SAP HANA (High Performance Analytic Appliance)

The first version of SAP HANA was developed as part of SAP's joint innovation program with its key partners and customers (Coca-Cola, Future Group, Hilti and many others).

The program allows users to develop business models and carry out business planning using real-time data and analytics to achieve business goals in a short time. The use of SAP HANA technology provides an advantage when using the latest advances in computing power, such as more affordable multi-core blade servers capable of processing data for companies of all sizes. With SAP in-memory solutions, customers can quickly navigate vast amounts of information, as data is stored and analyzed by SAP HANA technology instead of being stored in statistical tables of traditional databases.

With the optimal use of RAM, processor technology and innovative applications, SAP HANA has improved the speed of in-memory processing and provided unique analytics capabilities. For example, during the pilot phase of the SAP HANA project, SAP implemented some key application scenarios that increased performance by 1,200 times. Client application scripts, which previously took two to three hours, now run in less than five seconds.

From a technical point of view, HANA is a system consisting of hardware (a complex of servers based on Intel CPU architecture, from hardware partners) and software from SAP, delivered as a pre-configured complex.

Innovation at HANA

SAP has implemented a number of technical breakthroughs in its in-memory computing core, providing, for example, optimal processor utilization and the ability to parallel data processing on several nodes. In the process of working with clients during the pilot phase of the SAP HANA project, it was possible to demonstrate a number of global innovations in three key areas:

• Speed: SAP's in-memory computing module allows each processor core to scan 2 million records per millisecond and perform more than 10 million data aggregation operations per second on the fly. These results are achieved using real-world customer data running on standard Intel processors. For example, SAP implemented a real SAP HANA-based solution for a consumer product customer that demonstrated the ability to handle the most complex requests involving more than 450 billion records in seconds.
• Scalability - The SAP HANA software core is built on a multi-core architecture and features adaptive algorithms that enable optimal cache utilization. As a result, performance increases linearly with more cores, processors, and servers involved. The conclusions are obvious - this is the technology of the future. It will provide the best price/performance ratio for a long time, as the number of cores used in servers continues to increase exponentially.
• Compression: The SAP in-memory engine uses advanced compression algorithms and data structures to minimize the amount of memory required for normal system operation.

SAP HANA Use Cases

• As an accelerator to accelerate existing Business Suite applications.
• Analytics for real-time reporting on detailed transactional data
• BW on HANA, which enables a new level of BW storage performance
• Applications that are originally designed for use with HANA
• Business Suite on HANA - a scenario in which Business Suite applications use it directly as a database

Usage and Consolidation Options on SAP HANA

SAP HANA Supported Virtualization Scenarios

Migration to SAP HANA, Risk and Mitigation

 

Risks in the transition to SAP HANA and their minimization

Overview of Technical Migration to SAP HANA

SAP Landscape Transformation Examples

SAP HANA Core Data Protection Functionality

SAP HANA Solution Strategy

Infrastructure Changes When Migrating to SAP HANA

SAP HANA Across Industries: Application Scenarios

Retail

The significant amounts of data accumulated by large retail chains can give a lot of useful analytical information to top managers: what goods are in demand, whether there is enough of them in stock, whether supplies are established, which stores are the most profitable, and so on. Tools such as SAP HANA are used for analytics. It allows a supermarket with more than 10 thousand items of goods to spend not 15 days on obtaining detailed information on them, as in manual analysis, but only 5 minutes.

The system automatically predicts demand and offers a number of solutions for a specific situation: planning promotion campaigns, moving goods to other warehouses and stores, returning to suppliers and other actions. As a result, the reaction time to the identified opportunities for increasing sales is reduced from months to several days.

Metallurgy

In the expenses of metallurgical enterprises, the share of energy resources increased to 30%. Therefore, the topic of energy saving management is becoming more and more relevant, today it is dealt with by CEOs and chief engineers. Often they do not have complete information about energy consumption. SAP HANA provides remote operational accounting and monitoring of electricity consumed for various needs (individual industries, workshops, sites, products), and the formation of reporting documents on these data. The result: increasing the efficiency of the enterprise's energy management and reducing the cost of electricity by identifying and eliminating the factors of its inefficient use. In metallurgy, big data is valuable for the study of sales strategies and pricing policy formation^[1].

Financial industry

In financial institutions, SAP HANA can serve as both an electronic trading platform and a tool for analyzing creditworthiness or calculating capital adequacy ratios. For example, in accordance with the instruction of the Central Bank No. 139-I "On the mandatory ratios of banks," about 300 indicators are calculated on a large amount of initial data. In other cases, the platform needs to work with a huge stream of write and read requests (thousands per second) to support bidding or auctions. In banking, more data can be useful for credit scoring, as well as underwriting - modeling a scenario for passing a borrower's application, in which deviations from credit rules are recorded and a credit limit is calculated. The integration of such a subsystem with the loan application entry system reduces the time for consideration of applications by several times.

Oil and gas industry

Big data in the oil and gas industry is used both in the production of resources and in their sale. In production, it is certainly important to assess the effectiveness of field development. This implies a huge set of functions: comprehensive analysis and identification of suboptimal development areas, targeted planning of measures, selection of geological and technical measures, forecast of effects, selection of optimal options for action programs, development modes in accordance with production requirements, economics, infrastructure restrictions. Monitoring the drilling process, tracking the capital construction schedule, analyzing the current well situation with respect to historical data, identifying incidents and further forecasting of possible incidents at other assets are also important.

When selling petroleum products through retail networks (gas stations), big data helps marketing predict demand, conduct brand analytics, analyze prices and their changes in the context of competing companies and regions, taking into account macroeconomic indicators. And the commercial director will be interested in the possibilities of increasing sales of related goods (due to the identification of patterns) and reducing the downtime of gas stations (due to more accurate logistics of fuel trucks).

As an example, we will cite the active introduction Brazil of technologies in the oil and gas industry, big data which is under the influence of two factors: the discovery of large hard-to-recover oil and gas reserves and the rapid growth of the IT sector. Modern IT tools made it possible to analyze the entire amount of exploration data, highlight the most valuable information from it, and on its basis investors were able to make an informed decision on investments in "complex" Brazilian oil.

The result of the introduction of new technologies is massive foreign investment in the industry. Thanks to the partial government support and investment of foreign energy enterprises, many international IT companies are now investing in the country's economy. EMC alone has already invested about $100 million in the creation of a research center in Rio de Janeiro, which develops big data technologies, specializing in solutions in the storage, analysis and management of big data flows generated in abundance by the country's oil producers.

Despite the fact that today only 2% of oil exploration in Brazil is carried out by competing companies of the Brazilian state-owned Petrobras, just last year they invested about $500 million in R&D here. At the same time, it is expected that in the next five years this figure will increase by 25%, and by 2017 the total investment in R&D for oil exploration and production in Brazil will amount to $7 billion.

Telecom

Advanced big data technologies, of course, are also used in the field of telecommunications. One application is subscriber loyalty management. Companies use big data to form subscriber profiles: they segment the customer base, assess preferences and calculate profitability for each group. Then they make an analysis of records of customer calls by dozens and hundreds of customizable parameters, determine social groups of subscribers. After that, planning and preliminary assessment of marketing companies, high-quality targeting based on subscriber profiles are carried out. As a result, marketing helps prevent the outflow of subscribers by identifying and assessing the significance of factors that affect loyalty.

In early 2014, the Spanish telecom company presented an analytical system based on working with big data in 3G and 4G networks. The system predicts the behavior of crowds based on information transmitted by their smartphones, both on the street and in hospitals, libraries, shopping centers and other public buildings. The system can be used by law enforcement agencies, during concerts and sports events and for organizing advertising campaigns.

Russian telecommunications companies also use big data. For example, MGTS now provides online technical personnel management: predicts field resource needs, plans personnel changes, and optimizes employee work schedules. Such a system is already used by large foreign operators.

Another solution in the field of telecommunications is preventive diagnostics. By analyzing various parameters of equipment operation, you can identify patterns of system behavior that precede the occurrence of failures, determine the causes of failure. Early diagnosis allows you to plan the prevention, replacement and repair of equipment in a working order, without problems for customers.

Telecom operators try to analyze which of their clients is considered an authority in their circle of communication and what needs they have. This information is provided by the analysis of social networks. If suddenly one of the authoritative customers publicly reports that he is switching to another operator, then this can cause a domino effect. Naturally, it is in the company's interest to prevent these events. And predictive analytics can help her in this, which will reveal a tendency to increase the cost of the service, or reduce the number of calls. The company has a chance to rectify the situation without bringing the user to the transition to a competitor. Predictive analytics can automatically warn when action needs to be taken. It is reported that in this way the American T-Mobile reduced the level of customer outflow by 50% per quarter.

Transport

SAP HANA also offers solutions for transportation. An interesting solution exists for monitoring the location and execution of schedules, planning schedules on the railway. First, it gives an analysis of deviations in train traffic with an indication of the causes of delays. And secondly, it allows flexible and fast processing of customer requests by quickly calculating various options for fulfilling the request (for example, offering a different time frame or other volume, at better prices for the customer) with criteria for optimality in fulfilling the schedule, company profit and customer satisfaction. Big Data can also improve diesel fuel metering. For this purpose fuel consumption is analyzed in order to determine optimal speed mode along the route at different tonnage and number of stops. Graphs of fuel consumption are built and errors of the driver on the route are detected when choosing the operating mode of the power plant, efficiency indicators (l/tkm) for the period are calculated.

Railway construction has also become an object for big data applications. Every year more and more kilometers of the railway track are being built in the world, and, accordingly, its repair and maintenance are also a costly part in the country's budget. For example, the Canadian engineering company Bombardier has built monorail trains in Saudi Arabia and São Paulo, which are 25% lighter and 10% less energy consuming than traditional metro rolling stock. The company borrowed ideas for construction in the aerospace industry. In addition, the system is highly economical, without requiring significant costs for the construction and organization of infrastructure.

In the Netherlands, railways use advanced software, analyzing 56 thousand variables, including the state of the railways and the level of passenger demand. Thanks to the analysis of these data, the carrier sends more than 5 thousand trains per day, increases operational efficiency by 6% and saves about 20 million euros per year.

Equally telling is the example of the use of big data in aviation. Bangkok Airways uses the full range of solutions on the SAP HANA platform. One of the advantages of this solution for passengers is that the company in real time receives information about the most popular and busy routes, promptly introducing additional flights on them. SAP solutions increase the efficiency of airports around the world, so, using them, the management of Fraport AG (Frankfurt am Main Airport), has achieved a 70% reduction in maintenance and equipment management costs.

Power

SAP HANA and power solutions are used. A popular topic of recent years is intelligent electric power systems. They have a wide range of functionality - from monitoring and adaptive real-time network management, analyzing and changing the topological parameters of power networks, to providing communication between consumers and suppliers. The main task is to optimize generation and consumption, and, as a result, reduce electricity costs. Another solution is monitoring the technical condition of the power grid equipment, which involves early detection (forecasting) of faults and an increase in equipment readiness, which ultimately allows you to switch to servicing production assets "according to the actual state" and allows the management of enterprises to make more informed decisions.

Another front of work in the power is operational monitoring and forecasting. This refers to the operational monitoring of transmitted, consumed electricity, real-time accounting of electricity and the formation of reporting documents on this data. As a result, improving the efficiency of the energy sector and reducing electricity costs due to the identification of unsustainable use and forecasting of consumption volumes.

As an example, one of the developments of SAP is the Manhattan concept. The project scenario assumes that each house will be equipped with a "smart meter." Readings will be measured every 5 minutes, and the results will be sent to an analytical system based on advanced big data technologies integrated with GIS (including online maps). Thanks to this, the system will be able to see the overall picture of energy consumption and get detailed information on each district and house: how energy consumption changes depending on weather conditions, time of year and day. And on the basis of these real and accurate data, it will be possible to plan the energy supply of one of the busiest and most energy-intensive areas.

Cross-industrial scenarios

In addition to solutions for specific industries, big data is also used for cross-industrial scenarios. Let's briefly talk about some of them.

The organization of "Predictive Maintenance" (Predictive Maintenance) allows you to reduce equipment downtime, plan repairs more accurately, and reduce warehouse stocks.

Situational Center - it is organized for instant response to events with an action plan in all areas (personnel, ecology, production), automatic monitoring of the specified parameters of the system functioning, identification of possible threats and support for the development of solutions in atypical, crisis and emergency situations.

Fraud prevention helps to identify fraudulent transactions and certain types of behavior of objects - either falling under pre-configured filters (inconsistency of information in different sources of data, transaction codes), or containing deviations (the number of services provided is more than the average in the group, the current level of service consumption does not correspond to the history of consumption), etc.

Brand analytics provides for the use of big data to analyze data from social networks, media and forums, and the formation of a personalized approach to customers.

Image recognition and identification - identification of violators, fraudsters, customers using CCTV cameras and a recognition system, data profiling. The number of such scenarios will only increase over time as big data processing and analysis technologies evolve.

Product History

2024: BSC Server Certification for SAP HANA

The company DataRu on May 13, 2024 announced the certification of the line servers BSH for the high-speed analytical platform SAP HANA. According to information DataRu, BSKh16 servers demonstrated high reliability and performance when conducting tests in the HANA SAP BW benchmark - SAP HANA Standard Version 3. More. here

2019: RHEL 8 for SAP Solutions as SAP HANA 2.0 launch platform

On September 10, 2019, Red Hat introduced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for SAP Solutions, a smart operating system that simultaneously provides hybrid cloud coverage and support for critical SAP workloads. During the launch of RHEL 8, SAP opened production support for SAP RHEL 8 for SAP Solutions as a platform for running SAP HANA 2.0 (SPS 04 and higher) on Intel x86 architecture (64-bit). The IBM Power9 version for September 2019 is being tested accordingly. Read more here.

2018: Chances of success for SAP projects are 50-50

In February 2018, the consulting company Resulting IT published the results of a study stating that only half of SAP software implementation projects can be called successful. Read more here.

2017: SAP HANA available from Google Cloud Platform

On March 13, 2017, Google and SAP announced the start of a strategic partnership aimed at accessing SAP products on the Google Cloud Platform.

According to the companies, SAP HANA will become available on GCP for companies around the world. Customers will be able to launch analytical services and important applications in the cloud infrastructure. GCP will automatically prepare certified SAP HANA databases with enterprise security, high availability, scalability, and backup disaster recovery.

2016

SAP HANA 2

On November 7, 2016, SAP announced the release of the SAP HANA 2 platform with advanced opportunities for digital business transformation.

The functionality of the system has been upgraded in terms of data management, intelligent analytics, application development, supplemented with cloud microservices.

SAP HANA 2 Presentation, (2016)

SAP HANA 2 will be available on November 30, 2016.

Add-ons to platform functionality

• Database management-Continuity business processes with higher availability, security, workload management, and improved administration
• Data Management - Leverages data, regardless of location, through integration, quality improvement, and tiering (the new version of the SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer Web will help you manage complex information architectures and visualize new technologies before implementation)
• Intelligent analytics - Improved processing capabilities for text, spatial, graphics, and streaming data
• Application Development - Advanced features and a new API file processor for creating and implementing applications, tools, and native development languages.

SAP HANA Cloud Microservices

Users of cloud microservices will be able to improve applications using analytical capabilities, a simplified API processor, any language or development platform^[2].

Among cloud services

• Text Analysis Entity Extraction, Text Analysis Fact Extraction and Text Analysis Linguistic Analysis - advanced capabilities for managing text data in the cloud to improve natural language processing applications;
• The Earth Data Analytics Service (beta), developed jointly with the European Space Agency (ESA) on the basis of the Open Geospatial Consortium (using ESA and SAP HANA satellite data, this microservice processes real-time spatial data in the cloud: vegetation, water, soil and other spectral indicators).

"SAP pioneered in-memory technology with the launch of SAP HANA in 2010. With its help, we stimulated the transformation of the business of our customers, "said Bernd Leukert, member of the board of SAP SE. "The release of the next generation SAP HANA 2 platform is an important step towards a successful digital future."

"SAP HANA 2 will allow companies to adapt faster to changes in the digital world," commented Carl Olofson, Vice President. IDC- New and enhanced features will help improve data management and accelerate the development of digital transformation applications. The capabilities of cloud microservices will strengthen the competitiveness of SAP customers. "

SAP HANA in Microsoft Azure Cloud

Azure-based SAP HANA will help organizations in all industries build mission-critical applications and analyze data globally to meet corporate security and regulatory requirements. Together, companies certify SAP HANA for Microsoft Azure-based development, testing, and production (including SAP S/4HANA). New offerings for SAP HANA are designed to support the largest and most priority workload.

2015

SAP released the 10th service pack

On June 17, 2015, SAP announced the release of the HANA Support Package Stack 10 (SPS10), which focuses on expanding big data processing and analysis capabilities and supporting [[Internet of Things (IoT)|the Internet of Things (IoT)]]^[3].

To do this, HANA integration tools have been added with the latest versions of distributions Hadoop from Cloudera and, Hortonworks support for the fast transfer of structured and unstructured Spark SQL data and a unified user interface for administering HANA and Hadoop clusters via. Apache Ambari

The distribution of data in the data tiering mechanism implemented in SPS9 (released at the end of 2014) can be set using rules coming from the business. For example, an enterprise can store data over the past year in RAM, and move older ones to disk DSS or Hadoop. The text mining capabilities have been expanded, where the syntax of standard SQL is now supported and 32 national languages ​ ​ have been added. When analyzing data of spatial nature, you can use multidimensional objects that can be included in specialized SQLScript expressions.

In the tasks of the Internet of Things, an important place is given to synchronizing data accumulated at remote sites with the central database. Developers of IoT applications and mobile solutions with intensive data exchange can now use the built-in DBDSAP SQL Anywhere, which is able to accumulate and process data on the ground, transferring it to the central storage synchronously or at those moments when communication channels are available. At the same time, critical processes from the point of view of business logic can, taking into account the results of predictive analytics, be worked out locally even in the absence of a stable connection to the central server.

With the advent of 1: n asynchronous replication mechanisms, recovery of dynamic tiered storage hierarchy after failures, and incremental backup, fault tolerance has been significantly improved, which is important in critical applications that require uninterrupted 24/7 operation. Vertically scalable HANA server configurations now support multiprocessor NUMA architectures, allowing more than 12 TB of RAM to be used in a single in-memory server.

According to SAP, in the six months since the release of the SPS9 service pack, the number of customers using HANA has grown from 4100 to 6400. As of June 17, 2015, the SAP HANA Cloud Platform cloud service is used by 1,400 SAP customers. More than 1900 startups have been registered using the HANA platform in their developments.

SAP HANA Security System Has a "Regulatory Hole"

On June 18, 2015, Alexander Polyakov, technical director of the Russian company Digital Security, spoke about the incorrect organization of protection in the SAP HANA platform at the Black Hat Sessions XIII conference in the Netherlands^[4].

SAP's product, SAP HANA, contains a vulnerability that allows attackers to gain access to user login/password pairs of the information being processed. Alexander Polyakov spoke on behalf of ERPScan, the California subsidiary of Digital Security.

According to Polyakov, the problem is that SAP HANA customers do not change the static master key, which is the same in every installation of the HANA platform around the world. Having received the key, the hacker can also gain access to all data within the platform.

Dmitry Chastukhin, director of the SAP audit department at Digital Security, said: "You can get the encryption key by analyzing the program code and conducting research. Digital Security specialists used this method and were able to decrypt data on other servers using the found key. Most importantly, to decrypt a file, you do not always need to be highly qualified. "

"People think that since SAP HANA is an In-Memory database, no information is stored on hard drives. But in fact, everything is not so wonderful. In reality, some of the data is on disks, - explained Alexander Polyakov. "The fact is that the system reserves data from RAM to disk in case any failure occurs."

This information includes the data of some technical accounts, passwords and keys for decrypting save points. All of them are placed in storage under the name hdbuserstore. This vault is a simple file on disk. It is encrypted using the 3DES algorithm using a static master key. If an attacker gains access to this file and decrypts it using a static master key (the same for all installations), he will receive system user passwords and keys to decrypt data on disks. After that, he will be able to access all the data.

The documentation for SAP HANA indicates the need for the customer to replace the static master key, but no one does this. According to experts, all customers of the company ERPScan whom it interviewed (100% of enterprises) continue to use the factory key to encrypt hdbuserstore.

According to the technical director of Digital Security, vendors should force customers to change the key during installation, and not hide the recommendation to replace it in the text of the 160-page instruction. He also added about the very common problem of storing static keys and weak encryption algorithms in the field of corporate software and ERP systems in particular. More than 200 commercial solutions are vulnerable to this attack, the expert added.

2014

Virtual SAP HANA runs on VMware vSphere 5.5

Until recently, the SAP HANA database system with in-memory technology (loading all data into RAM) was available for productive use only on physical servers. But now the situation has changed - on May 6, 2014, VMware and EMC jointly announced that for high-level business applications, Virtual HANA can now run in vSphere 5.5.

Released in late 2010, SAP HANA is now the backbone of a one billion dollar business with more than 3,200 customers^[5].

As Michael Harding, chief technical architect of SAP systems for EMC's internal IT infrastructure, wrote in a corporate blog post on May 6, "EMC IT has made a strategic transition from our old ERP environment to a new one based on SAP technologies. During this process, we have significantly transformed and optimized a number of aspects of EMC's business. The SAP HANA platform for data management and in-memory applications has helped us reduce the risks of slowing down information processing when generating important reports at the end of the quarter based on the large amount of real-time data on business-critical product allocation, production and delivery processes. "

Virtual HANA on vSphere 5.5 can be managed with the rest of the SAP software landscape using tools already in use. One of the key benefits of HANA virtualization with VMware solutions is the ability to work with multiple smaller HANA instances on a single physical server. This means that the hardware complex for HANA is no longer necessary to bind to one DBMS instance, it can simultaneously support several virtual HANA instances, which provides the customer with more flexibility in using existing resources.

The virtualized HANA offering based on VMware also gives the customer the following advantages:

• Significantly reduce HANA deployment time (Creating a new SAP HANA site becomes a simple task done by VMware using copy and clone technology tightly integrated with EMC storage arrays)
• the ability to migrate virtual HANA instances online via vMotion (recent benchmarks have shown that a heavily loaded virtual instance of SAP HANA with 512 GB of memory can be cloned and copied from one data center to another using vMotion within 10 minutes);
• The ability to avoid unnecessary hardware costs using existing HANA certified server and storage and the HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration methodology (EMC's own IT team today uses VMware high availability functionality for stable operation of Virtualized HANA applications instead of the previous fully equipped backup node in a hardware-based high availability physical model; in the event of a server failure, the appropriate VMware functionality provides an automatic reboot of the Virtualized HANA instance).

In November 2012, SAP and VMware joined forces to make HANA work under vSphere in release 5.1, but the result was not ready for intensive productive use. Today, both IT companies are fully satisfied with them.

SAP HANA 8 (SP8)

On June 9, 2014, SAP announced the new capabilities and functions of SAP HANA - they appeared on the SAP HANA platform, mobile and analytical applications, data services and integration services in the cloud, which are accessed through open user interfaces.

SAP HANA SP8 enables customers to incorporate innovation into next-generation applications from both SAP and its partners. SAP Lumira business intelligence and data visualization software is available for implementation on the SAP HANA platform and includes real-time analytics functions.

In the enhanced integration framework, partner companies will have the ability to integrate advanced analytical functions (such as forecast model evaluation) into SAP HANA to dramatically improve efficiency, simplify, and reduce data movement.

New standardized and bundled turnkey solutions for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud will help customers move faster to SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and leverage a secure environment to transform their business. They include a comprehensive suite of rapid deployment solutions designed to automate the implementation process and simplify the migration of the client system to the cloud. Three more turnkey solutions were added to the set of five simple and convenient solutions - for retail, insurance companies and organization of cooperation in the supplier network, as well as integration with the Ariba network. Customers will benefit from faster and easier operations in a managed private cloud environment.

SAP HANA Cloud Integration technology can be used as a standalone solution. Customers can integrate data and processes between cloud and local applications, including SAP and third-party applications. SAP continues to expand and complement its pre-packaged content portfolio for integration, enabling customers to quickly implement new business scenarios.

2013. Ecosystem, indicators, figures

SAP, together with its dynamic ecosystem, is driving business development and innovation through the SAP HANA platform. The company helps customers find new ways to develop their business and take effective action on the SAP HANA platform. A statement in this vein was made at the SAPPHIRE NOW conference, May 14-16 in Orlando (Florida, USA).

By the end of the first quarter of 2013, almost 4,000 consulting partners were trained to work with SAP HANA, and more than 1.3 thousand sales and pre-sales employees were trained to work with SAP Business Suite under SAP HANA, which helps to quickly implement the platform with customers.

During the first quarter of 2013, more than 50% of SAP Business Suite sales under SAP HANA were made by SAP partners. They continue to play a key role in meeting the market needs for technological solutions based on this product. According to IDC, in 2012, the SAP partner ecosystem received $4.2 billion in revenue from sales of SAP RAM solutions.

2012

In January 2012 SAP , she introduced a series of new solutions for medium and small organizations based on HANA. In particular, the HANA Edge system and a special analytical module for the Business One enterprise resource planning system are presented. ERP

Database management systems with information processing in RAM have recently become the main trend in the development of corporate business systems due to their ability to significantly speed up request processing. Until now, such solutions have been most often used in large organizations, but now SAP, like a number of other manufacturers, is starting to offer solutions with data processing only in RAM for the medium and small business segment. New SAP products will be distributed through partners. SAP itself believes that more than 96,000 customers can become buyers of these solutions, that is, about 79% of the entire customer base.

The main difference between HANA DBMS as a platform is the use of only RAM for data processing. Not accessing the hard disk when processing information allows you to successfully cope with both analytical requests and mass processing of transactions. Now solutions based on HANA are supplied by many vendors in the form of virtual devices and in the form of software and hardware systems.

The Edge edition HANA package for the SMB segment will completely repeat the functionality of the industrial version of HANA. In addition, subsequent versions of HANA Edge will be released simultaneously with the update of the industrial version. At the same time, HANA Edge solutions will have one important limitation - in terms of RAM. In addition, HANA Edge technology will be delivered in a suite with SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI (Business Intelligence).

For data analysis, the Business One Series offers a solution that developers themselves describe as "a lightweight, easy-to-use SAP HANA-based application with best-in-class SAP Crystal Reports." This product will go on sale until the end of 2012, but for now it is available to a limited range of trusted customers.

At the moment, SAP has not announced official prices for SMB products based on HANA technology. SAP representatives assure that the price will be adequate, since the target market is very sensitive in terms of price, which is the main difference from the market of large customers.

In connection with the launch of SMB products based on HANA technology, it should be recalled that after the first official introduction of this technology in June 2011, SAP is actively introducing it into the key modules of its flagship Business Suite platform. Moreover, the developers plan to include this technology as the main DBMS for the next generation of Business Suite products.

In March 2012, SAP announced another expansion of HANA's capabilities. It now supports the BusinessObjects 10.0 financial planning and consolidation package running on the NetWeaver platform.

Planning and consolidation, emphasized in SAP, is one of the most promising areas of HANA application. Although both Oracle and IBM have their own solutions in this area, using HANA will give SAP BusinessObjects a performance advantage, the company claims. However, SAP has not yet done comparative tests.

HANA was originally intended for business intelligence tasks, but now SAP is actively adapting it to solve problems that traditionally used transactional DBMS.

More than 500 HANA customers

SAP is close to signing the 600th in-memory contract for SAP HANA, top executives said in early September 2012. According to representatives of SAP AG, at the moment the number of customers of the system released a year ago is more than 500. Steve Lucas, vice president of SAP for DBMS products and technologies, told reporters about this. About 100 projects are in production, another 200 are in the planning stage.

Interestingly, 40% of HANA's customers are still not users of SAP's key business applications, which indicates that the product is spreading far beyond SAP's existing customer base, Lucas said.

At the same time, SAP continues to position HANA as the best-selling product in the history of the company, in 2012, sales of the solution, according to SAP forecasts, should generate $403 million in revenue. At the same time, the company does not disclose complete data on the cost of the solution, especially the industrial version of it. Lucas explained this by the fact that the company is working on some changes in the product, but did not explain which ones.

Lucas also said that HANA will develop not just as a DBMS, but as a platform, and now SAP is working on creating additional platform services. He also said SAP is committed to building an ecosystem of startup companies around HANA by working together with a number of venture capital funds.

SAP places HANA DBMS in Amazon Web Services cloud

HANA DBMS which entirely is carrying out processing in random access memory is from now on available in the form of the cloud-based version with hourly payment on the Amazon Web Services platform. Now customers and partners of SAP will be able to get acquainted with HANA without purchase of the equipment and software licenses, believe in the companies. Still HANA was offered in the form of a complex which hardware was delivered by various producers. Te­per same HANA vos­pol­zo­vat­sya on AWS can be used for $0.99 per hour, excluding Amazon ta­ri­fov.

Earlier, to interest in the new DBMS customers, SAP offered the free license for HANA for developers. Now the organizations will have an opportunity to test trial versions of HANA projects in AWS, consider in SAP.

Services of technical support of the cloud-based version of HANA in SAP are not planned to be provided. In view of presence of level of virtualization the speed of HANA in AWS is about 5% lower, than at the local version, specify in SAP. AWS ek­zem­plya­ry HANA smo­gut ob­slu­zhi­vat base raz­me­rom not bol­she 32 GB. In addition, nel­zya kla­ste­ri­zo­vat ek­zem­plya­ry for po­vy­she­niya byst­ro­dey­stviya. These restrictions are caused by the fact that in SAP do not intend to undermine own business of sales of local versions of DBMS, emphasize in the company.

SAP HANA Real Time Fund funding increase

SAP strengthens support for young companies by increasing its contribution to the SAP HANA Real Time Fund in 2012 from the previously planned $155 million to $405 million - an excellent help for young companies around the world that build businesses based on SAP technologies, including the SAP HANA platform.

Managed by independent SAP Ventures, the SAP HANA Real-Time Fund aims to further develop and support an ecosystem of entrepreneurs and fund managers focusing on developing real-time applications and using big data as a tool to create business value.

In addition, the company has improved the SAP HANA Marketplace. Individual developers and entire enterprises can now be trained, tested, and purchased SAP HANA solutions developed by SAP, young companies, and ISVs. Integrated with the SAP Store, the SAP HANA Marketplace not only offers solutions to buy, it's where you can join a community where developers share ideas and collaborate to create new products. Solutions certified for the SAP HANA platform in accordance with SAP integration standards are labeled "powered by SAP HANA." As the Marketplace portfolio expands, SAP plans to add additional features such as request for quotation (RFP), developer and system integrator reviews, and an analysis of infrastructure options for implementing the SAP HANA platform.

"Leveraging the incredible potential of the SAP HANA platform opens huge opportunities for SAP, its partners and customers to develop and innovate," said Dr. Vishal Sikka, SAP AG Board Member Responsible for Technology and Innovation. - We see the impressive results of new applications that our partners create and the new areas of growth that are opening up for them thanks to the SAP HANA platform. Our ecosystem offers ways to transform the business of enterprises of all sizes from a wide variety of industries. They will gain undeniable benefits: they will be able to develop and innovate faster and easier, get results instantly, grow and strengthen their business with the SAP HANA platform. Such opportunities previously simply did not exist. "

2011

Allowable loads

In March 2011, SAP AG and IBM announced the first official performance test results for the SAP In-Memory Appliance (SAP HANA) solution. SAP software easily handles 10,000 requests per hour, processes 1.3 TB of data during this time, and produces results within seconds.

The test simulated the workload typical of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that SAP customers use, among other things, for reporting. The tested solution was connected to the SAP ERP system data warehouse, which contained a large amount of information about the delivery of sold products. Testing was carried out as part of a joint project between the two companies and aimed to create an effective solution for analyzing data in real time. The solution is based on optimal software and hardware - computing technology in SAP In-Memory Computing RAM and best-in-class IBM 3850 Series servers.

Testing was conducted under the control of an independent expert - WinterCorp. Test scenarios are designed specifically for analyzing the performance of a solution that processes analytical queries to the online database in the RAM. Test scenarios fully reflected the complexity of corporate data, taking into account the definitions and types of data, as well as their distribution schemes, without first aggregating data or optimizing the database. Specialized analytical queries were designed to meet the needs of today's business. They allow companies to analyze various trends in their sales history and help, for example, identify key customers and best-selling products, as well as track customer returns - at any level of detail and over any period of time. The results confirm that the solution in question is unparalleled in terms of performance. This has already been seen by 50 SAP customers who are participating in a joint innovation program aimed at improving the SAP HANA solution.

The following results were also obtained:

• The SAP HANA solution handles a large number of complex parallel queries during business analysis. The workload is ten analytical query streams and four operational flow reporting streams (SAP In-Memory Database solution). The total performance was 10,000 requests per hour.
• SAP HANA analyzes huge amounts of data in seconds. Complex queries, for example, to analyze trends in the operation of a sales organization or to find patterns within the sales history of materials, were performed on a database containing 1.3 TB of information. The system returned results within seconds.
• SAP HANA enables on-the-fly analysis. SAP HANA can process specialized analytical queries without any preparation, pre-materialization, or data aggregation. Large-scale configuration of the database is also not required.
• SAP In-Memory Computing technology combined with IBM hardware ensures a quick return on investment. The test process used a 1.3 TB database, the SAP solution for computing in RAM was deployed on an IBM X5 server (32 cores, 0.5 TB RAM, RAID 5 disk system). The results confirmed the excellent price-performance ratio. In the production of IBM eX5 servers, MAX5 technology was first used, which allows you to abstract RAM from processors and increase system scalability without buying additional equipment.

In collaboration, IBM and SAP have developed advanced replication scenarios for customers who use DB2. DB2 supports SAP HANA and can efficiently replicate near-real-time data in SAP HANA using Sybase Replication Server. DB2-based ERP systems will be able to fully meet the high needs of the business for preparing real-time reporting based on the most up-to-date data and without additional administrative efforts.

Adding a Data Processing System from Meters

In September 2011, the family of specialized applications for the SAP HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance) platform was replenished with an intelligent metering information processing system and a complex profitability analysis system that processes large amounts of financial data.

HANA, a platform for processing large amounts of information in RAM, is supplied as a complex operating on equipment from various suppliers. The system is offered primarily for analytical tasks, but SAP has long-term plans to transfer its entire Business Suite to HANA.

The profitability analysis system is offered in the form of a "rapid implementation solution" - a pre-prepared software product implemented by SAP consultants or its partners. The system will allow you to generate reports on large amounts of data in real time and analyze current information for useful information.

SAP also plans to create a special portal for developers and sysadmins, where they can share negative experiences using HANA so that SAP specialists can eliminate these shortcomings.

IDC: SAP HANA leads demand growth among RDBMS

SAP AG said it ranked first in profit growth among top relational database management systems (RDMS) providers, according to a new IDC report. In the report "Distribution of Market Shares between Suppliers of Relational Database Management Systems 2011 Vendor Shares" ('Worldwide Relational Database Management Systems 2011 Vendor Shares'), the well-known analytical company IDC informs that SAP has the highest performance in the market in terms of profit growth. SAP surpassed the global RDBMS profit growth by 15.1% and became the fastest growing of the top 10 RDBMS suppliers. The growth compared to 2010-2011 was 44%. With revenues of US $1.004 million, SAP now ranks fourth in the RDBMS market in terms of market share, beating Teradata (compared to the results of a similar study last year).

According to the IDC report, "SAP's aggregate revenue from the following solutions: SAP Sybase ASE, SAP Sybase IQ, SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere and SAP HANA allowed it to gain a foothold in fourth place, beating Teradata, mainly by adding [SAP] HANA to its RDBMS product portfolio."

According to the IDC report, "The [RDBMS] market includes multi-user DBMSs, which are organized mainly in accordance with the relational paradigm and apply SQL as a fundamental language for definition and access. In addition, RDBMSs were added to the study that are capable of supporting embedded tables and other non-relational additions, as well as extended attribute types (e.g., graphics, geo-information, or audio), object-oriented presentation forms (e.g., data encapsulation), and XML data. "

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