About HANA

SAP HANA Overview

SAP HANA:

1. SAP HANA overview

1.1 What is SAP HANA? 

SAP HANA is a general purpose and ANSI standards-compliant in-memory database. Because of its design it allows transactional and OLAP reporting in a single system, which makes it simpler, and much faster, than traditional RDBMS systems like Oracle.

1.2 Is SAP HANA an appliance? 

SAP HANA comes shipped as a pre-configured appliance from your hardware vendor and the license is bought from SAP.

SAP HANA is an analytics appliance that consists of certified hardware, an In Memory Database (IMDB) an Analytics Engine and some tooling for getting data in and out of HANA. You build the logic and structures yourself, and use a tool e.g. SAP Business Objects, to visualise or analysis data.

1.3 How is SAP HANA licensed? 

With SAP HANA, you pay based on the size of productive usage. All test, demo, HA and DR licenses are included in this price and there are no hidden extras like CPU or user licenses. It is one simple price based on appliance size. There are volume discounts so as you buy HANA, the price decreases.

SAP HANA is priced by the 64GB unit right now, and there is some discounting based on volume. As usual with SAP licenses, it's best to contact your account exec directly and talk to them. The minimum purchase amount is currently 64GB, and the smallest appliance is 128GB, which is upgradeable to 256GB. This means if you buy 64GB today, you can easily incrementally expand up to 256GB.

Note that Steve Lucas from SAP has given some HANA prices for BW to the market - What Oracle won't tell you about SAP HANA - saying that it can cost as little as €13k per 64GB unit.

1.4 Why is SAP HANA version less and what is innovation without disruption?

SAP HANA was originally going to be numbered 1.0, 1.2, 1.5 and 2.0 and you will see this in some early literature. But what SAP have done is really interesting: they have removed the versions and provide innovations automatically when you update HANA.

For the purposes of information and marketing, SAP HANA has patches - SP01 which was the ramp-up, SP02 which was the generally available version, SP03 which provided support for BW and SP04 which provides support for Text Analytics and High Availability. But the patches are just to let people know about the new features - there is no release of SP04.

But the reality is that SAP HANA only comes released in Revisions. And for example, Revision 28 is SP04. So when last week, I had all our SAP HANA systems updated to SAP HANA Revision 28, we got the innovations from SP04 included. And this update takes about 10 minutes and can be done online in High Availability environments.

This is what SAP call innovation without disruption and it seems to work really nicely.

1.5 What are the key benefits of SAP HANA Patches?

SAP HANA SP01 (Revision 10) is the initial release of SAP HANA to ramp-up.

SAP HANA SP02 (Revision 12) is the general-availability release of SAP HANA to the market.

SAP HANA SP03 (Revision 20) brought:

·         Support for the SAP NetWeaver BW database

·         Information Composer

SAP HANA SP04 (Revision 28) brought:

·         Loading Data from Flat Files (CSV, XLS, XLSX) including automatic table creation in HANA Studio

·         Enhancements for Attribute/Calculation Views, Usability, Security, Multi-language and technical.

·         High Availability

·         ETL-based Data Acquisition by SAP HANA Direct Extractor Connection

·         Predictive Analytics Library (PAL)

·         R Programming Language Integration

1.6 What is SAP NetWeaver BW on HANA?

SAP now supports SAP HANA as the underlying database for its first Business Suite product, the NetWeaver BW Data Warehouse. I have broken this out into a separate article - The SAP BW on HANA FAQ

1.7 What is SAP ERP on HANA?

SAP planned from the start to allow customers to run their ERP or Business Suite on SAP HANA. However, out the box, ERP on HANA does not provide the same level of benefits that BW on HANA does. This is because ERP is predominately transactional (OLTP) and SAP HANA does not optimize large transactional volumes to the extent that it does the OLAP functions of SAP BW. It will still run faster than ERP on Oracle or DB2, but not 100 or 1000 times faster.

SAP ERP is not optimized for any particular database and this was a deliberate decision. ERP basely makes use of database stored procedures. However, to optimize ERP on HANA it is necessary to push the logic down into the database and make use of the SAP HANA stored procedure language SQLScript. This work is in progress.

In addition, SAP wanted to prove the reliability of SAP HANA and its ability to support business critical applications. From a technology perspective, it is already possible to run the Business Suite on IMDB and SAP has trialled moving some large databases into HANA already. In fact, it runs its own ERP system, affectionately called "NSP" by employees, on HANA in parallel.

SAP ERP on HANA is expected to be released into ramp-up in Q4 2012. CRM, SCM and PLM will follow.

1.8 What is SAP HANA great at?

The best thing that HANA brings to the table is the ability to aggregate large data volumes in near real-time - and to have the data updated in near real-time. SAP's demos show hundreds of billions of records of data being aggregated in a matter of seconds. SAP has built a set of Analytics Apps on top of HANA and this are set to be great point use cases to get customers up and running quickly.

The really great SAP HANA apps that have been created mix three big performance improvements. First, the performance of in-memory analytics, second, an inefficient design and third, a change in process that allows further improvements. This is what SAP's CTO Vishal Sikka affectionally calls the "100,000x club".

In addition, SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3, powered by SAP HANA looks like it will be a no-brainer for the majority of SAP's 14,000 BW customers. The improvements in performance and flexibility it allows resolve many of the classic data warehouse problems that have plagued the market for 20 years.

1.9 Where might SAP HANA not provide a benefit?

SAP HANA improves the biggest bottleneck that exists in standard database platforms - the spinning disks. In-memory technology is typically 100-1000x faster than disk for this reason.

The biggest examples of where I have seen SAP HANA not able to provide a benefit is where it is compared feature-function as a replacement to an existing transactional system.

The reason for this is because SAP HANA provides opportunities to simplify the architecture of the existing solution and simply replacing the database does not provide this opportunity.

For example, SAP HANA does in this instance not require a separate data warehouse for analytics - you can just build real-time virtual OLAP functions on top of your transactional OLTP store. So, the analytics functions are real-time where they were replicated before, and what's more because of the high analytical performance of SAP HANA, they are likely to be massively faster.

1.10 How does SAP HANA compare to Oracle Exalytics?

This is a perfect example of the simplification example I gave in the last question. With Oracle, you need to build your transactional database in Exadata, then you replicate this into the Exalytics Times-Ten database for reporting and into Essbase for forecasting.

By contrast if you use SAP HANA, you store the information once in the SAP HANA appliance. From that one store you can do transaction processing, analytical reporting, forecasting and predictives. With HANA you are not moving information around the whole time and this simplifies the solution, enables the solution to be more easily changed and more agile. And you do not pay a performance penalty because everything happens in-memory.

1.11 What happens if hardware or power fails?

Intel has a comprehensive collection of Reliability, Availability and Scalability features in their SAP HANA hardware and this includes predictive memory failure, fault tolerance and recovery of failed memory. This is designed to avoid hardware failure but obviously hardware does fail from time to time.

In case of hardware failure, SAP HANA supports fully Highly Available scenarios and standby nodes. If one node fails, another will replace it.

It also supports Disaster Recovery using disk mirroring to an alternative location, in case of power failure in the main site.

In addition, SAP HANA writes a copy of what is happening in memory to disk, using a combination of save-points and log files. If the power goes out, it will reload the last save point and then apply the log files when you switch it back on.

1.12 What does SAP HANA cost?

SAP HANA is priced by the 64GB unit right now, and there is some discounting based on volume. As usual with SAP licenses, it's best to contact your account exec directly and talk to them. The minimum purchase amount is currently 64GB, and the smallest appliance is 128GB, which is upgradeable to 256GB. This means if you buy 64GB today, you can easily incrementally expand up to 256GB.

Note that Steve Lucas from SAP has given some HANA prices for BW to the market - What Oracle won't tell you about SAP HANA - saying that it can cost as little as €13k per 64GB unit.

1.13 Why is SAP HANA so fast?

Regular RDBMS technologies put the information on spinning plates of iron (hard disks) from which the information is retrieved. HANA stores information in electronic memory, which is some 50x faster (depending on how you calculate). HANA stores a copy on magnetic disk, in case of power failure or the like. In addition, most SAP systems have the database on one system and a calculation engine on another, and they pass information between them. With HANA, this all happens within the same machine.

1.14 Does SAP HANA replace Oracle?

It's the elephant in the room, but once the Business Suite runs on IMDB, Oracle won't be needed any more by SAP customers who purchase HANA. This doesn't affect anything in the short term because many of those people buying HANA today will still need an Oracle ERP system.

However if you run an Oracle or DB2 data mart that performs poorly, you could replace this outright with SAP HANA and that would allow you to actually eliminate some licenses today. The same applies if you buy your SAP BW licenses from another database vendor directly.

1.15 What compression can I expect as compared to alternatives?

The answer is it really depends on the number of unique values in your data. The fewer unique values, the better the compression. If you have raw flat files or uncompressed databases like DB2 or Oracle then I generally see 10x compression to be a good start point.

If you are using DB2 or Oracle compression then you can expect that to reduce to 5x compression with HANA in an average scenario.

Note that this is missing the point because HANA allows simplification. In one customer I have dealt with, they had 27TB of SAP BW database, but 20TB of this was aggregates and indexes used to improve performance. So when the database was moved to SAP HANA, they started with 7TB and got 5x compression. In real life this means compression of 27TB down to 1.5TB or 18:1.

1.16 What is the wider market opportunity for in-memory technologies?

I think that this is the biggest challenge that SAP HANA provides today: because it simplifies and changes the way in which computer solutions can be designed, which requires a change in the design philosophy of computer systems. I have been talking to a number of people that see the potential and the key is this: you move all your data into one place. You transact, report, plan, forecast and consolidate on a single version of the truth.

If you can make the mental jump of what that would mean to your organization then you can see the potential.

2. SAP HANA database hardware

2.1 What hardware is supported right now?

I have broken out the SAP HANA Hardware guide into a separate FAQ - The SAP HANA Hardware FAQ 

There is a supported hardware list on SAP's website at: http://service.sap.com/pam (login required).

2.2 Why doesn't SAP HANA run on blades?

Running SAP HANA on blades is only relevant in multi-node systems. SAP HANA does run on blades from Cisco and HP. Fujitsu and IBM currently do not have a blade solution and IBM have stated that it is not their current strategy. This is because their GPFS file system requires local disk storage in the system and blades cannot hold this.

2.3 Does SAP make its own SAP HANA hardware?

Yes, but only in the labs so far. There are no public plans to compete against IBM/HP/Dell in this space, but it may make sense for SAP to enter the appliance market, especially in the context of Data Centers and even more so in the context of the SAP Business by Design cloud offering, which will run on HANA.

2.4 How big does SAP HANA scale?

The largest certified appliance is 16TB and there are 100TB appliances in the lab. Remember that you do get compression on this so this is equivalent to 160TB of raw data for a 16TB appliance.

But for "big data" fans, HANA currently only scales to the small-end of Big Data, which refers to the kind of huge datasets that Facebook or Google have to store - not Terabytes, but rather Petabytes. These volumes remain the domain of solutions like Hadoop.

That said, given that we moved from 1TB to 16TB certified appliances in the last year, you can expect by 2013 for much larger appliances to be certified.

3. Technical FAQ

3.1 What source databases does SAP HANA support in real-time?

There are two mechanisms that HANA supports for near-real-time data loads. First is the Sybase Replication Server (SRS), which works with SAP or non-SAP source systems running on Microsoft, IBM or Oracle databases. This was expected to be the most common mechanism for SAP data sources but there remain some license challenges around replicating data out of Microsoft and Oracle databases, depending on how you license the database layer of SAP. If you buy your database license direct from the vendor then you are fine, but if you buy it through SAP then you may have a restricted license that does not allow for usage of SRS.

For those scenarios, SAP have a second choice of replication mechanism called System Landscape Transformation (SLT). SLT is also near-real-time and works from a trigger from the SAP Business Suite products. This is both database-independent and pretty neat, because it allows for application-layer transformations and therefore greater flexibility than the SRS model. Note that SLT has now been extended to work with non-SAP source systems.

In addition there is a new model, the Direct Extractor Connection. This provides a means to work with Business Content Data Sources (DXC), which send data from an SAP Business Suite system to SAP HANA. With DXC, the Business Content extractors are redirected, and instead of flowing into SAP Business Warehouse, extracted data flows into SAP HANA directly.

SRS has additional restrictions which are worth bearing on mind. It can only replicate Unicode data and does not support IBM DB2 compressed tables at this time.

3.2 What source databases does SAP HANA support for batch loads?

If you use SAP Business Objects Data Services 4.0 for bulk loads then pretty much anything. BO-DS is a very flexible Extract, Transform & Load tool that supports many databases. Data Services was previously called Data Integrator, and was previously called Acts, prior to being acquired by Business Objects.

You can reasonably load into HANA using Data Services every 10 minutes and Data Services allows for excellent flexibility because you can take care of complex business transformations including e.g. address verification outside of HANA, which may allow simplified modeling within HANA.

I hear that SAP plan to open up a certification for third-party ETL tools later in 2012. However there are plans to move the Data Services ETL engine into SAP HANA which would allow transformations to happen in-memory. This would provide a significant benefit over any other ETL tool.

3.3 What BI Platforms does SAP HANA support?

SAP HANA supports the ODBC, JDBC and MDX standards for BI (or other connections). Today, only the SAP BI4 suite and Analysis for Excel client are supported.

However I have tested a number of different tools on top of HANA and they generally work well - including the SAP Mobility Platform for real-time replication to mobile devices. Again there is set to be a certification process starting later in 2012 that will allow third-party vendors to certify their software