support features: On-site Response — 4 hour on-site 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  — On-site service technician dispatched in parallel with phonebased troubleshooting when you declare a Severity level 1 incident.

Optional SAP HANA services Dell offers optional 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 jumpstart process, customers can see quickly the value that SAP HANA can bring to the decision making process. SAP Modernization Services – Dell has developed a portfolio of Modernization Service for SAP applications that features cloud computing, real-time analytics and mobile applications. Implementation – SAP HANA Implementation workshops facilitate planning and creation of the Business Justification for the rest of the deployment.

Analytics Factory – Dell offers global business intelligence consulting and support.

Customer success stories Aareon AG  is a leading consultancy and provider of IT systems for the property sector, offering software and services to its customers, and managing their outsourced business processes. It also provides datacentre services. The company, which has more than 50 ears’ experience in the market, offers expertise as well as software and services. Aareon invests as many resources in its internal systems as it does developing IT systems for clients. It knows that customers’ employees rely on rapid access to operational data to make the smartest business decisions. With this in mind, a customer wanted to speed up its data warehouse for its line-of business applications. Aareon found the right IT partner in Dell. The company had worked with Dell in the past, deploying a number of its server solutions to support a wide range of applications. “When we looked for an IT provider to deliver a SAP HANA appliance, Dell came closest to our demands,” says Sänger. The benefits the new system provided to Aeroen include: Aereon predicts data access speeds to quadruple for its customers’ staff driving strong productivity gains Aareon ensures smooth implementation with expert SAP support Easy-to-use tools make environment design simple Company ensures great performance with responsive support The IT team works with Dell ProSupport to optimize the performance of its Dell appliance. It chose the Mission Critical option with four-hour on-site support to ensure it receives a high level of responsiveness 24/7.  As a result of the SAP HANA workshop from Dell, personnel gained a deep level of insight into the software and  knowledge to begin working with the technology when it goes live. — Stefan Claus, System Administrator, Aareon AG

Koehler Paper Group  is a manufacturing company based in Germany. World leaders in specialist paper manufacturing, Koehler Paper Group sells 500,000 tons of paper each year. It employs around 1,800 staff and reports an annual turnover of more than ?700 million. Koehler wanted to replace its conventional database environment with a more efficient infrastructure. The company worked with Dell and SAP to introduce a new database solution based on SAP HANA and Dell PowerEdge servers in three days. Dell’s SAP HANA solution delivered many benefits to Koehler Paper Group, including: New system cuts data loading times from five minutes to five seconds Firm reduces cost of business warehouse by one-third Ease of use simplifies reporting process Efficient reporting helps employees make smarter decisions faster Strong partnership provides expert consultancy

 I was very pleased with the technical know-how of the Dell and SAP teams. Not only was the level of expertise impressive, but on a personal level, everyone collaborated well to make the project a success. — Karl Schindler, Head of IT, Koehler Paper Group, Germany

Contact information for inquiries Dell offers you the complete portfolio of end-to-end solutions in support of your SAP HANA applications that can drive down your IT costs and help transform your business performance. Contact your Dell Sales or Services Account Executive to learn more.

Fujitsu SAP HANA Solutions The global partnership between Fujitsu and SAP has been an innovation engine for customers for decades. In its role as a pioneering SAP HANA partner, Fujitsu offers solutions and services that simplify the introduction and operation of the SAP HANA platform, enabling its full potential to be exploited thus providing customers with optimal support on their way towards real-time business. The features of our broad approach to support SAP’s in-memory technology include: A smart infrastructure architecture based on the latest Intel Xeon processor technology (Ivy Bridge) for highest flexibility, scalability and availability Tailored solutions for different use cases and requirements , ready for on-premise and off-premise implementations Rapid time to value and a quick return on investment thanks to a unique, high-quality pre-installation and staging process. Dedicated services that go far beyond traditional infrastructure services to support better decision-making, project preparation, financing and migration. The Fujitsu SAP HANA Global Demo Center which can be used remotely by customers to test and tangibly experience the business benefits of SAP HANA . The innovative FlexFrame Orchestrator solution, which enables operating SAP applications, SAP databases and the SAP HANA platform faster and more easily and effectively. It thus simplifies the management of complex SAP environments and reduces costs by up to 90%. Fujitsu’s expertise in infrastructure solutions and BI knowledge enables us to provide superior service and best-in-class support for SAP HANA projects. Furthermore Fujitsu is certified in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and thus well positioned to help customers transform CAPEX into OPEX by leveraging hosted SAP HANA deployments.

Fujitsu SAP HANA Infrastructure Offering The Fujitsu portfolio for SAP HANA addresses the requirements of various customer segments — from specific turnkey appliances for small and medium-sized companies to customized solutions for large enterprises: The Fujitsu Compact Appliance is optimized for HANA implementations in combination with SAP Business One and SAP Business All-in-One. The Fujitsu Power Appliance for SAP HANA is designed as an optimal foundation for the SAP HANA database and comprises single-node and multi-node offerings that are suitable for all the existing usage scenarios including SAP BW on HANA, Business Suite on HANA and the entire set of accelerator options. Fujitsu infrastructure solutions for SAP HANA are based on industry-standard PRIMEQUEST servers, which represent a unique combination of Japanese-style innovation and German quality standards. Solid reliability and excellent price performance contribute to the favorable lifecycle costs. Operational costs are reduced thanks to server management,

energy efficiency, and innovative, market-leading technology.

Fujitsu Compact Appliance for SAP HANA (designed for SAP Business One customers) Fujitsu PRIMERGY TX300 and PRIMERGY RX350 servers are SAP-validated platforms for SAP Business One, analytics powered by SAP HANA and SAP Business One on HANA. The tower and rack systems are available with four different main memory options ranging from 64 GB to 256 GB and allow tailored configurations for different environments and use cases. Fujitsu’s high-quality pre-installation services for SUSE Linux and the SAP HANA software ensure a ready-to-connect delivery for fast and non-disruptive SAP HANA implementation. Pre-installation is optional, and software components can also be installed onsite by the partner. The Fujitsu Compact Appliance for SAP HANA is rounded off by a set of optional services including SAP Business One migration, partner coaching, extended maintenance for hardware or the SUSE Linux operating system, etc.

Fujitsu Power Appliance: Single-Node (scale-up) The single-node configurations range from TCO-optimized entry options based on PRIMEQUEST RX4770 up to PRIMEQUEST 2800B systems, and all set new levels of  performance and system resilience. Data persistency is ensured by the easy-to-use storage subsystem Fujitsu ETERNUS JX40. The offerings are ideal for: SAP HANA proof-of-concept and proof-of-value projects, plus initial SAP HANA projects with a limited scope SAP HANA environments for development, tests, quality assurance and training Productive use of SAP HANA, even in business critical use cases thanks to advanced RAS features SAP Business Suite powered by HANA, even for projects with highest performance and capacity requirements (thanks to scalability up to 6TB main memory and 8 CPUs)

All single node options can be delivered pre-installed with the complete software stack including SUSE Linux and the SAP HANA software. The industrialized, high quality installation and pre-tested delivery ensures fast time-to-value. VMware virtualized appliances enable significant cost savings, increase agility and enable the simultaneously drive of several development, test and production projects.

Fujitsu Power Appliance: Multi-Node (scale-out) The Fujitsu multi-node offering concept for SAP HANA is designed for productive environments and mission-critical use. The building block concept allows customers to start small and easily add and integrate additional servers (up to 16) and storage capacity as requirements grow. Our offering is based on industry-standard PRIMEQUEST RX4770 or PRIMEQUEST 2800B/E servers with up to 6 TB main memory and most recent NetApp storage systems due to comprehensive long-term experience with NetApp technology. Nevertheless, to comply with individual storage requirements and strategies of our customers, Fujitsu fully supports the SAP Tailored Datacenter Approach (TDI) and thus integrates any SAP validated storage system into our Fujitsu Power Appliance. Utilization of the existing enterprise storage is possible in order to significantly reduce TCO. Based on mutual development with Symantec and CommVault Fujitsu has presented the first certified third-party backup solutions for SAP HANA. ComVault Simpana and Symantec NetBackup are optional components of the Fujitsu Power Appliance for SAP HANA. To meet individual requirements Fujitsu also offers the option of tailoring customized backup solutions as well as integrating existing solutions.

High availability is crucial for the mission-critical readiness of the overall SAP HANA solution and this is already built into the smart concept, thanks to the differentiation between worker nodes and standby nodes, which take over should a productive server fail. The second pillar ensuring high availability is NFS (Network File System) and the shared NetApp FAS storage system, which ensures that all data is constantly mirrored. If there is a data loss in the main memory, data can be copied back from the storage system. The highest system availability demands can be met by the implementation of the SAP-certified disaster-tolerant Fujitsu Power Appliance for SAP HANA ®  solution (see SAP Note #1755396). The implementation requires identical appliance configurations on two sites. The SAP HANA production instance at the primary site runs all the transactions, and all the data is stored consistently on a shared NetApp FAS3000, 6000 or FAS8000 Series storage system and replicated to the NetApp storage system at the secondary site. Zero data loss can be ensured with NetApp MetroCluster mirroring for implementations at up to 200 kilometers in distance. Asynchronous SnapMirror can be used for long range disaster resilience (> 200 kilometers). During normal operations, the infrastructure on the secondary site can be used for test and development projects with an additional storage system. In a possible disaster situation, an IT expert evaluates the dangers involved and initiates the recovery, if and where applicable. A guided recovery process reduces the risk of human error and administration overheads, ensuring a rapid return to normal SAP HANA operations.

Support infrastructure As an additional, certified component, the Fujitsu SAP HANA infrastructure solution may include a PRIMERGY RX 100 Infrastructure Management Server (IMS) used for: Efficient SAP HANA software maintenance (initial installation and upgrade) Seamless integration into the customer’s systems management landscape Integrated monitoring of SAP HANA environment or connection of customer’s monitoring tools Easy remote support access as a key part of the solution maintenance offering (SolutionContract) System administrators especially benefit from the IMS when systems need to be recovered or software updates are distributed automatically within multi-node environments.

Additional software needed The AISConnect software enables remote access to the SAP HANA landscape and is thus a prerequisite component for the solution maintenance offering (SolutionContract).

Support Services A complete set of infrastructure-related services covers all project phases — from a customer-specific solution concept to continuous solution support ensured by the Fujitsu SolutionContract. All services are based on proven methods and follow strict guidelines to ensure high quality projects.

Additional information on the Fujitsu pre-installation (Solution Implementation) Pre-installation allows fast time-to-value and a rapid return on investment. Consequently, Fujitsu offers a highly professional and industrialized pre-installation service which exceeds the mere assembly of hardware components, the pre-installation of the SAP HANA software stack, and the SUSE Linux operating system. Customer-specific settings (e.g., IP addresses and switch configurations) are also prepared in the dedicated Fujitsu staging center. The installation is steered by dedicated scripts, which help to avoid human failure and ensure the highest quality. Having delivered a completely installed, individually staged and comprehensively tested system on the customer’s premises, the Fujitsu Power Appliance for SAP HANA can then be implemented and integrated rapidly using proven Fujitsu deployment and integration services. Single-node implementations are generally completed within 48 hours, whereas multi-nodes require a few days depending on the project size and complexity.

Additional information on the Fujitsu SolutionContract (Solution Support) The Fujitsu SolutionContract is the maintenance and support service for specific Fujitsu solutions. It represents a mix of proactive and reactive services, ensuring that issues are resolved before they affect business operations. This concept takes into account that Fujitsu solutions consist of hardware, software and network products from a range of different

vendors. Fujitsu is the single point of contact for all the infrastructure components involved in a Fujitsu solution as well as their interactions with each other. The Fujitsu SolutionContract offers several service level options depending on the individual requirements. SAP software support is not part of this contract.

Additional Addit ional SAP HANA HANA Servic Services es The comprehensive Fujitsu service portfolio for SAP HANA exceeds the traditional infrastructure service offering and helps customers answer typical questions, such as: How can SAP HANA help to solve specific problems in my organization? How can we migrate existing data securely? se curely? How How much will the the SAP HANA implementation actually actually cost? The portfolio includes developing business cases, demonstrations and test offerings, professional database optimization and migration, as well as decision-making support based on cost estimates and financing options. The services are partly provided by the Fujitsu SAP HANA Global Demo Center Ce nter,, which which is operated by our subsidiary subsidiary TDS. TD S. The Demo De mo Center hosts a remote accessible environment comprised of a system landscape for SAP HANA applications that is maintained by a competent team of developers and consultants for solution, solution, database, database, BI and business business process matters. Services overview: Smart discovery (e.g., Bi consulting, demos, Proof of Concept projects) Solid preparation (e.g., DB assessment and optimization, SAP BW 7.3 upgrade) Smooth impleme implementation ntation (e.g., (e.g., database migration, SAP HANA Deployment)) Secure operations (e.g., Fujitsu SolutionContract, Application Management Services) This offering is under under constant constant refinement, re finement, development and extension exte nsion..

Innovation: Innovati on: Unifor Uniform m manag management ement for all SAP environments environments including i ncluding SAP HAN HANA A wit with h FlexF FlexFra rame me Orchest Orches t ra ratt or Fujitsu’s Fujitsu’s innovative FlexFrame Orchestrator solution solution enables operating SAP applications, applications, SAP databases and the SAP HANA platform easier, faster and more effectively. It simplifies the management of complex SAP environments, optimizes planning, operation and change management and reduces costs by up to 90% whilst increasing agility by up to 50%. Comprising most advanced orchestration and administration capabilities, FlexFrame Orchestrator is an optimized operational concept for the entire SAP landscape. Centralized SAP software components can be dynamically deployed across physical and virtual resources based on business demand. The result is faster provisioning of innovations resulting in an empowered, agile business. Working with our specialist partners such as, NetApp and VMWare, this can be applied for all IT provisioning models, on premise, as a managed or hosting service or deployed in the cloud. FlexFrame Orchestrator can be delivered as a pre-installed and pre-tested ready-to-run installation out of the Fujitsu factory, which ensures highest quality and fast time to value.

Customer Custom er Success Stories Stor ies Modern Bakery, Dubai Modern Bakery has selected Fujitsu for a highly strategic project to update the bakery’s IT infrastructure. Using the SAP HANA platform running on Fujitsu Power Appliance, the project is designed to provide real-time insight into the business data and financials that can be critical for a business in perishable products. Modern Bakery turned to Fujitsu, which has 40 years of experience working with SAP solutions. Fujitsu Power Appliance for SAP HANA is expected to provide Modern Bakery with the speed and transparency transparency it needs to improve improve its business. business. As A s a future future step, Modern Bakery plans to expand the system to a disaster-resilient disaster-res ilient configuratio configuration. n. With the aid of Fujitsu’s end-to-end consulting, and using remote access to the Fujitsu Global Demo Center to view an initial demo of SAP HANA, Modern Bakery was able to gain a clear picture of how the solution is expected to accelerate its reporting and business processes. Dr. Fawaz Al Bahri, CEO & Managing Partner, Modern Bakery: “We chose Fujitsu based on its comprehensive portfolio of infrastructure solutions and long experience working with SAP solutions. Fujitsu’s end-to-end consulting and our ability to remotely use the Fujitsu Global Demo Center demonstrated how the implementation of SAP  HANA could be used to help us achieve our business goals. Most of all, we value the fact that  Fujitsu intends to tailor its offering for us based on our individual needs.”

SAP internal project: SAP BW powered by SAP HANA The new SAP internal SAP BW powered by SAP HANA has a central role to play in the corporate analytics architecture for combined and integrated planning with BW IP and SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation. For SAP’s system, the decision was made to go with a Fujitsu Scale-Out HANA solution based on PRIMERGY servers. The key features are: The SAP HANA scale-out infrastructure infrastructure is design des igned ed to have no single single point of failure. failure. This means that any failure in the infrastructure — server, storage, network — would be corrected automatically with minimal to no downtime. If a server fails, the work of the server is taken over by a standby node. More than one standby node may be configured as an option. The storage is designed for highest availability — many disks or even a storage controller can fail fa il without stopping stopping operations. Last, but not least, the complete network infrastructure — NICs, cables, switches — is designed to cope with component failures without the user even noticing that something has broken. For further information see SAP Blog (http://scn.sap.com/community/hana-inmemory/blog/2012/05/04/get-high-availability-with-bw-on-hana-scale-out-solution )

Further information For more information please please visit: www.fujitsu.com/fts/hana www.fujitsu.com/fts/flexframe www.fujitsu.com/fts/sap Feel free to get in touch with your local Fujitsu sales representative or contact us at: [email protected] .

Hitachi Hita chi Unified Comp Compute ute Platform Select for SAP HANA HANA Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Select for SAP HANA is an SAP-certified, optimized, and converged infrastructure platform for SAP HANA that enhances an organization’s decisionmaking capabilities while providing advanced business insights based on instant, intuitive access to data. This platform is comprised of Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 and Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) 130, an enterprise-class storage system rated at 99.999% uptime with SAP in-memory computing technology for a broad range of high-speed analytic capabilities. The HDS SAP HANA Solution Solution is pre-integrated pre-integrated in Hitachi Data Systems Syste ms distribution distribution centers and is architected to meet SAP’s high standards, including SUSE Linux 11 (for SAP) and SAP HANA. Customers can derive the following benefits from Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Select for SAP HANA: Predictable, repeatable, reliable results:  results:   Pre-validated reference architectures, prepackaged 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 massive volumes volumes of rapidly rapidly changing changing data. data. Exceptional performance:  performance:  High-density computing and throughput with wide-striping technology technology for enhanced utilization. utilization. Customers Customers benefit from flexible server se rver management capabilities capabilities and a nd scalable architectures. Faster time-to-value:  time-to-value:   Quicker, simpler deployment offered from a single source for ordering and for providing services for planning and implementation. Pre-configuration and SAP validation of key components drastically reduce 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 the organization’s data volumes increase, all three Hitachi SAP HANA appliances sizes — ‘Small’, ‘Medium’, and ‘Large’ —enable users to easily scale system processing capability without “forklift upgrades” or complete system overhauls. Customers may elect to start with a ‘Small’ configuration and easily scale to ‘Medium’ or ‘Large’ by inserting additional blades into the server chassis. There is no need to change server models because scaling requires a ‘Medium’ or ‘Large’ appliance appliance size. size .

Hitachi SAP HANA Appliances 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. In addition, each platform offers a scalable patch to easily increase the system’s processing capability. Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Select for SAP HANA includes: Operating System: SUSE System: SUSE Linux Enterprise Enterprise Server Se rver 11 SP1 for SAP

Storage: Hitachi Storage: Hitachi Unified Storage 130, with a 99.999% uptime rating, is designed for high availability, down to the dual battery backup that protects the cache during power outages. outages. It I t contains symmetric active-active controllers controllers that self-b se lf-balance alance workloads. workloads. SAN: Fibre SAN: Fibre Channel host bus adaptors Blade servers:  servers:   Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 offers the considerable I/O capacity and onboard memory that are required for effective implementation of SAP HANA. Systems include include 4-way x86 blade servers serve rs with Intel 10-core 10-core processors.

SAP HANA: SAP HANA Load Controller Controller 1.0 SAP IMCE Server Se rver 1.0 1.0,, Client, Studio Studio SAP Host Agent Sybase Replication Server 15.5 +ECDA Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Select for SAP HANA — Small, Medium, Large — meets varying performance requirements. All three options come with Hitachi Unified Storage 130 storage subsystems and a nd with with SAP HANA pre-loaded.

Hitachi supports SAP HANA from the smallest configuration with a single Compute Blade and 256 GB 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:  Hitachi HUS 130, which 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. 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

Figure 1 — Hit achi SAP HANA Appliance Archit ect ure

Hitachi-SAP Alliance Since 1994, Hitachi, Ltd., and its subsidiaries, including Hitachi Data Systems, have had a strategic relationship with SAP that 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 with lower risk and accelerated deployment of the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Select for SAP HANA tailored to our customer’s specific needs. Along with our consulting partners such as Hitachi Consulting, we can integrate and customize the solution into the customer’s SAP environment. Support Infrastructur e Hitachi Data Systems Global Services and Hitachi Consulting are equipped to support every aspect of an SAP HANA solution. In addition, they provide strategy; infrastructure; and HANA Appliance, Integration, Development, and Support Services for a HANA initiative. Modern information technologies have blurred the lines between infrastructure, software, and applications. Given this reality, having one partner who provides a single, fully integrated solution is a tremendous benefit. Hitachi’s full breadth of capabilities delivers one fully integrated, highly-optimized environment that ensures the desired results in a lower-cost, lower-risk, high-business-value HANA initiative. Contact Hitachi If you would like to get in touch with the SAP team at Hitachi, please email [email protected]. You can find additional information at www.hds.com/go/sap  or Hitachi Consulting: http://www.hitachiconsulting.com/hana.

HP Solutions for SAP HANA HP ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA Through a close, collaborative partnership that spans more than 25 years, HP and SAP have worked together to offer an innovative and comprehensive portfolio of products and services that help more than 40,000 joint customers around the world, of all sizes and in all industries, solve their business problems. This strategic partnership has ultimately resulted in system offerings like HP ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA as well as value-added services to implement rapid-deployment solutions for SAP HANA. HP has collaborated with SAP on in-memory technologies from the beginning. In 2006 it became the first SAP partner to design and deliver SAP NetWeaver ®  Business Warehouse Accelerator. Based on that experience, HP developed highly engineered and optimized systems plus core competencies to deliver successful implementations of HP AppSystems for SAP HANA which has since evolved into HP’s latest offering — HP ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA. ’

HP s point of view Customers are making long-term, strategic, architectural bets for their data centers and data management platforms. Solutions like SAP HANA act as a catalyst for business transformation and HP is the only player who has the architecture, expertise and vision to meet its infrastructure needs by offering HP ConvergedSystem — a portfolio of workloadoptimized systems that are easy to buy, manage, and support. HP ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA is a portfolio of engineered, pre-built, optimized-forSAP HANA systems that provide the fastest path-to-value on the SAP HANA journey. These systems are optimized with proven performance and built-in high availability, as well as unmatched scalability to grow as data and business needs grow. In addition, only HP has the committed long-term roadmap and investments to offer customers a number of system configurations and deployment options, including on-premise, hosted, and Cloud (HANA Enterprise Cloud, HEC). These systems, in combination with leading data management solutions and consulting services (from planning to migration to deployment), provide the most complete offering in the market. HP recognizes that SAP HANA adoption is a journey. There are SAP customers who are primarily interested in accelerating analytics/reporting with SAP HANA, while others want to run multiple SAP business applications on HANA as a database. Because of our experience working with customers, we understand the importance of laying out an adoption strategy that best aligns with their HANA journey. Whether you are looking to accelerate business analytics for one of your lines-of-business, are ready to build your next generation Business Warehouse on SAP HANA, or want to transform your entire global SAP landscape with HANA, HP has a solution configuration that’s sized just right for you — and is ready to scale as your needs change. The HP ConvergedSystem for HANA portfolio includes the HP ConvergedSystem 500 which is optimized for Analytics, Data Warehousing and basic business application deployments as well as HP ConvergedSystem 900 which leverages technologies that were developed as part

of HP/SAP’s co-innovation prototype, Project Kraken. It is this technology that enables the largest, most mission-critical business application deployments.

HP ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA HP ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA is built on HP Converged Infrastructure and includes all of the implementation and support services that you need to ensure quick time to value and minimal planned or unplanned downtime. It is a complete system — not just a collection of components. That means your staff has more time for innovation. With HP ConvergedSystem 500, you can simplify the way you deploy SAP HANA with a preengineered HANA optimized system that can be configured, quoted and installed in as few as 15 days. And the system can grow as you grow — scaling to meet your changing SAP requirements from Analytics and Data Warehousing, to business applications on SAP HANA. Built on the HP Proliant DL580 Gen8 server powered by the Intel Xeon E7-4880 v2 processor and HP 3PAR StoreServ 7400 storage, HP offers a range of scale up and scale out configurations. Scale up: 2s/256GB RAM, 2s/512GB RAM, 4s/1TB RAM and 4s/2TB RAM Scale out: 4s/8TB++

HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA The HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA is based on next generation Superdome technology offering unparalleled flexibility and high availability. Superdome has been a long time, leading server platform for enterprise class SAP systems. Now, SAP HANA users can take advantage of hardware partitioning and fault tolerant features developed for the most challenging and business critical environments. ConvergedSystem 900 offers the world’s largest single memory image for SAP Business Suite on HANA implementations — up to 16 processors and 12 TB RAM on a single server. Later this year, ConvergedSystem 900 will also offer a powerful, general purpose, scale out configuration that can run OLAP, OLTP, or even mixed workloads on the same system, enabling IT to focus on strategy and innovation instead of management of  sprawl. Built on the HP Superdome BL920s Gen 9 server blade powered by the Intel Xeon 15 core E7-2890 V2 processor and HP 3PAR StoreServ storage, HP offers a range of scale up and scale out configurations. Scale up: 8s/6TB or 16s/12TB in memory computing power, with up to 24TB on the roadmap Scale out: dual nPar 8s/2TB configurations that can scaleout to the largest mission critical needs

Why HP for SAP HANA? Only HP provides a portfolio from start to finish with a strong history of innovation and partnership with SAP and a committed, long-term roadmap. When it comes to SAP HANA, you can spend less time on IT and more time driving your margins, growing your profit and being the innovator your business needs. HP has implemented more than 800 SAP HANA installations and runs nearly half of all SAP installations in the world (77,000), and is a global leader in SAP operations, supporting 1.7 million users in more than 50 countries. In addition, HP has developed core competencies for designing and building SAP appliance-based solutions, successful on-site customer implementations, and industry-leading support services to ensure optimal performance throughout the lifecycle. And, HP offers multiple deployment choices — on premise, hosted or Cloud. HP’s As-a-Service Solutions for SAP HANA, is a first to market offering, combining the strength of HP’s industry leading ConvergedSystem, the complete portfolio of business solutions, and optional cloud deployment models all bundled into a monthly subscription payment. This offering helps companies to move to an OPex financial model and freeing up capital investment for strategic programs. As testimony to HP’s close alignment and support of SAP, HP has received numerous SAP Innovation and Impact awards across all three geographic regions, with the most recent ones being: SAP Pinnacle Awards: Platform Co-Innovation Partner of the Year – 2014 Winner Rapid Deployment Partner of the Year – 2014 Winner HANA Adoption Partner of the Year – 2014 Finalist Technology Partner Innovator of the Year – 2013 Winner Run SAP Partner of the Year – 2013 Finalist SAP HANA Co-innovator Partner of the Year – 2013 Finalist

Technical specificat ions for HP ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA Based on HP Converged Infrastructure products HP offers multiple server choices, sized for your company’s needs. Scale up to 512 GB RAM with a single server Optimized for cost conscious customers Ideal for standalone analytics, reporting or application acceleration scenarios May also be used for small SAP Business Warehouse or SAP Business Suite scenarios Compute and memory: HP ProLiant DL580 Gen8 server 2 Intel Xeon E7-4880 v2 processors 256 GB or 512 GB RAM Database data and log files: 8 SAS disk drives (600 GB HDD), server internal storage

OS and HANA application files: 2 SAS disk drives (600 GB HDD), server internal storage Scale up to 2 TB RAM with a single server Optimized for customers needing larger memory capacities and higher performance 1 TB RAM configuration is ideal for larger analytics, reporting or application acceleration scenarios 1 TB RAM configuration may also be used for small SAP Business Warehouse or SAP Business Suite scenarios 2 TB RAM configuration is restricted by SAP to SAP Business Suite and specific use cases outlined in SAP note 1826100 Compute and memory: HP ProLiant DL580 Gen8 server 4 Intel Xeon E7-4880 v2 processors 1 TB or 2 TB RAM Database data files: External D2700 disk enclosure configured with 25 SAS disk drives (600 GB HDD) OS, HANA application files and database log files: 2 SAS disk drives (800 GB SSD, solid state storage) Scale out to 16 TB+ RAM with multiple servers Ideal for SAP Business Warehouse May also be used for analytics, reporting or application acceleration scenarios needing more than 1 TB RAM Compute and memory: HP ProLiant DL580 Gen8 server 4 Intel Xeon E7-4880 v2 processors 1 TB RAM Up to 16 servers per system certified by SAP Larger, customer-specific systems may be offered with approval by SAP Database data and log files: Stored on centralized, shared storage Direct connect via SAP Storage Connector Shared HANA application files: Clustered NFS servers (one pair per system) Files stored on centralized, shared storage Shared storage HP 3PAR StoreServ 7400 (4-node) 96 SAS disk drives (900 GB HDD) Supports up to 4 HANA servers Storage arrays added as needed to support additional servers Dedicated management server

HP 10 GbE top of rack (TOR) switches used for HANA internal networks and connection to customer’s network HP 16 Gbps FC switches used for internal SAN (connections from HANA nodes, NFS servers and dedicated management server to centralized, shared storage) Enhanced high availability and disaster tolerance with HP Serviceguard Automated failover for clustered NFS servers (scale out systems) Automated failover from primary HANA system to secondary HANA system (usually located in a different data center) for disaster tolerant architectures

Technical specificat ions for HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA Based on HP Converged Infrastructure products HP offers multiple server choices, sized for your company’s needs: Scale up to 6 TB RAM with a single server Ideal for SAP Business Suite scenarios combined with select analytics and reporting Compute and memory: HP ProLiant Superdome BL920s Gen 9 server blade 8 Intel Xeon E7-2890 v2 processors 6 TB RAM OS, HANA application files, database data and log files: 3PAR StoreServe 7400 storage (4-node) 48 SAS disk drives (600 GB HDD) 2 arrays (96 disk drives total) Scale up to 12 TB RAM with a single server The largest single memory pool available Ideal for SAP Business Suite scenarios combind with select analytics and reporting Compute and memory: HP ProLiant Superdome BL920s Gen 9 server blade 16 Intel Xeon E7-2890 v2 processors 12 TB RAM OS, HANA application files, database data and log files: 3PAR StoreServe 7400 storage (4-node) 48 SAS disk drives (600 GB HDD) 4 arrays (192 disk drives total) Scale out to 80 TB RAM with multiple servers Ideal for SAP Business Warehouse May also be used for analytics, reporting or application acceleration scenarios needing more than 16 TB RAM Compute and memory:

HP ProLiant Superdome BL920s Gen 9 server blade 2 Intel Xeon E7-2890 v2 processors 512 GB RAM 4 blades combined into 1 partition (8s/2 TB) Up to 2 partitions per server Up to 16 partitions per system certified by SAP Larger, customer-specific systems may be offered with approval by SAP Database data and log files: Stored on centralized, shared storage Direct connect via SAP Storage Connector Shared HANA application files: Clustered NFS servers (one pair per system) Files stored on centralized, shared storage Shared storage HP 3PAR StoreServ 7400 (4-node) 96 SAS disk drives (900 GB HDD) Supports up to 4 HANA nodes (server partitions) Storage arrays added as needed to support additional servers Dedicated management server HP 10 GbE top of rack (TOR) switches used for HANA internal networks and connection to customer’s network HP 16 Gbps FC switches used for internal SAN (connections from HANA nodes, NFS servers and dedicated management server to centralized, shared storage) Enhanced high availability and disaster tolerance with HP Serviceguard Automated failover for clustered NFS servers (scale out systems) Automated failover from primary HANA system to secondary HANA system (usually located in a different data center) for disaster tolerant architectures

HP Converged Infrastructure products include all necessary installation, deployment and support services Factory Express Level 4 including custom implementation services includes complete installation and configuration is performed at the HP Integration Center before shipping the appliance to the customer. This includes customization of network parameters and customization of the SAP HANA database based on a questionnaire completed by the customer HP Fast Start Service (delivered by HP Enterprise Services) or HP Deployment Accelerator (delivered by HP Technology Services Consulting) includes onsite integration services including connecting to the customer’s network and confirming communication between SAP HANA and other systems (e.g. SAP Business Warehouse application servers), demonstrating correct operation of appliance using sample data and providing knowledge transfer

Proactive Care (delivered by HP Technology Center of Expertise): Solution-level, one-stop, support service including HANA-specific call management, remote monitoring, proactive service delivery (e.g. regularly scheduled firmware updates), and support from HP Center of Expertise for SAP HANA

Scale-out configurations HP offers two scale-out, future-ready systems that can grow as your needs grow. This design significantly reduces the costs, difficulties, and down-time associated with field upgrades. The HP ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA (CS 500) scale-out system uses the HP ProLiant DL580 Gen8 server powered by the Intel Xeon E7-4880 v2 processor. The HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA (CS 900) scale-out system uses the HP ProLiant Superdome BL920s server blade powered by the Intel Xeon E7-2890 v2 processor. Both systems use the 3PAR StoreServ 7400 for shared, centralized storage for the SAP HANA shared application files and database data and log files. 3PAR is the world’s most advanced storage platform preferred by eight out of the ten largest service providers. The CS 500 is ideal for SAP Business Warehouse or standalone analytics/reporting/application acceleration scenarios needing a system that is certified up to 16 TB RAM. The CS 900 is ideal for scenarios needing a system that is certified up to 32 TB RAM. Both systems may be used for larger, customer-specific implementations with approval by SAP and HP.

High Availability and Disaster Tolerance The CS 500 and CS 900 support all of SAP’s high availability and disaster tolerance features including automated failover from an active node to a standby node inside of an SAP HANA cluster and failover of an entire SAP HANA system to a standby system (usually located in a different data center) using SAP System Replication. However, HP offers enhanced disaster tolerance by incorporating HP Serviceguard software plus a quorum server. This enhancement makes it possible to automate failover to a standby system in disaster tolerant environments, and it is something that only HP is able to offer. These solutions protect your information systems in the event of a catastrophic event. In doing so they help to mitigate risk, improve IT availability, and reduce the costs of downtime.

Storage Infrastructure HP provides three different storage infrastructures depending upon the customer’s sizing and budget requirements.

Entry level or budged-sensitive implementations ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA provides 256 GB and 512 GB scale up systems that use the internal storage of the HP ProLiant DL580 Gen8 server to offer a very economical storage infrastructure. These systems use a pair of 600 GB HDD disk drives in a RAID-1 configuration for the operating system and HANA application files. They use another eight 600 GB HDD disk drives in a RAID-5 configuration for the database data and log files.

Medium sized, performance-sensitive implementation ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA provides 1 TB and 2 TB scale up systems that use a combination of internal storage and low-cost, direct attached storage to provide a larger, higher performance storage infrastructure. These systems use a pair of 800 GB SSD (solid state) disk drives in a RAID-1 configuration for the operating system, HANA application files and database log files. Using solid state storage and separating the log file storage from the data file storage provides a higher performance configuration, which is particularly important to customers implementing SAP Business Suite on HANA (SoH) using the 2 TB scale up configuration. The D2700 storage enclosure provides a low cost, direct attached storage solution for the database data files. It is configured with 25 disk drives in a RAID-50 configuration, managed by an HP Smart Array controller installed in one of the server’s PCI slots. Enterprise-class shared sto rage ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA scale out and ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA scale up and scale out use 3PAR StoreServ 7400 as centralized, shared storage for HANA application files (which must be stored on shared storage for scale out systems) as well as HANA database data and log files. The HP 3PAR StoreServ 7400 storage array is part of the industry-leading family of HP 3PAR storage arrays chosen by three out of four of the world’s largest managed service providers (MSPs). It features high performance, high availability and simplified management through a combination of system-wide striping (all storage is striped across all system components, including controllers, cache and disk drives), Mesh-Active design and autonomic (self-managing) capabilities. HP 3PAR Thin Technology is another significant differentiator, implementing thin provisioning at the hardware level instead of requiring customers to purchase additional software, which is typical for other storage platforms. In addition to reducing costs, this results in a more efficient design and enables certain capabilities that are not possible otherwise (e.g. non-disruptively converting thin volumes to thick volumes and vice versa). For more information, visit http://www.hp.com/go/3par for more information.

Additional Software HP ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA includes all of the software needed to deliver a complete solution including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP applications and Integrated Lights Out (iLO) Advanced. VMware vSphere and vCenter software is also included if  customers select the virtualization option. HP ensures global quality standards by preloading and configuring SAP HANA software at the factory before delivery. No additional software is necessary for the HP ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA. All solutions are built to your specifications, and they include all required components, services and support. HP also provides monitoring and backup software solutions to further enhance your solution. HP ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA can be easily monitored utilizing HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM), available as part of HP Insight Control or as a free download. This powerful yet intuitive solution provides hardware-level management for system administrators to improve system uptime and health. For more information, visit http://www.hp.com/go/sim. Finally, HP ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA includes Insight

Remote Support Advanced (IRSA) to provide remote monitoring by the HP Center of  Expertise (CoE) for SAP HANA. This is a free add-on to SIM, and free installation and configuration services are included as part of all recommended support Care Packs. For more information, visit the HP Insight Online page at http://www.hp.com/go/insight. HP Data Protector software is certified for Backint for SAP HANA, improving performance when backing up or restoring the SAP HANA database and improving management and scheduling of backup jobs. One major benefit to customers is the ability to use one backup solution for all of their computing environments, including SAP HANA — there is no longer a need to do things one way for SAP HANA and a different way for everything else. Another major benefit is the ability to develop a comprehensive, single-vendor backup and recovery solution, simplifying implementation and ongoing administration and support, by combining HP Data Protector with HP StoreOnce and/or HP StoreEver backup solutions. “

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One  HP service solution for SAP HANA

HP provides end-to-end services across the lifecycle of HP ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA, including strategy and design, factory integration, on-site installation, and one-stop solution level support for HP hardware, SLES, and SAP HANA. HP and SAP collaborate to provide you with seamless support experience.

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, in addition to recommendations concerning 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 they integrate the hardware, load all of the software components, and apply your unique environmental settings for network and source systems. Finally, the system completes a burn-in test before they ship the order to your location.

Implementation Delivery of the SAP HANA system is not the final step. Beyond the design and build of a SAP HANA solution, integration of the solution into your environment is equally, if not more, critical to successfully getting SAP HANA up and running. HP understands this, so they include installation, implementation, and training with every SAP HANA solution they deliver. The basic foundational service includes the following: All HP ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA come standard with Factory Express Level 4 services that leverage HP factory integration skills on SAP HANA. This way, HP helps reduce deployment time with hardware built to customers’ exact specifications, then shipped as a turn-key solution from the HP factory. Additional, on-site installation services help with harware installation in the Datacenter, powering up server(s) and storage, and connectivity and Hardware checks. HP Deployment Accelerator Service is a service that accompanies HP ConvergedSystem to

ensure the appliance is properly installed and that the database connections are made. HP Fast Start Services are available to ensure that the replication and/or Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) of data from the source systems have been tested and confirmed as fully functional. Customers can choose either the Deployment Accelerator Service or the Fast Start service for their onsite implementation.

Support Customers may choose from a selection of HP Support Services to meet business needs. The minimum required support level for HP ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA is HP Proactive Care HP recommends HP Proactive Care with HP Personalized Support option and HP Proactive Select to develop an ongoing support plan, build an advocate into the reactive support delivery team, and plan for unique or changing needs.

HP Proactive Care Advanced HP Proactive Care Advanced is the recommended support level for our HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA. Proactive Care Advanced builds on the HP Proactive Care Services providing customers with dedicated and technical resources to extend their IT team to proactively prevent issues, maximize performance, and accelerate problem resolution. HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA customers will benefit by: personalized advice, planning, and deliverables from dedicated, local resources and single-stop support from HP Center of Expertise for SAP HANA for the entire system. The customers can prevent problems and reduce risk with personalized, proactive reports and best practice advice, optimize the usage and functionality of their IT system, and accelerate problem resolution with dedicated critical case management, thus enjoying high availability and performance from their HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA. HP Migration Services for SAP HANA — Migrate smoothly to CS900 for SAP HANA Thanks to HP Migration Services for SAP HANA, you can move to SAP HANA without worrying about disrupting business. Ease the implementation through step-by-step migration assessment, preparation, execution, and transition to operations. The services facilitate a “ready-to-use” HP ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA. You can: Assess through a comprehensive review of key SAP HANA migrations steps, plans, and roadmaps Prepare with OS, database management system (DBMS), and hypervisor upgrades, system preparation, and migration tests Migrate using complete deployment, production migration, SAP certification, and acceptance Manage via training, knowledge transfer, transition to operations, and decommissioning of legacy systems

HP High Availability Service fo r SAP HANA — Keep business running With HP High Availability Service for SAP HANA, you can automate and simplify SAP HANA

System Replication through the implementation of HP Serviceguard solution for SAP HANA. Achieve high availability (HA), faster time to disaster recovery, and efficiencies in configuration administration, as well as: Achieve up-to-date backup, connection, SAP HANA System Replication, and system readiness Integrate HP Serviceguard with SAP HANA System Replication Deploy the SAP HANA cluster packages Transfer knowledge covering the use and operation of HP ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA in an HA environment.

HP Disaster Tolerance Service for SAP HANA Simplify the process of implementing and configuring system replication for HP ConvergedSystem with HP Disaster Tolerance Service for SAP HANA, accelerating time to disaster recovery. In addition, you can: Gather and validate SAP HANA System Replication requirements Enable up-to-date backup, connection, and system readiness Configure and test SAP HANA System Replication in a DT (disaster-tolerant) environment. Knowledge transfer for HP ConvergedSystem for HANA configuration, networking and system replication for SAP HANA. Note that while support for the SAP HANA software requires a separate support agreement with SAP, HP and SAP collaborate to resolve your issues around SAP HANA. You get a dedicated, single point of contact for the whole solution Proactive Care Service includes proactive support as well as hardware and software support to provide an additional level of support for organizations that are managing complex IT environments. Geared for converged, virtualized, and cloud-based environments, Proactive Care Service features remote and onsite support, proactive scans and reports, and regular consultations with HP technology experts. You can purchase an option that includes an assigned local HP specialist who delivers an “Account Support Plan” customized to fit your needs. Each customized plan includes delivering updates to your hardware firmware and operating system, regular system health checks, and setup of remote monitoring. For hardware and software support, HP delivers enhanced support from trained specialists in its Advanced Solution Center. With a connection to SAP’s support operation, HP can take the first call on any SAP HANA support issue. Based on this well-established process, HP is able to deliver industry-leading support and help improve performance of SAP HANA solutions. For SAP HANA deployed in large complex, datacenter environments that need a customized approach to support, HP recommends Datacenter Care that increases datacenter efficiency and resolve interoperability issues faster by providing environmental, customized support.

Business Solutions for SAP HANA based on business outcomes

HP provides end to end services to help you identify your strategy, quantify your business opportunity, computing your ROI, and implementing SAP HANA into your SAP landscape. They include the following services. The HP Business Intelligence Master Plan Service is an overarching BI strategydevelopment service designed to help you define a BI strategy and a landscape to enable  your organization to realize that strategy. This service includes a roadmap for implementation. The HP Impact Analysis for SAP HANA helps you understand the technical feasibility of  introducing SAP HANA to meet your real-time and high-volume data analysis requirements. It is highly recommended for each SAP HANA implementation. The HP Financial Assessment for SAP HANA provides granular information to support  your decision-making process. It 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 your existing information landscape in detail, identify data sets for use with SAP HANA, detect 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 is optimized to allow for the inclusion of  the SAP HANA appliance and to speed time-to-value of the SAP HANA solution. This service includes upgrading or installing SAP and non-SAP components in the landscape. HP Fast Start Service includes required services that accompany the appliance to ensure that 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. These consultants follow the HP Global Implementation Methodology for Business Intelligence for all SAP HANA implementation projects Implementation services for rapid-deployment solutions covering a wide range of  business reporting and analytics. HP Migration Services — HP is offering a number of migration services to SAP HANA. These include Business Warehouse (BW) migration services to SAP HANA Business Suite migration services to SAP HANA Enterprise Edition migration services to SAP HANA Business analytic solutions for SAP HANA Use case development for industry and horizontal business processes supporting improved business reporting, business processes and analytics

HP As-a-Service Solution for SAP HANA This offering provides clients with a complete solution that includes the SAP HANA product,

management of your SAP HANA environment, initial and ongoing costs, and the SAP HANA license. This means you can be connected to SAP HANA’s revolutionary in-memory database platform in weeks instead of months. This offering also supports the as-a-service payment model and the client pays for the service via a monthly subscription rate eliminating the need for the client to make capital investments for their HANA solutions. These offerings include Business Warehouse on SAP HANA — Provide single source of truth for all your SAP data and provide real time business analytics with your enterprise data warehouse based on SAP Netweaver® Business Warehouse (BW) Business Suite on SAP HANA — Provide real time access to your transaction data enabling faster business processes and innovative solutions not possible until now. Enterprise Edition on SAP HANA — Provide single source of truth for all your enterprise data and provide real time business analytics with your enterprise data warehouse based on Enterprise Edition for SAP HANA

HP Financial Services HP Financial Services can make your transition to SAP HANA easy and cost effective, and it can help you get started even sooner. You can expand your organization’s SAP HANA initiatives by taking advantage of an efficient, effective way to maximum return from IT and BI solutions, while minimizing risk and aggressively managing costs. HP Financial Services offers new HP hardware leasing and SAP software license loans plus a complete, global solution that recovers value from older assets. This solution also helps safeguard privacy, and it complies with applicable environmental regulations for disposing of SAP infrastructure assets that are displaced by your new HP AppSystems for SAP HANA. For further information please go to: www.hp.com/go/asset_recovery. Migration Assistance For existing SAP NetWeaver BW and SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator software customers, HP and SAP recognize that to migrate your environment to SAP HANA will involve extra effort and incremental costs. To help ease the transition, HP and SAP offer a migration-assistance package that features a combination of HP financing options and a portfolio of migration services you can use to clear the path to faster data analysis. HP Leads the Way with another #1 Benchmark Results for SAP HANA SAP partnered with HP to co-develop the new SAP standard application benchmark for the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse application, called the enhanced mixed load (EML) benchmark. SAP standard application benchmarks are designed to represent customerrelevant scenarios in many different business contexts. This new SAP EML standard application benchmark simulates the current demands of typical SAP NetWeaver BW customers. These demands are shaped primarily by three major requirements: near realtime reporting, ad-hoc reporting capabilities, and reduction of TCO. Continuing with HP’s commitment to deliver innovation, in March 2014, HP once more achieved an excellent outcome on the SAP NetWeaver ®  Business Warehouse-Enhanced Mixed Load (BW-EML) standard application benchmark. Utilizing the new HP

ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA ®, which includes the ProLiant DL580 Gen8 Server and the latest Intel Xeon processor technology, the system achieved a remarkable result of  126,980 ad-hoc query navigation steps with 2 billion initial records on the SAP HANA ® platform (certification 2014009). The system accessed twice as many initial records as its previous generation system, the ProLiant DL580 G7. The result demonstrates the ability of HP ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA to meet evolving market and customer needs, highlighting HP’s understanding of market conditions— from managing analytics and data warehousing workloads to running mission-critical business applications. Simply put, HP gets similar performance with double the data footprint. In addition, the system is optimized to deliver the highest levels of performance and availability for in-memory computing, which significantly improves analytics processing speeds by delivering outstanding, scalable analytic performance in seconds versus hours on massive, multi-dimensional databases.

Customer Success Stories  Velux Group The VELUX Group is a Danish manufacturer of windows and skylights that runs 15 production and 39 sales companies, and employs 10,000 workers worldwide. The VELUX Group aimed to render its data capabilities more agile and accessible. Since 2005, the VELUX Group has worked with HP partner Accenture as its IT outsourcing provider. The company also was a HP customer, running its SAP infrastructure on HP Superdome servers. When SAP began replacing its Integrated Planning (IP) application with Business Planning & Consolidation, the VELUX Group saw this as an opportunity to move to a more dynamic forecasting model. “We had three main drivers: Bring more data to more users, faster; move from a static to a rolling forecasting model; and leverage advanced tools such as predictive analytics.” — Anders Reinhardt, head of global business intelligence, VELUX Global Financial Management To get the most out of Business Planning & Consolidation, the company decided to implement SAP HANA, running on HP AppSystems for SAP HANA scale-out configuration, as the underlying database. “HP didn’t just deliver hardware and leave; it’s been an integral part of the project  throughout and still brings value in relation to HANA operations.” — Anders Reinhardt, head of global business intelligence, VELUX Global Financial Management

T-mobile An example of the outstanding results that can flow from an HP–SAP collaboration, consider the case of T-Mobile. The U.S. wireless operation of Deutsche Telekom AG, T-Mobile provides more than 33 million customers with customized wireless plans that reflect their smart phone

and data needs. A key component of the company’s marketing strategy is to conduct highly targeted customer communications concerning mobile phone services and offers. Unfortunately, its previous analytics solution was too complex and could not track customer offers in a timely way. The solution — built on HP Converged Infrastructure in collaboration with SAP AG and deployed in just two weeks — enhances T-Mobile’s ability to deliver targeted marketing campaigns to customers by transforming the way it delivers, manages, and measures its wireless plan offers. “T-Mobile needed faster and better customer insight from its varied data systems,” explained Paul Miller, vice president of Converged Systems at HP. “HP and SAP quickly delivered a turnkey solution that provides simplicity, performance, and faster time-to-value.” “SAP, in cooperation with HP, worked to support the creation and delivery of a unique and differentiated customer-tracking solution for T-Mobile,” revealed Steve Lucas, executive vice president and general manager of Global Database and Technology, SAP. “With SAP HANA, T-Mobile can more effectively track its marketing campaigns’ success.”

Nong fu Spring Another illuminating example is Nongfu Spring, an established and expanding national consumer brand in China with a vast scope of operations encompassing production, sales, planning, dispatching, logistics, and marketing. As the company expanded and constantly added new branches in different cities, it needed to implement a database solution that could keep pace with its impressive growth while providing the real-time, accurate data its executives needed to make informed business decisions. To accomplish this task, Nongfu Spring chose HP AppSystems for SAP HANA due to the stable, powerful performance of its HP ProLiant DL980 server and the professional services provided by the HP team. With the new system in place, Nongfu Spring’s manufacturing environment now runs more smoothly — and with more accurate data. For example, the increased computing speeds enable the company to analyze data 200–300 times faster than with their previous database platform. Another benefit: Financial reporting times have reduced from seven to three days. “The market today is changing constantly, and companies and the market environment have more new IT requirements,” asserts Nongfu Spring CIO Patrick Hoo. “By cooperating with HP on SAP HANA 1.0, we have proven that HANA is a high-speed in-memory computing column-storage database product that is mature and practical. It fundamentally solved the problem of slow computing and presentation of data caused by having too much data, which had affected our business. It also built a solid foundation for our IT department to provide strong support for the company’s rapid future business development.”

Contact information for inquiries For more information, visit http://www.hp.com/go/sap/hana  or contact your HP sales representative.

Huawei SAP HANA Solutions The SAP HANA is a data platform that can be deployed either as an appliance or in the cloud. It is a revolutionary platform that is ideally suited to run real-time analytics and to develop and deploy real-time applications. It enables real-time processing of massive amounts of  data in the main memory of a server. Huawei has partnered with SAP to create an appliance based on Huawei’s high-end Tecal RH5885 V2 rack server. This appliance provides outstanding performance when it is used in combination with SAP HANA. It offers solutions ranging from entry-level supporting 128 GB of memory to large-scale supporting up to 100 TB of usable memory with 100 nodes. The RH5885 V2-based appliance for SAP HANA is able to deliver the fastest write performance in the industry for SAP HANA write patterns. It has less than 15% latency as well as 20% more bandwidth. RH5885 V2 is a high-end 4-socket rack server that is expandable to 8 sockets. It supports Intel® Xeon® E7-8800/4800 series CPUs, and it can accommodate up to 80 cores with 4 TB of memory. RH5885 V2 offers enhanced system reliability thanks to its 35 RAS features. These features combine with scalable I/O to make RH5885 V2 an ideal choice to deploy mission-critical applications such as large-scale databases, business intelligence, and ERP.

Highlights 100–100,000x faster than disk-based DB; No.1 writing performance with 15% less latency and 20% more bandwidth Pre-optimized and one-stop maintenance Powered by RH5885 with 35 RAS features; No. 1 in 12 SPEC tests

Infrastructure The RH5885 V2 for SAP HANA offers a preinstalled, preconfigured, optimized appliance ranging from XS to L Size that supports the SAP HANA application stack in a single host.

Figure 1: Teca l RH5885 V2 Front View

Figure 2: Tecal RH5885 V2 Rear View

Model Specifications Table 1: Tecal RH5885 V2 fo r SAP HANA

Included Software and Driver SLES for SAP Applications 11.2 SAP HANA Appliance software (license is sold separately by SAP) Huawei Tecal ES3000 driver

More information http://enterprise.huawei.com/en/products/itapp/server/rh-series-rack-servers/hw145982.htm http://enterprise.huawei.com/en/products/itapp/server/high-performance-pcIe-card/hw194918.htm

IBM Systems and Services Solutions for SAP HANA 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 our SAP HANA infrastructure cost-effectively. IBM Global Business Services (GBS) can help ou extract the business value out of your SAP HANA implementation.

IBM and SAP team for long-term business innovation With a unique combination of expertise, experience and proven methodolo- gies — 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 over 40 years to deliver innovation to their shared customers. Since 2006, IBM has been the market leader for implementing SAP’s original inmemory 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 and X6 Systems with GPFS Power SAP HANA SAP HANA, delivered on IBM eX5 and X6 enterprise servers with fifth and sixth-generation IBM®  Enterprise X-Architecture ®  technology (eX5, X6), help 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 and X6 enterprise servers with the Intel Xeon processor E7 and E7v2 family combines the speed and efficiency of inmemory 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 System x servers with Enterprise X Architecture 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 and X6 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 and X6 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 fifteen cores in each processor, the four-socket x3850 X6 can be scaled to 60 cores and 120 threads with the use of Intel Hyper-Threading 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 and X6 features such as Predictive Failure Alerts warn ahead of potential hardware failures, trigger preemptive action, and help maintain application availability. In addition, features such as eXFlash solid-state disk technology can ield significant performance improvements in storage access, helping deliver an optimized system solution for SAP HANA.

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, 4 socket x3850 X6 and 8 socket x3950 X6 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 speed 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 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, 4 TB configuration. The X6 models include the 2 or 4 socket x3850 X6 and the 8 socket x3950 X6 provide a modular design which nearly two times the performace over the eX5 system, simplifies maintenance, and provides on-going investment protection.

These systems are designed for maximum utilization, reliability, and performance for compute-intensive and memory-intensive workloads such as SAP HANA. IBM also offers a virtualized implementation using VMware. This implementation, intended for non-production environments, enables you to optimize your hardware investment. Now, ou can install multiple HANA virtual machines (VMs) on a single system and quickly deploy those VMs for non-production workoads. IBM and SAP have worked closely together to validate each of the work-load-optimized configurations and have also collaborated on performance testing. Outstanding results like this are founded on years of joint product development which allows IBM and SAP offerings to be integrated for simplified implementation.

Simple and Seamless Scalability Using the workload-optimized solution models you can combine multiple models together to

create multi-node scale-out configurations. These multi-node scale-out configurations enable ou 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 56-node x3950 X5, x3850 X6 and x3950 X6 solutions validated. You can start with one 256GB node, upgrade to a 512GB or 1TB node, and grow your environment to 56 x 2TB nodes. This modular approach enables you to invest in a Workload-Optimized solution for SAP HANA and grow our infrastructure as your SAP HANA environment grows. In addition, you can handle unplanned outages by including an additional seamless 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 HighAvailability 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 capacity expansion to handle the explosive growth of data SAP HANA environments High reliability, availability and disaster recovery 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. By implementing SAP HANA on eX5 and X6 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 and X6 Systems.

Services t o speed deployment To help speed deployment and simplify maintenance of your 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 and X6 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. In addition, IBM also offers skills enablement services to provide technical training to your teams that need to manage the HANA appliance. IBM Total Solution Support and Remote Managed Services for SAP HANA provide a single point of contact and focal point for all SAP HANA issues. 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 enabling you to off-load the maintenance and management of the 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 These services have been grouped into four key offerings as shown in the table below:

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  insight and action. IBM can also offer financing options helping clients to acquire IT solutions that are tailored to their individual goals and budget.

For more information To learn more about the IBM Systems and Services solutions for SAP HANA and IBM System x eX5 and X6 Workload Optimized Systems, please contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit: www.ibm-sap.com/hana.

NEC SAP HANA Solutions NEC delivers SAP HANA as a key platform to realize a world where people can reach all the information they need or want and to discover something new and worthwhile from the massive amount of data produced daily. The NEC High-Performance Appliance for SAP HANA incorporates the truly innovative inmemory computing technology of SAP and the truly dependable hardware platform of NEC, which has kept the No.1 market share in PC-servers in the Japan market for 18 years. In the beginning of 2014 NEC launched the 6th generation of Intel architecture based scalable enterprise server, Express5800/ A2040b, which succeeds the previously very successful lineup of NEC HANA appliances. It is designed to optimize performance, scalability and reliability for mission critical workloads. This enterprise server uses the Intel Xeon processor E7 v2 product family and will be available starting from the middle of 2014 as appliance certified for SAP HANA in different sizes. The HANA appliance entry model starts with 128GB of RAM and 2 CPU sockets, scaling up through different sizes to a 4-way 2TB RAM top of the line model. Scale out configurations up to 16 nodes with multiple aggregated 10 GB internode links will be available later. All the NEC SAP HANA appliances include the EXPRESSSCOPE® Engine SP3 integrated into the server, which provides superior remote control and system management capabilities.

Why Express5800 is ideal platform for SAP HANA High-performance Express5800/A2040b Scalable Enterprise Servers, which leverage NEC’s long heritage in the development of supercomputer and mainframe technologies to achieve highly reliable and flexible system expandability, are leveraged as the platform for SAP HANA. The flagship NEC Express5800/A2040b model has capabilities to mount up to 4CPUs and 4TB RAM within a single 4U chassis.

One noteworthy hardware feature is its EXPRESSSCOPE ® Engine SP3, a uniquely developed device by NEC based on our experience in UNIX servers, enables to monitor and control Express5800/A2040b with a remote and centralized interface regardless of the power status of servers. It significantly increases maintainability and reduces downtime of SAP HANA.

Support Infrastructure SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications  — is a fine-tuned and supported operating system based on fully open source technology towards the nature of SAP application’s workload and its system lifecycle. Its priority support provides unlimited 24hx7d technical support from SUSE, and its extended support offers additional 18 months for package maintenance. It also maximizes system uptime with highly-selected packageupdates; only packages that affect SAP system shall be upgraded. NEC High-Performance Appliance for SAP HANA uses SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, including its priority support. NEC has a lot of experience providing mission-critical grade support on Linux systems, and has contributed various kind of open source community including Linux kernel development. Through the long-standing partnership with SUSE, NEC provides mission-critical class support for SAP HANA.

Additional software supported NEC ESMPRO ServerManager  — is server management software that provides administrators a centralized view to manage or monitor distributed multiple nodes. It leverages the EXPRESSSCOPE®  Engine SP3 of Express5800/A2040b servers and an installed ESMPRO Agent on the system to collect the run-time information of both hardware and software; which enables administrators to identify issues quickly if and when something should happen.

Support and Additional Services Through the longstanding partnership with SAP and SUSE, NEC will offer mission-critical grade support service from hardware to applications, for the global market. NEC was one of the first distributors of SAP BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence (BI) solutions in Japan market, which is the front-end tool for visualization and analytics for SAP HANA, and NEC has experience supporting more than 500 installations with help of our sales, support and consulting organizations. In addition, NEC has established an evaluation team of SAP HANA to make the latest

technology commercially available as soon as possible.

Support Service For more information, please contact a NEC sales representative in your region or email [email protected].

VCE Vblock Specialized System for SAP HANA Software VCE Vblock™ Specialized System for SAP HANA ® software delivers faster time–to-value and the highest levels of availability and application performance. Incorporating best-of-breed compute, network, and storage components from Cisco and EMC, this Vblock Specialized System is optimized for SAP HANA software and certified by SAP. The optimization of the VCE Vblock™ Specialized System for SAP HANA ® software brings together all of the necessary components for SAP HANA ®  into a single, standardized, converged infrastructure system. This ensures maximum performance at scale, even with high data volumes. This allows you to deploy SAP HANA into production with trusted and predictable performance, one-stop customer support, security and pain-free deployment.

VCE  VCE, formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel, accelerates the adoption of converged infrastructure and cloud-based computing models that dramatically reduce the cost of IT while improving time to market for our customers. VCE, through Vblock Systems, delivers the industry’s only fully integrated and fully virtualized cloud infrastructure system. VCE solutions are available through an extensive partner network, and cover horizontal applications, vertical industry offerings, and application development environments, allowing customers to focus on business innovation instead of  integrating, validating and managing IT infrastructure.

Vblock Systems VCE Vblock Systems have revolutionized the IT infrastructure by providing a datacenter in a rack. By consolidating all the components into a single system, Vblock Systems improve efficiency, speed, and reliability — all while driving down costs. Sprawling, complex hardware is replaced by a smaller footprint x86-based Vblock System.

Figure 1: A Vblock S yste m wit h three cabinet s

With Vblock Systems, IT staff no longer needs to spend an average of 70% of their time maintaining infrastructure, they can focus on activities that add real value to the business. Business continuity is a key requirement for companies whose success relies on robust operations. VCE solutions enable high availability and rapid recovery, ensuring missioncritical applications are there when you need them. All Vblock Systems are built the same based on validated best practices. This is why they have a shorter time to deployment and deployment provides less room for human errors. All are built to lower facilities costs. Vblock Systems provide reduced complexity with standardized infrastructure, are pre-integrated, pre-tested and pre-validated. As a result you do not have to worry about firmware releases, management tools, configuration settings and if they will integrate with each other — VCE’s engineering team will.

Building a Vblock System Each Vblock System is designed, engineered, built, and installed by a global team. This team, brought together by VCE, brings their specialist expertize to ensure a robust and optimally engineered solution. When the system arrives for installation at your facility it has been configured for your environment including configuration for your network. Figure 2 illustrates the process for building a Vblock Specialized System for SAP HANA Software. Each Vblock System is sized, built (both physically and logically), installed, and validated to ensure optimal performance.

Figure 2: Creating a Vblock S yste m from request t o final installat ion and te st ing

The first step in the process is sizing. At this stage, the amount of memory required is determined. For a SAP HANA appliance, the number of servers and amount of storage required is determined based on the memory requirements. Once a Project Manager has been assigned, the Logical configuration survey is completed. Examples of the extensive logical configuration requirements are IP addresses and VLANs. The Site survey addresses issues related to the physical space into which the Vblock System will be installed. This survey includes items such as door heights and available power supply. The survey process allows you to benefit from VCE’s extensive experience. Once onsite, VCE specialists will complete any physical installation tasks, connect it into your network and execute an onsite test plan to ensure that your Vblock System is operating optimally.

rchitecture VCE has developed the Vblock Specialized System for SAP HANA, a scale-out appliance that has undergone SAP’s rigorous performance and stability tests and is an SAP-certified solution. The VCE datacenter in a rack brings together servers, network, storage and virtualization into a well-defined package.

The architecture of the Vblock Specialized System for SAP HANA is shown in the diagram below:

Figure 3: Vblock S pecialize d Syst em for SAP H ANA architec t ure

The Vblock System provides a highly scalable and available infrastructure leveraging the EMC VNX Storage and Cisco UCS to help organizations best utilize the big data analytics capabilities in SAP HANA and make better real-time business decisions. The built-in fault tolerance of Cisco UCS blade servers and EMC VNX ensures the infrastructure will be

available through hardware failures. Each Vblock Specialized System for SAP HANA has one hot-standby node for High Availability. The SAP HANA scale-out design incorporates high availability that is managed and operated at the application level. Each system includes a standby node that provides failover capability. Vblock Specialized System for SAP HANA delivers the server and storage infrastructure needed across block or file data access and allows seamless growth to enable real time data analytics. The data storage requirement determines which Vblock Specialized System for SAP HANA configuration is applicable in a given situation. Vblock Specialized System for SAP HANA leverages advantages in server technology, inmemory databases, and cloud computing. In the scale-out scenario, the SAP HANA database instance is distributed over multiple servers allowing you to incrementally add Cisco B440 M2 blade servers, each with 512 GB memory with four Intel® Xeon® Processors.

Figure 4: Connect ivity for Vblock Spec ialized S yste m for S AP HANA wit h four nodes

Thoroughly tested and certified by SAP and VCE, key components and features of the Vblock Specialized System for SAP HANA include: Pre-integrated and pre-validated Vblock System infrastructure that simplifies and optimizes deployment and management Pre-installed and configured SAP HANA appliance hardware, operating system (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server), and SAP HANA Platform Edition software. Pre-configured storage platform, EMC VNX, with centralized management for file and block data services. High availability is provided to ensure that a node failure does not cause the system to

fail Scales up to sixteen blades across one to four EMC VNX platforms Common power solution across cabinets with domestic and international options Single-purpose environment with all server resources dedicated to the SAP HANA appliance

Easy maintenance Choosing the Vblock Specialized System for SAP HANA significantly reduces your maintenance overhead. Supporting a SAP HANA environment requires management of these components: Firmware patches Operating system patches Patches for the SAP HANA platform components Patches for peripheral components By choosing VCE, you gain access to a solution that assists you with this management through support or extended support offerings. This aligned with VCE’s proven methodology of delivering and supporting converged Infrastructure throughout its lifecycle makes VCE a safe choice for your SAP HANA project.

Seamless Support  It can be difficult to determine if your issue is caused by your hardware platform or SAP HANA. VCE provides a single point of contact support to take responsibility for all issues. With VCE, if you are an existing SAP customer, you can submit issues using the SAP Service Marketplace exactly as you do now. The ticket is reviewed by SAP who conducts initial analysis on the issue. If at any point during their analysis the issue appears to relate to the Vblock™ System, SAP contacts VCE. The VCE Support team will convert to a standard service request and follow standard support processes and B2B processes to engage partner support, for example from SUSE, EMC or Cisco, as needed.

Services VCE offers a comprehensive suite of professional services to accelerate your IT transformation. Select from a full spectrum of service options, available through both VCE and our extensive ecosystem of worldwide partners. Get the expertize you need, at any phase of your journey, to transform your infrastructure, lower their costs, and achieve greater flexibility and agility.

All VCE™ Professional Services leverage the combined expertise of ecosystem technology experts in networking, compute, information management, virtualization, and cloud computing.

Further reading www.vce.com/sap — Additional information about how VCE can address the requirements of  SAP environments www.vce.com/products/specialized/sap-hana   — Detailed information and documentation about the Vblock Specialized Systems for SAP HANA http://www.vce.com/asset/documents/sap-hana-use-case.pdf   — Additional information about the benefits of the Vblock Specialized Systems for SAP HANA

Chapter 11

SAP HANA Projects and Implementation “He who fails to plan is planning to fail.” — Winston Ch urchill

Introduction So, you’ve decided to move forward with SAP HANA. Great! But how do you get started? SAP HANA is a new technology, so your organization may lack the in-house expertise to implement it on their own. Fortunately, whatever your situation, expert project planning, implementation, and development services are available that can help ensure that you get the maximum business value from SAP HANA, as quickly as possible.

Selecting t he Right SAP HANA Service Partner It’s important to choose a partner who can help you be successful with SAP HANA. A recent IDC report found that four of the top six impediments to implementing in-memory technologies — lack of skills, risk, organizational barriers, and return-on-investment concerns — highlight the need for a service provider who is highly experienced with inmemory technologies.10  Such a partner should be able to help your company plan, deploy, and use SAP HANA to create value across the organization — harnessing the power of big data, delivering real-time analytics and business processes, and managing a robust architecture complete with system landscapes and solutions. The right partner should also provide you with access to experienced, certified experts in areas such as architecture, deployment, and development. Throughout the implementation process, you’ll need to think about how SAP HANA fits into your overall IT strategy now, and how it can serve as a basis for growth and innovation in the future. Listen to how USHA International, a leading Indian consumer products company, with the help of SAP Services, utilized  SAP Netweaver Business Warehouse, powered by SAP HANA, to improve supply chain productivity and provide real-time insight to respond quickly to consumer demands. Usha International: http://youtu.be/B3TRsEpw-I0

It All Starts with Go od Planning The more attention you devote to planning your implementation, the more you will benefit from your SAP HANA investment. First and foremost, a good implementation partner should help you develop a comprehensive roadmap detailing how in-memory computing can help our company run at maximum speed and solve specific business problems. To accomplish these goals, that partner must ask the critical questions that mean the difference between success and failure — and be able to answer these questions correctly. Although the specific questions will vary by engagement, you should start by identifying the right business use case for SAP HANA in your company. At SAP, we often distinguish between business intelligence  and technology intelligence. The best technology in the world will not

necessarily create value if it isn’t aligned with the proper business scenario. Thus, the first question to consider is: Where can an in-memory solution create the most value for the least investment in the shortest timeframe, with the least disruption for business users? The answer to that question will help you align desires (what you want) and needs (what you actually need). At that point you can begin mapping the solution back to a technical landscape. Proper risk assessment is also crucial. Ask yourself: How can we realize the solution in the shortest time with the least risk? Does either SAP or its implementation partners offer any predefined services or application solutions that can help? What does the high-level project plan look like, and how well does it align with our business requirements and expectations? What personnel do we need to ensure successful planning and delivery?

Everyone Wants a Low-Cost, Rapid Implementa tion — But How? Once you’ve documented and received signoff on the planning phase, it’s time to identify the expertise and skill sets you need, whether internal or external (or both). The goal: an efficient, low-cost implementation that mitigates risk to both business and IT. Your solution partner should be able to offer a wide range of solution scenarios including end-to-end project implementation experience coupled with a holistic delivery methodology. For many projects, prepackaged fixed-price offerings based on globally compiled best practices, such as SAP Rapid Deployment solutions, can accelerate deployment while limiting costs. Such solutions include preconfigured software, implementation services, content, and end user enablement that together can radically accelerate time to value — delivering benefits in weeks rather than months.  What about Highly Complex Projects? If your business problem is really complex — for example, you need to manage large amounts of data, work with highly-customized systems, extend existing solutions, or build new solutions specific to your needs — you may want to consider specialized services. If you choose this option, it’s especially important that you select a partner with deep knowledge and skilled resources, one who understands your unique issues and has a track record for delivering custom solutions that successfully address their clients’ needs.

How Will We Ever Get up to Speed on This New Technology? It is imperative for you to learn as much as possible about SAP HANA in order to fully reap the benefits of this new technology. In addition to educating your technical and IT staff, you need to make certain that your business users know the full extent of what is now possible and how to best adapt for your environment. To accomplish these tasks, you should select a service provider that offers skills-transfer opportunities. Want to get the most from your SAP HANA platform? The SAP Education organization offers courses and certifications to  give technical consultants and internal IT staff the knowledge and skills they need to fully leverage the power of SAP 

HANA. For more information visit the SAP https://training.sap.com/us/en/curriculum/hana-g-en

Learning

and

Software

Services

for

HANA

website:

Service Pro vider Selection Checklist The right service provider for your project should be able to: ____ Ensure appropriate due diligence during planning ____ Build a bridge between business and technology ____ Contribute the necessary resources and skill sets ____ Validate the value attained from your investment ____ Ensure that your SAP HANA installation fits well into your overall IT landscape and architecture ____ Identify additional business benefits that might be gained with a SAP HANA installation ____ Execute completely on the selected strategy, on time and within budget ____ Ensure skill transfer to in-house stakeholders ____ Execute installation so as to reduce risk To learn more about ARI’s SAP HANA implementation project, click here: ARI: http://youtu.be/TE0ZDgckXYQ. We’ve just discussed the importance of selecting a qualified solution implementation partner. The next step is to determine how best to use SAP HANA within your current environment to deliver maximum value in your organization.

SAP HANA Use Cases We’ve reviewed many of the key factors that you need to consider when you select an SAP HANA implementation partner. Now we’ll turn our attention to how best to use this powerful new technology to generate the most business value for this investment. SAP HANA is incredibly versatile. It can add value to a wide range of business scenarios, and it can be deployed in myriad ways to meet your project expectations and technical requirements. SAP HANA can also complement existing landscapes and replace outdated solutions. With that versatility in mind, we’ll review four typical use cases for SAP HANA deployments today, as well as some of the potential scenarios for the future. These use cases are: Agile data marts SAP Business Suite accelerator Primary database for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Custom application development Learn how the experts from SAP can assist you with all aspects of your SAP HANA Project with their end-to-end services. They can help you to: Design and plan your roadmap or solution  Implement and migrate SAP HANA into your environment   Innovate and develop new and exciting solutions to your unique business issues Support the technical and business environment and educate your technical and end users

Link: http://www.sap.com/community/ebook/2012_05_HANA_Services/en/index.html#/page/1 For More information, please visit the SAP HANA Services website:

Agile Data Mart One way to quickly get the most value from in-memory technology is to use SAP HANA as a standalone data mart for a specific use case. In this scenario, SAP HANA acts as a central hub, collecting source-system data from multiple sources via in-memory technology and then displaying focused reports and analytics via a reporting front end. The data can then be used in multiple ways, depending on the organization’s reporting requirements and formats. This arrangement has the advantage of providing a focused solution to an immediate business problem while minimizing disruption to the existing landscape. Such projects are usually completed quickly: The business problem is understood, and the required data and source systems are easily identified. Such installations offer instant value — making previously difficult and time-consuming tasks fast and easy.

SAP Business Suite Accelerator SAP HANA is frequently used to accelerate transactions and reports inside the SAP Business Suite. As with the agile data mart scenario, SAP HANA is set up as a standalone system, side by side with the database under the SAP Business Suite applications. In this scenario, however, SAP HANA is used to “offload” some transactions or reports that typically take hours or days to run, though it is not used as the primary database under the application. As we explained previous chapters, certain transactions or reports inside the SAP Business Suite can run slowly, primarily due to the slow I/O of the underlying disk-based database and the huge data requests required by these transactions or reports. To run its calculations and present a result, a typical budgeting or planning transaction in SAP must collect data from many different tables in the system. Reports can also be very data-intensive, requiring extensive data from many tables dispersed throughout the database. In both of these cases, 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 to users. To overcome system latency that slows down these common reports, SAP has developed “HANAfied” versions of several existing reports. These reports consist of three preconfigured reporting dashboards and 23 reports from the following business areas: Financial reporting Sales reporting Purchasing reporting Shipping reporting Master data reporting These dashboards and reports leverage existing reporting capabilities from SAP ERP. However, they offload the physical processing of the reports to a dedicated SAP HANA system that sits beside the live SAP ERP system. All relevant tables for each dashboard or report are physically copied from the SAP ERP system onto the SAP HANA system, which is

then used to generate the reports and display them to users in a variety of user interfaces. Let’s review the key elements of each bundle.

 Accelerated Sales & Distribution Repo rt ing The SAP HANA business content for Sales and Distribution (SD) enables sales managers and sales representatives to check basic key figures for sales in real time. Whereas sales managers use sales analytics to access instant overview information regarding the various performance indicators for their sales teams, the sales representatives focus on detailed information relating to the results of their sales activities. Model

Type

Details

Sales

Dashboard

Sales Dashboard on Sales Volume with Top Customers, Top Products and by distribution channel.

Sales

Crystal Report

Sales Order Fulfillment Rates

Sales

Explorer View

Sales Organization Analysis — display all sales order line item status is a single view (Sales, Logistics, and Billing) with related quantity and value.

Sales

Explorer View

Sales Order Item Analysis

Sales

Crystal Report

Order Time Schedule Analysis

Sales

Crystal Report/Explorer View

Credit Memo Analysis

Sales

Explorer View

Billing List Analysis

Sales

Web Intelligence

Sales Analysis by Top 5 Customers

 Accelerated Financial Report ing The SAP HANA Financials content package provides the prerequisites for building reports that provide the following analysis data: Real-time analysis of the subledger for Accounts Payable  (FI-AP) and Accounts Receivable (FI-AR) Flexible analysis of customer and vendor items based on the single line items from the back-end ERP system Calculation and analysis of the days sales outstanding (DSO)

Note that currently only General Ledger Accounting (new) is supported.

Model

Type

Details

Finance

Dashboard

Dashboard on Revenue Trend, EBIT Trend, Operational Expenses, Overdue and DSO Analysis.

Finance

Crystal Report

New GL Line Item Reporting (drill down from Revenue Trend)

Finance

Crystal Report

Due A/R items (drill down from Due Date)

Finance

Crystal Report

TOP X (for example 10) New GL Transactions

Finance

Crystal Report

Open Items Report

Finance

Crystal Report

Overdue Items Report

Finance

Explorer View

Flexible Customer Open Item Reporting

Finance

Crystal Report

Flexible Vendor Open Item Reporting

Model

Type

Details

Purchasing

Dashboard

Vendor Spend based on Financial Data

Purchasing

Web Intelligence

Finance Spend per Vendor (return rate for purchase orders)

Purchasing

Web Intelligence

Top Vendors by Invoice Spend (logistics invoice)

Purchasing

Web Intelligence

Purchase Orders

Purchasing

Web Intelligence

Goods Movement and Service Entries for Purchase Orders

Purchasing

Web Intelligence

Order History Overview

 Accelerated Procurement Reporting The purchasing content package for SAP HANA enables procurement managers to analyze key procurement processes in real time. Procurement managers use spending key figures along different dimensions including Material Groups, Vendors, Plants, and Purchasing Organizations to gain instant insight into inefficiencies that may point to savings potentials or internal and external process improvements.  Accelerated Master Data Report ing Master data are essential for nearly all business transactions, irrespective of the business area. The master data in this package concentrate on master data objects that are available in SAP ERP, such as material, customer, and vendor. Model

Type

Details

Master Data

Explorer View

Vendor List

Master Data

Explorer View

Customer List

Master Data

Explorer View

Material List

 Accelerated Shipping Report ing The SAP HANA content for Shipping enables shipping and warehouse managers to check basic shipping and stock key figures in real time. Managers use shipping analytics to obtain instant information for planning and monitoring outbound delivery-related activities. In addition, the managers can get an up-to-date overview on materials stock at any time. Model

Type

Details

Shipping

Explorer View

Stock Overview

SAP HANA Accelerates Reports  Imagine a “long-running” ABAP report within a particular business function, one that’s been an ongoing problem for  users. As a result of system latency, many reports could not provide real-time data analysis — and therefore could not be used to make proactive business decisions. SAP HANA can reduce a report’s run time from several hours to minutes or  even seconds, making the information much more current and valuable.

Primary Database for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse In our third use case example, SAP BW is powered by SAP HANA. In this scenario a company replaces the previously underlying database for their SAP BW system with SAP HANA. The IT team can perform a standard DB migration over to SAP HANA  and then enable specific objects to be in-memory optimized as necessary depending on the company’s requirements. SAP BW is the first SAP application that was optimized to run with SAP HANA as its primary

underlying database. With SAP HANA, SAP BW can leverage in-memory capabilities for improved performance, without the need for any sidecar accelerators or extensive modeling workarounds. The entire database physically sits under the SAP BW system, eliminating the need for in-memory aggregation. This arrangement simplifies the data modeling and query design, which in turn greatly enhances system performance while lowering IT ownership costs. Replacing an old database with SAP HANA generates speed and flexibility for two key reasons. First, keeping the entire database in memory eliminates the need to send large amounts of data between the application and DB servers, thereby reducing latency. In fact, running SAP BW on SAP HANA eliminates most of the problematic issues that slow down the system, from both a user and an administrator perspective. To watch a video of Home Trust’s BW migration project, click here: Home Trust: http://youtu.be/Q6057Cpr8V4

Custom Applications for SAP HANA As stated earlier, SAP HANA is a full-blown, do-just-about-anything-you-want application platform. It speaks pure SQL, and it 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. Overall, however, the sky truly is the limit when it comes to imagining what to build with SAP HANA. Although SAP HANA is valuable for a broad range of applications, it “shines” particularly well in a few unique situations. If you’re building an enterprise-scale application for a business scenario that has high data volumes, needs detailed/granular data analysis, needs to search or aggregate huge data volumes, requires complex algorithmic or statistical calculations, or suffers from latency between transactional recording and reporting, SAP HANA is a great choice.

Future Use Case Scenarios As SAP HANA matures and SAP updates its portfolio of solutions to take advantage of the extensive horsepower of SAP HANA, you can expect to see nearly every SAP product supported natively on SAP HANA as a primary database — plus many more “native SAP HANA” applications. By now you should have a good understanding of how typical use cases take advantage of  SAP HANA. The next step is to ensure that you understand the best ways to deploy this new technology in your environment to drive maximum value.

SAP HANA Implementation Scenarios As we’ve discussed, there are many different ways to use SAP HANA, and it stands to reason that there are also many different implementation scenarios. However, there isn’t a one-toone correlation between a use case and an implementation scenario. Rather, for each use case, you need to look at the business problem you are trying to solve, which will typically dictate the most appropriate implementation scenario. If, for example, your use case is for a specific need not addressed by an SAP application, you’ll likely need a custom development project. In contrast, if your business issue is a more common or typical one, then SAP may have already created a new SAP HANA application to meet your needs. For many repeatable business issues, SAP has created SAP Rapid Deployment solutions. These solutions contain preconfigured software, technical content, and implementation services, and they are priced and scoped for rapid implementation.

Rapid-deployment solutions Do you have to address an urgent business need? Do you want a fast start with a fixed scope? SAP Rapid Deployment solutions can help you implement SAP HANA using a package of  preconfigured software, content, and end user enablement plus implementation services. Clearly priced and scoped implementation services help you speed up time to value and limit risk. The available SAP Rapid Deployment solutions for SAP HANA can help you to find your path to realize a full IT landscape running on SAP HANA — quick, without risk and at predictable costs. You can start into SAP HANA as you like — e.g. with a quick win, implementing an accelerator or with a holistic approach, migrating your SAP Business Suite to SAP HANA. If  ou want to leverage your landscape with SAP HANA step by step, the following approach could fit to your wishes: Start smart with implementing some accelerators and gain immediate performance improvements without disruption for the end users, e.g. by implementing the SAP HANA Accelerated Finance and Controlling rapid-deployment solution. Then, try out new analytics with the HANA content that is delivered. The SAP HANA CRM analytics rapid-deployment solution could support your CRM users with new reports. Besides this you might explore new reporting options with SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA by speeding up existing scenarios or by implementing new ones. Rapid-eployment

solutions that are based on SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA support many different scenarios — e.g. in the area of ERP, CRM or EPM. Also, if you are looking to adopt SAP HANA as database for your SAP Business Suite, the Rapid Database Migration of SAP Business Suite to SAP HANA package supports the migration of an existing SAP Business Suite installation to the SAP HANA database system without disruption of the existing Business Suite scenarios. Reporting scenarios within the SAP Business Suite can be enhanced as well with the SAP HANA Live rapid-deployment solution. The SAP HANA Live rapid-deployment solution provides pre-built reporting content for easier and faster analysis based on virtual data models with best practices enablement content and fixed-scope and fixed-timeline service offering. SAP is continuously adding more rapid-deployment solutions. To see what’s available today, visit SAP Store or www.sap.com/solutions/rds  or the SAP Service Marketplace for customers and partners. In today’s competitive global economy, businesses must adopt technology solutions that provide an immediate advantage over their competitors, but time-to-value is key. With the SAP HANA rapid-deployment solutions, customers can benefit from the power of  SAP HANA within a few weeks.

Custom Development Although there are standard best practices that must be considered when developing custom solutions, there are also many possibilities when it comes to imagining what to build with SAP HANA. SAP HANA aligns well with several specific requirements and situations. Are you building an enterprise-scale application for a business scenario with high data volumes? Do you need detailed or granular data analysis? Do you have to query large data volumes? Do you require complex algorithmic or statistical calculations, or suffer from latency between transactional recording and reporting? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then SAP HANA is a great choice.

SAP Application Deployment SAP is delivering a new class of solutions on top of the SAP HANA platform — solutions that combine real-time insights into big data with state-of-the-art analysis. These innovative realtime solutions can help organizations transform their business by making smarter and faster decisions, reacting more quickly to events, and unlocking new opportunities. Companies can utilize these solutions to take advantage of new, data-driven business models and processes — options that would be difficult or even impossible with disk-based databases. These solutions include: SAP Sales Pipeline Analysis, powered by SAP HANA SAP BusinessObjects Sales Analysis for Retail, powered by SAP HANA SAP Smart Meter Analytics, powered by SAP HANA

Packaged Solutions Do you have to address an urgent business need? Do you prefer working with a fixed scope? SAP Rapid Deployment solutions can help you implement SAP HANA using a package of  preconfigured software, content, and end user enablement plus implementation services. Clearly priced and scoped implementation services help you speed up time to value and limit risk. The available SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions for SAP HANA can help you to find your path to realize a full IT landscape running on SAP HANA — quick, without risk and at predictable costs. You can start into SAP HANA as you like — e.g. with a quick win, implementing an accelerator or with a holistic approach, migrating your SAP Business Suite to SAP HANA. If  ou want to leverage your landscape with SAP HANA step by step, the following approach could fit to your wishes: Start smart with implementing some accelerators and gain immediate performance improvements without disruption for the end users, e.g. by implementing the SAP HANA Accelerated Finance and Controlling rapid-deployment solution. Then, try out new analytics with the HANA content that is delivered. The SAP HANA Operational Reporting rapid-deployment solution  could support your ERP users with new reports. Besides this you might explore new reporting options with SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA by speeding up existing scenarios or by implementing new ones. Rapiddeployment solutions that are based on SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA support many different scenarios — e.g. in the area of EPM, CRM, or Demand Signal Management. Also, if you are looking to adopt SAP HANA as database for your SAP Business Suite, the Rapid Database Migration of SAP Business Suite to SAP HANA package supports the migration of an existing SAP Business Suite installation to the SAP HANA database system without disruption of the existing Business Suite scenarios. Reporting scenarios within the SAP Business Suite can be enhanced as well with the SAP HANA Live rapid-deployment solution. The SAP HANA Live rapid-deployment solution provides pre-built reporting content for easier and faster analysis based on virtual data models with best practices enablement content and fixed-scope and fixed-timeline service offering. SAP is continuously adding more Rapid Deployment solutions. To see what’s available today, visit www.sap.com/solutions/rds  or the SAP Service Marketplace  for customers and partners.

Taking a Systematic Approach for Your Implementation You may be familiar with the traditional ASAP methodology used by SAP — and the fact that a complex ERP implementation can last for months, if not years. Because SAP HANA is a new technology, to stay on top of its learning curve you need to work with a solution implementation partner who has a deep understanding of the technology, the capabilities, and best practices for implementation. To successfully implement SAP HANA, you must follow a structured implementation methodology. Your solution partner should approach the solution with a phased, deliverableoriented implementation plan based in project and organizational change management. The

goals here: to streamline implementation, minimize risk, and reduce the total costs of  implementation. A robust methodology should include templates, tools, questionnaires, and checklists, including guidebooks and accelerators to support team members and increase project predictability. There are six basic steps that need to be a part of any SAP HANA implementation. The amount of emphasis you place on each step will be dictated by the type of SAP HANA project ou are implementing.

1. Customer education. Education is especially important for an SAP HANA project. The technology is new, so the relevant knowledge is not yet widespread. The technology is also rapidly evolving, with new use cases being created almost daily. Both the project team and the executive sponsors must be educated so they understand what SAP HANA can do and how it works. (Hint: Give them a copy of this book!) 2. Use case identification.  Workshops can help determine where to apply the power of  SAP HANA within the organization. Ask yourself: What are the possible scenarios for SAP HANA, and where might the company make improvements? Where could the technology have the biggest impact on corporate objectives or unlock deeper insights into the reported data? Once you have defined a use case, you should perform a comprehensive requirements gathering to ensure that the end solution addresses all of your company’s needs and maps back to your original use case expectations. 3. Solution approach. The SAP HANA solution must be designed and documented so that if your personnel or solution partners change, the new resources will understand how to support the solution. Most likely, this will be an iterative process, looking closely at use cases and their supporting infrastructure. As new information becomes available,

the solution approach will evolve into a comprehensive deliverable. 4. Modeling / Development A key task to implement your SAP HANA solution is creation of the data models and the different views to it. These models are adapted, modified, and enhanced to improve performance. For packaged applications this content is delivered by SAP, but can be adapted to your specific needs. Custom development projects will include both traditional application development and modeling aspects. 5. QA/testing.  This is the final test of all front-end reporting, data quality, data integration, and performance. The production system is up and running, and business processes begin to operate in the new SAP HANA environment. Quality assurance continues, along with end-user training and support. 6. Go live. SAP HANA is delivered as a production solution.

Commo n Scoping Pitfalls to Avoid  If changes are required for front-end reports or analytics, then expectations must be managed. Often, as a result of  dependencies, even small changes to a report can have a large impact on underlying systems; for instance, a change to a field may require changing a data model. Because of this factor, it is important to fully define requirements and to ask about any proposed report modifications. Reviewing the original form of a current report can be very helpful because you can see what the business user is accustomed to seeing, as well as how it might be improved. You should also perform a proper data decomposition to document how the current report is built and how it is working. In addition, identify any custom code within the business rules that may be difficult to replicate inside the SAP HANA modeler. Finally, map the sources from which the data are drawn, and how the data are imported into a formal deliverable for signoff. The right services partner can provide the needed level of due diligence in this area during planning.

After you’ve outlined a systematic approach to implementation, you need to identify the key timelines and activities for your SAP HANA implementation.

Timelines and Key Activity Considerations Just as there is no one size fits all, there is no single timeline for an SAP HANA project. Each project is different; each has distinctive contributing factors and characteristics. It is SAP best practice to use a standard project methodology, such as the SAP ASAP implementation methodology, to ensure that a project addresses all of the critical activities, phases, and deliverables that are necessary for success. The SAP ASAP methodology  has been updated to incorporate the SAP HANA activities required for a standard in-memory project. Accelerators, best practices, and implementation tools have also been updated or developed to shorten the project timeline and reduce risk. Methodology, timelines, and key activities vary based on three considerations: Current technical landscape.  Depending on the current landscape, the customer may have to consider prerequisites for delivering in-memory solutions. For example, data quality may need to be addressed, or the organization may first need to upgrade some

applications that work in conjunction with SAP HANA. Expectations for in-memory functionality.  As customers learn more about the capabilities of in-memory solutions, they may want to introduce additional functionality. It is important to manage this need and to consider it during the initial requirements phase. Original requirements per use case(s) identified during assessment. A key component of the successful delivery of SAP HANA is ensuring that the final solution meets the company’s requirements and expectations, as identified in the original use case scenario. In addition to defining an implementation methodology, you’ll need to identify the key skills required to ensure your implementation of SAP HANA is a success.

Critical SAP HANA Skills Needed for Successful Projects Because SAP HANA is a new technology the success of any implementation will depend in large part on your ability to locate experts who can fill any skill gaps on your team. Critical resources for an SAP HANA project will also vary depending on how you choose to leverage the SAP HANA in-memory solution, or which use case you select. The following roles are specific to agile data mart use case implementations: System architect/system administrator.   This resource is responsible for the physical SAP HANA landscape, including CPU, memory, and disk usage. He or she performs maintenance and system monitoring, along with configuration and application of any necessary patches. The system architect also performs SAP source system configuration and replication, and manages the SAP Landscape Transformation (SLT) replication server. Finally, he or she ensures that the SAP HANA database is backed up regularly, and also monitors and processes backup log files. Solution architect. As the name implies, the solution architect is responsible for solution design. He or she gathers requirements for the use case(s) and creates the technical design documentation. SAP HANA data modeler.   The SAP HANA data modeler is responsible primarily for modeling solution design and development and unit testing of all SAP HANA models. He or she also performs SAP HANA model lifecycle management, which includes the various steps contained in the process of moving from development to production. Data services/SLT developer.  The data services developer is responsible primarily for design and development of jobs to extract, transform, and load data into SAP HANA via data services or SLT. The developer also performs lifecycle management, which includes steps contained in moving from development to production.

Two other roles are specific to implementations of SAP BW powered by SAP HANA. SAP technology consultant. This expert on SAP HANA technology collaborates with the project manager to plan technical requirements for the project. He or she then implements these required technical tasks within the system. Certified OS/DB migration consultant.  This individual is responsible for technical planning and design of the in-memory infrastructure, including database planning, project organization, design, audit, and project review. If you perform a custom development, you will need additional development skills: SAP HANA developer.   This expert builds your applications beyond pure data modeling using the different development capabilities of SAP HANA (SQLScript, Business Function Library, etc.). Depending on the specific scope and architecture of your project, you may need development experts in the specific application domain and advanced technologies, such as predictive analytics, scripting languages, etc. Implementing SAP HANA is a major step in dramatically improving your ability to obtain optimal value from your big data. With the right service provider, use case, implementation methodology, and skilled resources, you’ll be able to enjoy the power, speed, and performance of SAP HANA. Let’s conclude this discussion by examining some truly stellar examples of successful SAP HANA implementations.

Putting it All Together — Examples of Stellar Projects Now that we have discussed the SAP HANA technology and how to obtain the best business value from this technology, we will present some innovative ways that customers have “put it all together.” The first example is a chemicals company that was able to improve compliance reporting by accelerating its standard SAP system. The second example involves a large university hospital that successfully implemented SAP HANA as the engine of a new custom application, enabling it to dramatically increase the speed with which it analyzed medical records. Finally, a financial services company used SAP HANA as a primary database for SAP Business Warehouse, with impressive results.

SAP Business Suite Accelerator at a Chemicals Company Our first example is a European consumer chemicals company that specializes in developing new fragrances and flavors. Every one of its hundreds of new recipes — each with unique ingredients and compositions — must be checked for compliance with legal regulations. As the demand for these chemicals increased and their recipes became more complex, the company simply became unable to scale its compliance checking. To resolve this problem, the company collaborated with SAP to build an application that enables it to quickly check new recipes while they are still in development to ensure that they comply with a vast array of  local legal regulations. Using SAP HANA to augment support of existing processes, we have demonstrated how the new application can cut processing time from 20 minutes to less than

4 seconds. This vastly improved performance enhances their scientists’ productivity while simultaneously driving down the costs of new product development.

Cust om SAP HANA Applicat ion in Use a t a University Hospital With a mature analytics program in place, the biggest university hospital in Europe provides 150,000 inpatient and 600,000 outpatient treatments every year. The hospital invested in SAP HANA to harness the big data associated with its vast inventory of patient data, medical records, and study results and make a positive impact on patient care and healthcare research. For example, the hospital now uses SAP HANA Oncolyzer to search for and examine information involving cancer patients, such as tumor types, gender, age, risk factors, treatments, and diagnoses. This information enables the hospital to quickly identify the best candidates for each clinical study. In the future, when DNA is added to the data set, the Oncolyzer will analyze up to 500,000 data points per patient in real time. SAP HANA analyzes both structured and unstructured data and greatly accelerates the identification process. Primary Databa se for SAP Business Warehou se in Use at a Financial Institution A leading North American mortgage lender has successfully completed proof of concept, migrating a half-terabyte of data from a competitive database to the SAP HANA database and upgrading to SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, powered by SAP HANA. The result has been a dramatic improvement in reporting runtimes in the data warehouse and business intelligence environments. Data query speeds have increased on average 8-12 times, simple queries run up to 450 times faster, and data store object activation is 19 times faster. Based on these impressive results, the customer is re-architecting its entire reporting environment to leverage the power of SAP HANA.

Final Words of Wisdom on SAP HANA Implementation We’ve reviewed the importance of selecting the right SAP HANA services partner — one who can help you plan and implement your solution and provide the right set of skill resources to ensure your implementation delivers on the value of SAP HANA. We’ve also reviewed common use cases, including the agile data mart, SAP Business Suite accelerator, primary database for SAP Business Warehouse, and custom SAP HANA applications. SAP HANA implementation scenarios can vary depending on your business need — from custom development to SAP application development to rapid deployment solutions. Next we reviewed the importance of taking a systematic approach to your implementation and the benefits of following a methodology built on education, use case identification, solution approach, modeling, QA and testing, and go-live best practices. Prior to implementation, ou’ll also need to identify your timeline, key activities, and skilled resources needed to implement SAP HANA. The key is planning and ensuring you understand the entire scope of  the implementation, while remaining flexible enough to leverage the latest in SAP HANA use cases. In conclusion, we’d like to leave you with a short list of six key takeaways to ensure a successful SAP HANA implementation: 1. Make certain that business requirements are completely understood and that the use

2. 3. 4.

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case complements the technical requirements. Remember, technology intelligence doesn’t necessarily equal business intelligence! Establish ROI metrics early in the scoping process. Build them into the project/solution to ensure that success can be properly measured and quantified. Ensure proper collaboration across application delivery teams (EPR, BW, CRM, reporting, etc.), depending on project requirements. Start with a focused use case to demonstrate business value, and then expand across other functional areas of the business. Establishing a quick win helps with sponsorship and funding for additional in-memory projects. Make sure that data quality is considered as part of overall SAP HANA solution planning. Acquiring data quickly can’t help the business if the data are not accurate. Define (or redefine) specific in-memory terminology with all users to make certain that each term is understood by — and means the same thing to — IT, developers, business users, and executive sponsors. Small clarifications on such terms as “realtime” and “self-serve” can go a long way toward preventing misunderstandings concerning both the functionality to be delivered and the value it brings. Bonus Advice: Encourage everyone involved with the project (Technical & Business) to download and read a copy of this book. It really helps get everyone “on the same page” and ensures you’re all speaking the same language.

For more information about SAP HANA services offerings, subscribe to SAPServices on Twitter band review the details on the SAP HANA services website.

Top Advice from SAP Mentors for SAP HANA Projects SAP Mentors  are the most influential community participants in the SAP ecosystem. They comprise a super-smart and engaged global cohort of nearly 110 bloggers, consultants, and technical wizards nominated by SAP Community Network peers and selected by SAP. All SAP Mentors are hands-on experts of an SAP product or service, as well as true project champions. The majority of SAP Mentors work for customers or partners of SAP. The following three SAP Mentors are experts in SAP HANA implementations. They provide their best tips and tricks for a successful SAP HANA project. Pay attention, these guys really know their stuff!

Vijay Vijayasankar Associate Partner IBM Global Business Services Twitter: @vijayasankarv 1. Find the best data modeler you can for your SAP HANA projects. That is the make-orbreak issue for most SAP HANA projects. 2. Do not jump into a POC (Proof-of-Concept) just to prove loading/reporting works faster in a data mart. SAP or IBM can easily show you how quickly their systems can report and load data. 3. Spend a lot of time refining your use case offline before you start the project. An important part of this step is to accurately define success up front. This helps reduce wasteful scoping efforts during the project, and it will help the project team focus on specific targets. 4. Size the hardware correctly. If you do not, then you will not see the expected results. Even if you want to scale out and buy new boxes, you should be aware that these boxes are not available off the shelf. Consequently, they will require some lead time to acquire. 5. Each HW vendor has some “secret sauce” on what makes them special for SAP HANA. Make sure you understand that before investing in HW. 6. Check SAP HANA performance under a variety of situations — reporting performance while heavy loads happen, while multiple people are working on system, logging on from different parts of network, etc. 7. Engage closely with your SI (system integrator) and SAP while the project is going on. SAP HANA is fairly new, and it will probably need a few workarounds. Your SI and SAP will probably have seen your issues before, and they can advise you and help minimize time spent “reinventing the wheel.” 8. If you are going to migrate to SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on SAP HANA, test as you go when migrating objects to their in-memory versions so that you can spot challenges sooner. Definitely consider re-engineering the design of SAP BW to take advantage of SAP HANA and avoid doing only an en-masse migration and leaving it at that. 9. SAP HANA security/administration is a specialized skill, and a good design is needed to make it work for all your use cases consistently. Plan to spend time refining the model. 10. Last but not least — poor data quality is even more damaging when the data come at  you in “lightning speed.” Garbage In/Garbage Out still applies. Profile the data, and fix them at the source or as close to the source as possible before sending them to SAP HANA.

Harald Reiter Senior Manager — SAP Deloitte Consulting Twitter: @hreiter 1. Rethink what is possible a. Revisit analytics that previously were not possible or were too difficult to perform. b. Processes can now actually change, be simplified, or be minimized because you don’t need as big a staff to conduct the analysis. c. Eliminate the data volume and speed barriers from the equation, and focus on the real business needs. 2. Develop a roadmap a. Move from theory to reality — real-time BI delivers true value. b. Make it dynamic to adapt quickly to new capabilities and integration options. c. Align business and IT goals. d. Be proactive to influence the product development, and make your voice heard to ensure timely delivery of new capabilities. 3. Pilot early a. Get used to rapid development cycles and capabilities. b. Don’t get caught up in all the hype and excitement — be pragmatic, and don’t forget basic due diligence. Focus your efforts, define what is really important, achieve success, and build on that success iteratively. c. Don’t try to throw all the data into the database just because you can. 4. Start with the hard stuff  a. Be realistic — don’t assume you go through fewer cycles of data analysis to find the best answer (or question); you will be able to do the cycles faster, though. This allows you to change your assumptions, quickly run scenarios, and ask different questions to uncover anomalies in your data. b. Embed statistical models and predictive analysis into your daily operations to detect risk, negative trending, and anomalies. c. Make sure there is a measureable ROI 5. Establish priorities a. Define what you really want, and make certain your objectives have a positive impact on your organization b. Don’t forget to look at unstructured data in your organization; these data can provide a new perspective. Incorporating unstructured data and rapid processing enables meaningful and timely analysis to minimize risk, losses, or negative exposure. c. Don’t underestimate the importance of data quality. Revisit your data quality initiatives using SAP HANA to quickly identify issues that result from processing massive data sets in one pass. Correlation of results without complex partitioning and staging areas can uncover skewed results. 6. Begin cultivating talent a. Team composition is key for successful implementations.

b. Don’t forget about change management. Focus on changes for end users because they can be empowered to do agile reporting as well as on changes for administrative staff due to technology and implementation tools. c. Resources can now be assigned real value-added tasks instead of time-consuming administrative tasks just to obtain basic information. 7. Incorporate mobility a. Continuous monitoring of key metrics is a reality using mobility and SAP HANA 8. Revisit your technology architecture a. Examine your overall landscape, and identify all areas that can benefit from technology modernization. b. Understand the database operations capabilities of SAP HANA. c. Identify your must-have requirements, and address any shortcomings. d. Identify the best tool for each job. 9. Size right a. One size does not  fit all b. Data composition and data source impact the compression rate and thus the sizing estimation. c. When in doubt, move up one T-shirt size. d. Scale-out capability mitigates the risk of not sizing correctly, but it should not be relied on. e. The quality of the data model impacts the available size for data versus workspace. 10. Establish metrics and plan for tuning and performance testing a. Don’t forget about SLAs (service-level agreements). b. Tuning and performance testing can make the fast even faster. c. Reveal bad data model designs.

Vitaliy Rudnytskiy Lead BI Architect HP Enterprise Information Solutions Twitter: @Sygyzmundovych 1. Accept nothing less than excellence from your project team and partners a. Technology makes things faster, better, and cheaper; but technology itself is still  just a tool. Make sure you assemble an excellent team: business, project team, partners, and SAP support. 2. Understand the technology a. If you are reading this book, you are already on the right track. 3. Think about details, but always consider them in the context of the big picture a. “The devil is in the details,” so think them through. At the same time, however, never lose sight of the complete picture of where all the details fit into. 4. Open your mind to the “New World” a. Question your old habits; forget about your “15 years of technical/project experience under the belt.” Old techniques do not necessarily work well or at all with new paradigms. 5. Don’t build the solutions for “Go Live” a. Your solution will live a long time after the go-live date and will need to accomodate new requirements, unexpected cases, and a surrounding environment that is in constant transition. Build for the long run.

Ranjeet Panicker Practice Manager SAP Next Generation Services HANA/In-Memory Center of Excellence

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) & Return on Investment (ROI) Analysis Do not limit analysis of TCO and ROI to technical, IT, or infrastructure savings. Too often, when customers generate a business case to justify the acquisition of SAP HANA, they apply only those savings related to infrastructure items such as storage and hardware. Avoid this mistake! Be bold! Explore the holistic value of SAP HANA to your business processes. For example, reducing the time it takes to run a BW analytic report from 4 hours to 5 minutes means something to the business. Apply metrics to these savings. Engage SAP Value Engineering teams who can help translate the speed of SAP HANA into true business value. The well-known adage “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is especially relevant to value management. If you don’t identify, track, and ensure the ongoing value of a project, you’re unlikely to achieve its financial and operational  objectives. Learn more about how strategy management helps you track and realize the full value of your organizational  objectives by reading this article: http://scn.sap.com/community/services/blog/2012/08/23/the-value-in-valuemanagement 

Cutting-edge Technology SAP HANA represents a paradigm shift in how we know and use an RDBMS. It is also a new database technology – one that is evolving as SAP customers find new ways to challenge the speed and performance of the database. The SAP HANA platform is evolving very quickly, and SAP continuously adds new and innovative functionality. To enable customers to take advantage of this new functionality quickly and efficiently, SAP has made the process of  upgrading very simple.

HANA Should Not Be Only an IT Project Recognize the business drivers which catalyzed the decision to make SAP HANA the platform for your business. Although switching the database underneath BW is part of the formula for success with SAP HANA, the full value of a BW powered by SAP HANA solution is realized through additional activities such as optimizing in-memory objects and examining processes to re-architect the information layers. Such activities will help you save not only on the maintenance of these objects, but also on storage, resources, and memory. Ultimately they will enable your business to report more quickly and efficiently.

Executive Sponsorship Buy-in at the highest level brings the authority and credibility that can mean the difference between success and failure for your SAP HANA project. Executive sponsorship helps drive the vision for SAP HANA in your organization, and it facilitates the change management that is required when you adopt a new technology. To secure and maintain this sponsorship, include the executives in project reviews at regular intervals to keep them up to date on

project status. Also, make certain they are involved in all follow-on endeavors.

Size Does Matter Do not rely purely on the size of the data set on source systems to predict the size of the SAP HANA appliance. Instead, analyze ways to reduce redundant data before loading/migrating into SAP HANA. Examine solutions like near-line storage (NLS) that may help mitigate rapid data growth in SAP HANA. Invest in hardware that can be scaled instead of being replaced. Adopt realistic goals on sharing an SAP HANA appliance between applications. Finally, look into items such as backup and restore, patching, and performance when you are considering sharing a single appliance.

The rest of the story....

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ince the SAP HANA Essentials book is being written in “real time”, it will be continuously updated as new chapters are completed and content revisions are added. Make sure to register for the mailing list on www.saphanabook.com  to be informed when new chapters are available and follow the book on twitter @EpistemyPress and @jeff_word. Please share the website and voucher code with your colleagues so they can benefit from the information in this book as well.

Notes 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. (2013), Business Process Integration with SAP ERP. Epistemy Press

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 data loss from disasters. 6 

Plattner, H & Zeier, A. (2011). In-memory data management: an inflection point for enterprise applications. Springer. 7 As

of SP7, there’s another deployment option for SAP HANA. Aimed at large customers that have invested in and manage their own storage environment, the SAP HANA tailored data center integration was added. 8

 The SAP HANA RDS for database migration takes ~7 weeks for most customers who are already running SAP BW 7.3. 9

 Meaning “Powered by SAP HANA” and renovated to natively take advantage of SAP HANA.

*

 As of January 2013, the SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SAP SRM) application was not available with SAP HANA. However, SAP plans to integrate them at some point in the future. 10  Gard

Little and Elaina Stergiades, IDC, Help Rethinking the Art of the Possible with SAP  HANA Services, March 2012.