SAP put HANA on the market

The high-performance HANA technology (high performance analytic appliance is the high-performance device of analytics) SAP companies on Monday became public that gives to vendor superiority in opposition to a similar data processing system of Exadata from Oracle and to other similar systems in extremely competitive segment of the market.

HANA created using advanced technologies of SAP places data in RAM that provides a huge gain of performance in comparison with data reading from a disk. According to in SAP, applying this technology, customers will have an opportunity to carry out data analysis, received from the systems of SAP and other sources, in time close to real, with a high performance.

SAP felt "extreme market demand", several dozens of clients already showed willingness to purchase HANA, the member of executive council Vishal Sikka said (Vishal Sikka).

The wholesale distributor of wine and Charmer-Sunbelt Group alcoholic drinks is at the intermediate stage of implementation of HANA now, the Chief information officer of the company Paul Fipps told in an interview. Charmer-Sunbelt Group already uses a number of technologies of SAP, but products of a business intelligence (BI) still were not applied. "When HANA was shown for the first time, it looked a real opportunity for us – to carry out the analysis of business transactions in real time", - Fipps noted.

CSG also hopes to take data from the SAP ERP system (Enterprise Resource Planning) for such tasks as the profound analysis of profitability. Phipps refused to describe result of a request of performance, implementable HANA. "We did not reach conditions of receiving the valid indicators yet", - he told. However noticed that his friend who left further in the HANA project told it that performance "is improbable". He did not report how many CSG pay for the HANA system. "But, figuratively speaking, if HANA makes that it should make, I think that cost will be repaid", - CIO told.

In September at the conference devoted to products HANA SAP will provide more information, including "cloud" HANA of AppCloud about which there was only short mentioning at the recent Sapphire conference. After a while SAP is going to open four data processing centers HANA of AppCloud under direct manipulation worldwide, and in the centers of joint placement of the equipment - together with partner owners of data centers, told Sikka.

So far HANA is available in the form of devices of a number of partner equipment suppliers - including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu, Cisco and IBM. SAP introduced restriction of hardware support: in this HANA works only on Intel processors of x86. Such decision was made for acceleration of development of HANA as only one platform which will be supported is required.

According to data from HP, the company sells sets of HANA on the basis of the ProLiant servers, six types of configurations. She also developed a number of services for implementation of HANA.

Fujitsu offers the equipment of HANA in five configurations, using the PRIMERGY RX servers. IBM has six HANA configurations constructed on the System X3690 X5 and x3950 X5 servers. A number of HANA services is also available. Dell was the PowerEdge R910 server platform while Cisco will use a product family of Unified Computing System the basis for the HANA systems.

According to Sikk, in general, there has to be some parity for all hardware implementations of HANA as SAP created the special list of hardware requirements for different configurations.

HANA supports the general constructions of requests of SQL and multidimensional expressions, i.e. can be compatible to any third-party software of BI, using standards of these languages, but was optimized for the Business Objects 4.0 BI platform which, as expected, will appear in July. HANA will support transaction loading, also as well as analytical. At last, SAP is going to provide HANA as an option for the customers applying now Business Suite based on data of Oracle.