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ISBN: 978-0-9856008-0-8
 About the Cover Image

T hesmilecoverto your
image is a European “No Speed Limit” sign. If you’ve ever driven on the Autobahn in Germany, this sign will immediately bring a
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 in Germany, you’ll see this sign about 2 miles south of the Frankfurt airport on the
A5 — and there’s no speed limit on your way to visit SAP.
 Note from the Author

Since 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 the first chapters now (May 2012) and then release the remaining
chapters as they are completed, with quite a few of the technical chapters coming out near the SAP TechEd 2012 events in the fall. Since this
is a “digital-only” book, it’s important that readers keep connected to learn about the release of new chapters and content updates. That’s
pretty easy: Follow the book on twitter @EpistemyPress and @jeff_word, sign up for the email updates from the saphanabook.com website
when you register to download the ebook and keep watching experiencesaphana.com.
 Table of Contents

1 SAP HANA Overview

2 SAP HANA Architecture
3 SAP HANA Business Cases & ROI Model
4 SAP HANA Applications
5 SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on SAP
6 Data Provisioning with SAP HANA
7 Data Modeling with SAP HANA
8 Application Development with SAP HANA
9 SAP HANA Administration & Operations
10 SAP HANA Hardware
11 SAP HANA Projects & Implementation
12 SAP HANA Resources
 Acknowledgments

Although 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, Wolfram Kleis, Tom Kurtz, Jay Foard, Sebastian Speck
SAP Mentors
Thomas Jung (SAP), Harald Reiter (Deloitte), Vitaliy Rudnytskiy (HP), John Appleby (Bluefin), Tammy Powlas (Fairfax Water), Vijay
Vijayasankar (IBM), Craig Cmehil (SAP), Alvaro Tejada (SAP)
SAP Partners
Lane Goode (HP), Tag Robertson (IBM), Rick Speyer (Cisco), Andrea Voigt (Fujitsu), Nathan Saunders (Dell), KaiGai Kohei (NEC), Chris March
(Hitachi)
Production
Robert Weiss (Development Editor)
Roland Schild (Libreka)
Michelle DeFilippo (1106 Design)
 How to use this book
“May you live in interesting times”

T 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 sub-topics in more detail. The content is
structured so that everyone can begin with the introduction chapter and then skip to the subsequent chapters that most interest them.
Business people will likely skip to the applications and business case chapters while techies will jump ahead to the application development
and hardware chapters. In fact, it would probably be odd if anyone actually read this book from beginning to end (but go ahead if you want
to).
Although a great deal of this book focuses on “living in a world without compromises” from a technology and business perspective, we’ve
unfortunately had to make a few compromises in the scope and depth of the content in order to reach the widest possible audience. If we
hadn’t, this would be a 10,000-page encyclopedia that only a few hundred people would ever read. We’ve tried to make this book as easy to
read as possible to ensure that every reader can understand the concepts and get comfortable with the big picture of SAP HANA. We’ve also
tried to cover as many of the high-level concepts as possible and provide copious links to deeper technical resources for easy access.
Hopefully, you will enjoy reading the chapters and find it quite easy to “punch out” to additional technical information as you go 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 real-time enterprise, but in many ways, it is just the
“tip of the iceberg”. We’re working on several Level 2 technical books on SAP HANA and are committed to providing as much technical and
business content as possible through the Experience SAP HANA website and other channels. Please refer to the last chapter to get a listing of
additional free information sources on SAP HANA.
Given the massive strategic impact of SAP HANA on the medium and long-term IT architectures of its customers, SAP felt that every
customer and ecosystem partner should have free access to the essential information they will need to understand SAP HANA and evaluate its
impact on their future landscape. SAP sponsored the writing of this book and has funded its publication as a free ebook to ensure that
everyone can easily access this knowledge.
SAP HANA is a rapidly evolving product and its level of importance to SAP customers will continue to increase exponentially over the next
several years. We will attempt to provide updated editions of this book on a semi-annual basis to ensure that you can easily access the most
up-to-date knowledge on SAP HANA. Please continue to visit the SAP HANA Essentials website to download updated and revised editions
when they are released (typically in May and November of each year). You can also follow @EpistemyPress on Twitter for updates.
 Foreword
By Vishal Sikka, Ph.D.
Executive Board Member, SAP AG

T 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 factory-built
flutes of yesterday.
I see layers of inefficiency dissolving all around us. An empowered populace gets more connected, and uses this connectivity to bypass the
intermediaries and get straight at the things it seeks, connecting and acting in real-time — whether it is to stage uprisings or rent apartments,
plan travel or author books, edit pictures or consume apps by the millions.
And yet enterprises have been far too slow to benefit from such renewal and simplification that is pervading other parts of our lives. The IT
industry has focused on too much repackaging and reassembly of existing layers into new bundles, ostensibly to lower the costs of integrated
systems. In reality, this re-bundling increases the clutter that already exists 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 main-memory, and lots of multi-core CPUs to bear on massively parallel processing of information very
inexpensively. SAP HANA was designed from the ground-up to leverage this, and the business consequences are radical. At Yodobashi, a
large Japanese retailer, the calculation of incentives for loyalty customers used to take 3 days of data processing, once a month. With SAP
HANA, this happens now in 2 seconds — a performance improvement of over 100,000 times. But even more important is the opportunity to
rethink business processes. The incentive for a customer can be calculated on the fly, while the customer is in a store, based on the purchases
she is about to make. The empowered store-manager can determine these at the point of sale, as the transaction unfolds. With SAP HANA,
batch processing is converting to real time, and business processes are being rethought. Customers like Colgate-Palmolive, the Essar Group,
Provimi, Charmer Sunbelt, Nongfu Spring, our own SAP IT and many others, have seen performance improvements of thousands to tens of
thousands times. SAP HANA brings these benefits non-disruptively, without forcing a modification of existing systems. And in Fall 2011, we
delivered SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA, a complete removal of the traditional database underneath, delivering fundamental
improvements in performance and 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 member of the Executive Board of SAP AG and heads the technology and innovation areas.
 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

Every 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 years.
Today, SAP HANA is disrupting the technology industry in much the same way that Amazon and Apple have disrupted the publishing
industry. Before we discuss how this happens, we need to consider a few fundamental rules of that industry.
The IT Industry: A History of Technology Constraints
Throughout the history of the IT industry, the capabilities of applications have always been constrained to a great degree by the capabilities of
the hardware that they were designed to run on. This explains the “leapfrogging” behavior of software and hardware products, where a more
capable version of an application is released shortly after a newer, more capable generation of hardware — processors, storage, memory, and
so on — is released. For example, each version of Adobe Photoshop was designed to maximize the most current hardware resources available
to achieve the optimal performance. Rendering a large image in Photoshop 10 years ago could take several hours on the most powerful PC.
In contrast, the latest version, when run on current hardware, can perform the same task in just a couple of seconds, even on a low-end PC.
Enterprise software has operated on a very similar model. In the early days of mainframe systems, all of the software — specifically, the
applications, operating system, and database — was designed to maximize the hardware resources located inside the mainframe as a
contained system. The transactional data from the application and the data used for reporting were physically stored in the same system.
Consequently, you could either process transactions or process reports, but you couldn’t do both at the same time or you’d kill the system.
Basically, the application could use whatever processing power was in the mainframe, and that was it. If you wanted more power, you had to
buy a bigger 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 NetWeaver Business
Warehouse to copy the transaction data over to a separate server and offload all that reporting activity onto a dedicated “reporting” system.
This arrangement would free up resources for the transactional system to focus on 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 NetWeaver2, which added extensive internet and
integration capabilities to its applications. SAP NetWeaver added many new users and disparate systems that talked to the applications in the
SAP landscape. Again, the greater the number of users, the greater the number of application servers that flooded the database with requests.
Similarly, as the amount of operational data in the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse database increased exponentially, so did the number
of requests for reports. Looking forward, SAP could see this trend becoming even more widespread and the bottleneck of the database
slowing things down more and more. SAP was concerned that customers who had invested massive amounts of time and money into
acquiring and implementing these systems to make their businesses more productive and profitable would be unable to get maximum value
from them.
Fast forward a few years, and now the acquisitions of Business Objects and Sybase were generating another exponential increase in
demands for data from both the transactional and analytic databases from increasing numbers of analytics users and mobile users. Both the
volume of data and the volume of users requesting data were now growing thousands of times faster than the improvements in database I/O.
Having become aware of this issue, in 2004 SAP initiated several projects to innovate the core architecture of their applications to eliminate
this performance bottleneck. The objective was to enable their customers to leverage the full capabilities of their investment in SAP while
avoiding the data latency issues. The timing couldn’t have been better. It was around this time that two other key factors were becoming more
significant: (1) internet use and the proliferation of data from outside the enterprise, and (2) the regulatory pressures on corporations,
generated by laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley, to be answerable for all of their financial transactions. These requirements increased the pressure
on already stressed systems to analyze more data more quickly. The SAP projects resulted in the delivery of SAP HANA in 2011, the first step
in the transition to a new in-memory architecture for enterprise applications and databases. SAP HANA flips the old model on its head and
converts the database from the “boat anchor” that slows everything down into a “jet engine” that speeds up every aspect of the company’s
operations.

SAP’s Early In-Memory Projects

SAP has a surprisingly long history of developing in-memory technologies to accelerate its applications. Because disk I/O has been a
performance bottleneck since the beginning of three-tier architecture, SAP has constantly searched for ways to avoid or minimize the
performance penalty that customers pay when they pull large data sets from disk. So, SAP’s initial in-memory technologies were used for very
specific applications that contained complex algorithms that needed a great deal of readily accessible data.
The Beginnings: LiveCache and SAP BWA
When SAP introduced Advanced Planning Optimizer (APO) as part of its supply chain management application in the late 1990s, the logistics
planning algorithms required a significant speed boost to overcome the disk I/O bottleneck. These algorithms — some of the most complex
that SAP has ever written — needed to crunch massive amounts of product, production, and logistics data to produce an optimal supply chain
plan. SAP solved this problem in 1999 by taking some of the capabilities of its open-source database, SAP MaxDB (called SAP DB at the time),
and built them into a memory-resident cache system called SAP LiveCache. Basically, LiveCache keeps a persistent copy of all of the relevant
application logic and master data needed in memory, thus eliminating the need to make multiple trips back and forth to the disk. LiveCache
worked extremely well; in fact, it processed data 600 times faster than disk-based I/O. Within its narrow focus, it clearly demonstrated that in-
memory caching could solve a major latency issue for SAP customers.
In 2003, a team in SAP’s headquarters in Waldorf, Germany, began to productize a specialized search engine for SAP systems called TREX
(Text Retrieval and information EXtraction). TREX approached enterprise data in much the same way that Google approaches internet data.
That is, TREX scans the tables in a database and then creates an index of the information contained in the table. Because the index is a tiny
fraction of the size of the actual data, the TREX team came up with the idea of putting the entire index in the RAM memory of the server to
speed up searches of the index. When this technology became operational, their bosses asked them to apply the same technique to a much
more imposing problem: the data from a SAP BW cube. Thus, Project Euclid was born.
At that time, many of the larger SAP BW customers were having significant performance issues with reports that were running on large
data cubes. Cubes are the basic mechanism by which SAP BW stores data in multidimensional structures. Running reports on very large cubes
(>100GB) was taking several hours, sometimes even days. The SAP BW team had done just about everything possible in the SAP BW
application to increase performance, but had run out of options in the application layer. The only remaining solution was to eliminate the
bottleneck itself. In the best spirit of disruptive innovators, the TREX team devised a strategy to eliminate the database from the equation
entirely by indexing the cubes and storing the indexes in high-speed RAM.
Initial 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 in-memory. Along with LiveCache, the success of BWA proved to SAP and its customers that in-memory
data processing just might be an architectural solution to database bottlenecks.
The Next Step: The 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 in-memory database prototype for SAP (the direct ancestor of SAP HANA).
In the mid-1990s, several researchers at Stanford University had performed the first experiments to build an in-memory database for a
project at HP Labs. Two of the Stanford researchers went on to found companies to commercialize their research. One product was a database
query optimization tool known as Callixa, and the other was a native in-memory database called P*Time. In late 2005, SAP quietly acquired
Callixa and P*time (as well as a couple of other specialist database companies), hired several of the most distinguished database geniuses on
the planet, and put them to work with the Tracker team. The team completed the porting and verification of the in-memory database on a
server with 64gb of RAM, which was the maximum supported memory at the time.
In early 2006, less than four months after the start of the project, the Tracker team passed its primary performance and “reality check”
goal: the SAP Standard Application Benchmark for 1000 user SD two-tier benchmark with more than 6000 SAPs, which essentially matched
the performance of the two leading certified databases at the time. To put that in perspective, it took Microsoft several years of engineering to
port Microsoft SQL to SAP and pass the benchmark the first time. Passing the benchmark in such a short time with a small team — in total
secrecy — was a truly amazing feat. Suddenly, an entirely new world of 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.
 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 NetWeaver Business Warehouse customer could immediately 3 replace their old, disk-based database with SAP HANA. What made
this new architecture especially attractive was the fact that SAP customers did not have to modify their current systems to accommodate it. To
make the transition as painless as possible for its customers, SAP designed Business Warehouse 7.3 to be a non-disruptive innovation.
Innovation without Disruption
Clay Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma was very popular reading among the Tracker team during the early days. In addition to all
the technical challenges of building a completely new enterprise-scale database from scratch on a completely new hardware architecture, SAP
also had to be very thoughtful about how its customers would eventually adopt such a fundamentally different core technology underneath the
SAP Business Suite.
To accomplish this difficult balancing act, SAP’s senior executives made the team’s primary objective the development of a disruptive
technology innovation that could be introduced into SAP’s customers’ landscapes in a non-disruptive way. They realized that even the most
incredible database would be essentially useless if SAP’s customers couldn’t make the business case to adopt it because it was too disruptive to
their existing systems. The team spoke, under NDA, with the senior IT leadership of several of SAP’s largest customers to obtain insights
concerning the types of concerns they would have about such a monumental technology shift at the bottom of their “stacks.” The customers
provided some valuable guidelines for how SAP should engineer and introduce such a disruptive innovation into their mission-critical
landscapes. Making that business case involved much more than just the eye-catching “speeds and feeds” from the raw technology. SAP’s
customers would switch databases only if the new database was minimally disruptive to implement and extremely low risk to operate. In
essence, SAP would have to build a hugely disruptive innovation to the database layer that could be adopted and implemented by its
customers in a non-disruptive way at the business application layer.

The Business Impact of a New Architecture

When viewed from a holistic perspective, the entire “stack” needed to run a Fortune 50 company is maddeningly complex. So, to engineer a
new technology architecture for a company, you first have to focus on WHAT the entire system has to do for the business. At its core, the new
SAP database architecture was created to help users run their business processes more effectively4. It had to enabled them to track their
inventory more accurately, sell their products more effectively, manufacture their products more efficiently, and purchase materials
economically. At the same time, however, it also had to reduce the complexity and costs of managing the landscape for the IT department.
Today, every business process in a company has some amount of “latency” associated with it. For example, one public company might
require 10 days to complete its quarterly closing process, while its primary competitor accomplishes this task in 5 days — even though both
companies are using the same SAP software to manage the process. Why does it take one company twice as long as its competitor to
complete the same process? What factors contribute to that additional “process latency”?
The answers lie in the reality that the software is simply the enabler for the execution of the business 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. Slow-performing
systems force people to take more time to complete their jobs, and they result in less effective use of all the system’s capabilities. Both of
these factors introduce latency into process execution.
Clearly, latency is a bad thing. Unfortunately, however, there’s an even darker side to slow systems. When businesspeople can’t use a
system to get a quick response to their questions or get their job done when they need to, they invent workarounds to avoid the constraint.
The effort and costs spent on “inventing” workarounds to the performance limitations of the system waste a substantial amount of institutional
energy and creativeness that ideally should be channeled into business innovation. In addition, workarounds can seriously compromise data
quality and integrity.
As we have discussed, the major benefits of in-memory storage are that users no longer have to wait for the system, and the information
they need to 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, Better, Cheaper

There’s another fundamental law of the technology industry: Faster, Better, Cheaper. That is, each new generation of product or
technology has to be faster, better, and cheaper than the generation it is replacing, or customers won’t purchase it. Geoffrey Moore has some
great thoughts on how 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 hundreds to thousands of times faster on RAM than on disks.
There’s really no comparison in how rapidly you can get memory off a database in RAM than off a database on disk. In-memory databases are
a better architecture due to their simplicity, tighter integration with the apps, hybrid row/column store, and ease of operations. Finally, when
you compare the cost of an in-memory database to that of a disk-based database on the appropriate metric — cost per gigabyte per second —
in-memory is actually cheaper. Also, when you compare the total cost of ownership (TCO) of in-memory databases, they’re even more
economical to operate than traditional databases due to the reduction of superfluous layers and unnecessary tasks.
But faster, better, cheaper is even more important than just the raw technology. If you really look at what the switch from an “old” platform
to a “new” platform can do for overall usability of the solutions on top of the platform, there are some amazing possibilities.
Take the ubiquitous iPod for example. When Apple introduced the iPod in 2001, it revolutionized the way that people listened to music,
even though it wasn’t the first MP3 player on the market. The key innovation was that Apple was able to fit a tiny 1.8-inch hard drive into its
small case so you could carry 5gb of music in your pocket, at a time when most other MP3 players could hold only ~64mb of music 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 solid-state
memory in the iPod, will encourage the development of a new breed of business applications that are built natively to exploit this new
platform.
Note: as of early 2012, Apple still 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 once the SAP Business Suite is supported on SAP HANA. At that point, you’ll need an overwhelmingly compelling business reason to forego all the
goodness of the new architecture and renovated SAP apps on top of SAP HANA.
In-Memory Basics
Thus far, we’ve focused on the transition to in-memory computing and its implications for IT. With this information as background, we next
“dive into the deep end” of SAP HANA. Before we do so, however, here are a few basic concepts about in-memory computing that you’ll need
to understand. Some of these concepts might be similar to what you already know about databases and server technology. There are also
some cutting-edge concepts, however, that merit discussion.
Storing data in memory isn’t a new concept. What is new is that now you can store your whole operational or analytic database entirely in
RAM as the primary persistence layer5. Historically database systems were designed to perform well on computer systems with limited RAM.
As we have seen, in these systems slow disk I/O was the main bottleneck in data throughput. Today, multi-core CPUs — multiple CPUs
located on one chip or in one package — are standard, with fast communication between processor cores enabling parallel processing.
Currently server processors have up to 64 cores, and 128 cores will soon be available. With the increasing number of cores, CPUs are able to
process increased data volumes in parallel. Main memory is no longer a limited resource. In fact, modern servers can have 2TB of system
memory, which allows them to hold complete databases in RAM. Significantly, this arrangement shifts the performance bottleneck from disk
I/O to the data transfer between CPU cache and main memory (which is already blazing fast and getting faster).
In a disk-based database architecture, there are several levels of caching and temporary storage to keep data closer to the application and
avoid excessive numbers of round-trips to the database (which slows things down). The key difference with SAP HANA is that all of those
caches and layers are eliminated because the entire physical database is literally sitting on the motherboard and is therefore in memory all the
time. This arrangement dramatically simplifies the architecture.
It is important to note that there are quite a few technical differences between a database that was designed to be stored on a disk versus
one that was built to be entirely resident in memory. There’s a techie book6 on all those conceptual differences if you really want to get down
into the details. What follows here is a brief summary of some of the key advantages of SAP HANA over its aging disk-based cousins.
Pure In-Memory Database
With SAP HANA, all relevant data are available in main memory, which avoids the performance penalty of disk I/O completely. Either disk or
solid-state drives are still required for permanent persistency in the event of a power failure or some other catastrophe. This doesn’t slow
down performance, however, because the required backup operations to disk can take place asynchronously as a background task.
Parallel Processing
Multiple CPUs can now process parallel requests in order to fully utilize the available computing resources. So, not only is there a bigger “pipe”
between the processor and database, but this pipe can send a flood of data to hundreds of processors at the same time so that they can
crunch more data without waiting for anything.
Columnar and Row-Based Data Storage
Conceptually, a database table is a two-dimensional data structure with cells organized in rows and columns, just like a Microsoft Excel
spreadsheet. Computer memory, in contrast, is organized as a linear structure. To store a table in linear memory, two options exist: row-
based storage and column storage. A row-oriented storage system stores a table as a sequence of records, each of which contains the fields of
one row. Conversely, in column storage the entries of a column are stored in contiguous memory locations. SAP HANA is a “hybrid” database
that uses both methods simultaneously to provide an optimal balance between them.
The SAP HANA database allows the application developer to specify whether a table is to be stored column-wise or row-wise. It also
enables the developer to alter an existing table from columnar to row-based and vice versa. The decision to use columnar or row-based tables
is typically a determined by how the data will be used and which method is the most efficient for that type of usage.
Column-based tables have advantages in the following circumstances:
Calculations are typically executed on a single column or a few columns only.
The table is searched based on values of a few columns.
The table has a large number of columns.
The table has a large number of rows, so that columnar operations are required (aggregate, scan, etc.).
High compression rates can be achieved because the majority of the columns contain only few distinct values (compared to the
number of rows).
Row-based tables have advantages in the following circumstances:
The application needs to only process a single record at one time. (This applies to many selects and/or updates of single records.)
The application typically needs to access a complete record (or row).
The columns contain primarily distinct values so that the compression rate would be low.
Neither aggregations nor fast searching is required.
The table has a small number of rows (e. g., configuration tables).
Compression
Because of the innovations in hybrid row/column storage in SAP HANA, companies can typically achieve between 5x and 10x compression
ratios on the raw data. This means that 5TB of raw data can optimally fit onto an SAP HANA server that has 1TB of RAM. SAP typically
recommends that companies double the estimated compressed table data to determine the amount of RAM needed in order to account for
real-time calculations, swap space, OS and other associated programs beyond just the raw table data.
Persistence Layer
The SAP HANA database persistence layer stores data in persistent disk volumes (either hard disk or solid-state drives). The persistence layer
ensures that changes are durable and that the database can be restored to the most recent committed state after a restart. SAP HANA uses an
advanced delta-insert approach for rapid backup and logging. If power is lost, the data in RAM is lost. However, because the persistence layer
manages restore points and backup at such high speeds (from RAM to SSD) and recovery from disk to RAM is so much faster than from
regular disk, you actually “lose” less data and recover much faster than in a traditional disk-based architecture.

SAP HANA Architectural 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. This eliminates
many of the typical activities and problems you find in regular databases. Second, it includes all of the standard application interfaces and
libraries so that developers can immediately get to work using it, without re-learning any proprietary APIs.
SAP HANA in-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
Business Function Library
SAP has leveraged its deep application knowledge from the ABAP stack to port specific functionality as infrastructure components within SAP
HANA to be consumed by any application logic extension. Examples of common business functions are “currency conversion” and “calendar
functionality.”

SAP HANA Studio

The SAP HANA Studio is the primary interface for developers, administrators, and data modelers. It is based on the open-source Eclipse
framework, and it consists of three perspectives: the administration console, the information modeler, and lifecycle management.
The administration console of the studio allows system administrators to administer and monitor the database. It includes database
status information as well as functions to start/stop the 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 requires modifications to the existing data
model, which required users to delete and re-load data into materialized views. In contrast, in SAP HANA, dynamic data modeling on the
lowest granular level is loaded into the system. These raw data are constantly available in memory for analytical purposes, and they are not
pre-loaded in cache, physical aggregate tables, index tables, or any other redundant data storage.
Data Provisioning for SAP HANA
SAP HANA offers both real-time replication and near real-time/batch replication to move data from source systems to the SAP HANA
database. Replication-based data provisioning like Sybase Replication Server or SAP SLT (System Landscape Transformation) provide near
real-time synchronization of data sets between the source system and SAP HANA. After the initial replication of historical records, the changed
data are pushed from the source to SAP HANA based on triggers such as table updates. SAP SLT can also be used to “direct write” data back
to the source system in scenarios where “write back” or “round trip” synchronization to the SAP source system is needed.
ETL-based data provisioning is primarily accomplished with SAP BusinessObjects Data Services (DS). DS loads snapshots of data
periodically as a batch and is triggered from the target system. The type of data provisioning tool used is primarily determined by the
business needs of the use case and the characteristics of the source system.
Real-Time Replication Using SLT
SLT replicator provides near-real-time and scheduled data replication from SAP source systems to SAP HANA. It is based on SAP’s proven
System Landscape Optimization (SLO) technology that has been used for many years for Near Zero Down Time upgrade and migration
projects. Trigger-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
In the event of disaster scenarios such as fires, power outages, earthquakes or hardware failures, SAP HANA supports Hot Standby using
synchronous mirroring with the redundant data center concept — including a redundant SAP HANA system — in addition to Cold Standby
using a standby system within one SAP HANA landscape, where the failover is triggered automatically.
User Provisioning
SAP HANA supports user provisioning with authentication, role-based security and analysis authorization using analytic privileges. Analytical
privileges provide security to the analytical objects based on a set of attribute values. These values can be applied to a set of users by
assigning them to user/role.
SAP HANA Hardware
SAP HANA is delivered as a flexible, multipurpose appliance that combines SAP software components optimized on hardware provided by
SAP’s leading hardware partners such as Cisco, Dell, IBM, HP, Hitachi, NEC, and Fujitsu, using the latest Intel Xeon E7 processors. SAP HANA
servers are sold in “t-shirt” sizes ranging from Extra-Small (128GB RAM) all the way up to Extra Large (>2TB RAM). Because RAM is the key
technology for SAP HANA, SAP uses the amount of RAM to determine the server’s t-shirt size as well as its price. SAP’s underlying philosophy
is “the more processors (cores), the better,” so it does not impose a per-processor charge for SAP HANA.
With the current certified Scale-Out options from SAP HANA hardware providers, companies can deploy up to 16 Extra Large server nodes
into on logical database instance, which equates to a maximum of 32TB of RAM and 128 CPUs with 1280 total cores. SAP is currently testing
a 60 node SAP HANA instance in the labs.
The hardware vendor provides factory pre-installation for the hardware, the OS, and the SAP software. It may also add specific best-
practices and configuration. The vendor finalizes the installation with on-site setup and configuration of the SAP HANA components, including
deployment in the customer data center, connectivity to the network, Solution Manager setup, SAP router connectivity, and SSL support. The
customer then establishes connectivity to the source systems and clients, including the deployment of additional replication components on
the source system(s) and, potentially, the installation and configuration of SAP BusinessObjects business analytics client components.
Although the term “appliance” suggests a “black box” that plugs into an outlet, in reality installing SAP HANA requires on-site activities and
coordination on a high technical level. The appliance approach for SAP HANA systems reduces the implementation and maintenance effort
significantly, but it does not eliminate it completely.
SAP HANA Use Cases
Because SAP HANA is both a database (in the traditional sense) and a database platform (in the modern sense), it can be used in multiple
scenarios and deployed in several ways. SAP HANA performs equally well for analytic and transactional applications. Due to its hybrid table
structure, however, it really shines in scenarios that involve both types of data. It’s important to remember that SAP has developed SAP HANA
to be a non-disruptive addition to existing landscapes. With this point in mind, we’ll discuss the key use cases that are most typical for SAP
HANA deployments today, and we’ll consider some potential future scenarios.
In its current form, SAP HANA can be used for four basic types of use case: agile data mart, SAP Business Suite accelerator, a
primary database for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, and a development platform for new applications. As SAP HANA
matures and SAP 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.
Agile Data Mart
The earliest scenarios where SAP HANA has been deployed in production are as a stand-alone data mart for a specific use case. In this
scenario, SAP HANA acts as the central hub to collect data from a few SAP and non-SAP source systems and then display some fairly simple
and focused analytics in a single-purpose dashboard for users.
This use case has the advantages of (1) being completely non-disruptive to the existing landscape and (2) providing an immediate, focused
solution to an urgent business analytics problem. These projects are also typically completed very quickly, sometimes in just a few weeks,
because the business problem is well known and the relevant data and source systems are easily identified. SAP HANA is set up as a stand-
alone system in the landscape, which is then connected to the source systems and displayed to a small number of users in a simple Web-
based or mobile user interface. This process involves zero disruption to the existing landscape, and companies get instant value because they
can now do things that were impossible before they acquired SAP HANA.
Additionally, the development cycles for these use cases are typically very short, because most of these scenarios use a standard SAP
BusinessObjects front end with self-service analytics or Microsoft Excel. We label these systems “agile data marts” because they perform a few
of the same functions as a 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.
Nongfu Spring

Medtronic

SAP provides a special licensing bundle to build an agile data mart use case with SAP HANA that includes the extractors and connectors
needed to obtain data from source systems and the front-end tools needed to build analytical applications on top of the data.
SAP Business Suite Accelerator
The second major scenario where SAP HANA is being used is to accelerate transactions and reports inside the SAP Business Suite. Again, SAP
HANA is being set up as a stand-alone system in the landscape, side-by-side with the database under the SAP Business Suite applications. In
this scenario, however, SAP HANA is being used to “off load” some of the transactions or reports that typically take a long time (hours or
days) to run, but it is not being used as the primary database under the application.
We explained earlier that certain transactions or reports inside the SAP Business Suite can be very slow, due primarily to the slow I/O of the
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.
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 disk-based 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 and Consolidation 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 NetWeaver 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, self-service access to trusted
profitability information.
This solution can also be implemented alongside the wider SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Performance Management solutions
portfolio to help organizations create a complete picture of their cost and profit drivers.
You can try the solution on your own with the SAP CO-PA Accelerator TestDrive and visit the website to discover how organizations
are generating significant business value with the solution.
SAP Finance and Controlling 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 real-time insight into massive volumes of pipeline
data in CRM while performing on the fly calculations and in-depth analysis on any business dimension. Sales managers can now leverage
the power of SAP HANA combined with SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for complete and instant visibility of accurate
and consolidated pipeline data. They can react more quickly to changing sales conditions with real-time information, and accelerate deals
through the pipeline with powerful and user-driven analytics. As a result, best-run businesses can unlock hidden revenue opportunities as
well as significantly increase profits and sales effectiveness.
SAP Customer Segmentation Accelerator
T he 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 rapid-deployment solutions in order to ensure a quick time to
value. The rapid deployment solutions streamline the implementation process bringing together software, best practices, and services
ensuring maximum predictability with fixed cost and scope editions.
SAP Rapid Deployment solutions leverage an innovative delivery model to accelerate the implementation times and lower risk.
Implementation is supported by a standardized methodology, accelerators developed uniquely for each offering, and predefined best
practices, meeting typical business requirements to address the customer’s immediate needs. Even as customers benefit from prebuilt
functionality, these solutions provide a platform designed to evolve and extend as the customer’s business grows.
SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions are available through SAP as well as SAP partners by traditional licensing or subscription pricing,
transparency of price and scope eliminate project risks for companies. A good example is the SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for
operational reporting with SAP HANA that can help you quickly generate insightful reports — from sales to financials to shipping — on high
volumes of ERP data.
A second example is SAP rapid-deployment solution for sales pipeline analysis with SAP HANA that helps you to analyze massive amounts
of pipeline data in CRM.
You can view a demonstration of the solution here.
Here are a few of the SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions that are available to enable the accelerated SAP applications:
SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for accelerated finance and controlling with SAP HANA Gain access to large volumes of secure and
detailed data from cost and material ledgers — quickly and easily. By running SAP HANA, you can improve decision making through
accelerated reporting, analyses, and period-end closings.
SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for operational reporting with SAP HANA Quickly and affordably generate insightful reports from
sales to shipping — in real time — using our operational reporting solution with SAP HANA. Rely on in-memory technology to process
high volumes of data quickly, and get ready to transform decision-making business-wide.
SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for profitability analysis with SAP HANA Analyze massive amounts of profitability data in enterprise
resource planning (ERP) (CO-PA) faster than ever before. Our ERP profitability analysis solution with SAP HANA can help you perform
real-time reporting and conduct instant, on-the-fly analysis — for more profitable decision making across your enterprise.
SAP rapid-deployment solution for customer segmentation with SAP HANA SAP HANA combined with SAP Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) can help you analyze and segment massive amounts of customer data in real time. You can target the precise
audience with the right offers across customer segments, tactics, and channels.
SAP rapid-deployment solution for sales pipeline analysis with SAP HANA Gain instant insight into massive volumes of sales pipeline
data while performing on-the-fly calculations and in-depth analysis on any business dimension.
 You can also try out a few of the current accelerated applications running LIVE: http://hanauseast.testdrivesap.com/copa. We’ll go into
much more detail on the applications and RDS packages in the Accelerated SAP Business Suite chapter.
SAP offers a specific licensing bundle to utilize SAP HANA for this use case that includes additional replication tools needed for the
connections to the SAP source system.
SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Powered by SAP HANA
Possibly the “killer” use case for SAP HANA in 2012 is SAP BW 7.3 on SAP HANA . In this scenario, companies replace the entire database
under their SAP BW 7.3 system with SAP HANA. They simply swap out whatever disk-based database their system is currently running on
with SAP HANA — in just a few weeks.7
Recall from our earlier discussion of early SAP in-memory projects that SAP BW was the first SAP application that was renovated and
updated to natively run on SAP HANA as its primary run-time database. Most of these renovations were necessary to more closely tie the SAP
BW application to the SAP HANA database. In a disk-based architecture, SAP BW is separated from the database by an abstraction layer,
essentially making it impossible for the application to “see” anything in the database other than bare tables. Once the abstraction layer is
removed, the SAP BW application cannot only “see” everything in the database, but the entire database is designed around the needs of that
specific application. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for SAP customers.
With SAP HANA, SAP BW now generates turbo-charged query responses natively, without the need for any side-car accelerators or crazy
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. All of the SAP HANA-specific enhancements were bundled into the SPS05 update, and customers who had already
upgraded to 7.3 could install the service pack and migrate to SAP HANA in a matter of days (seriously).
Red Bull was the first live customer of SAP BW on SAP HANA. They told the world about their amazing 10-DAY project to get up and
running at the Sapphire Now 2011 conference in Madrid, Spain. The whole effort was incredibly non-disruptive. SAP is seeing similar results
with the other customers in the ramp-up project. All of the changes on the SAP BW side are delivered “under the hood” in the service pack,
and the database migration can be performed without any changes to the SAP BW application. All of the customer’s content and configuration
are completely unchanged. Have a look at the end-to-end migration guide for a great overview of the SAP BW database migration process.
You should also read a great blog post by John Appleby, a consultant who performed one of the first SAP BW on SAP HANA migrations.
The speed and flexibility acquired by replacing the old database with SAP HANA reflect two fundamental benefits of keeping the entire
database in memory: (1) This architecture eliminates the need to send huge amounts of data between application and DB servers, and (2) it
allows users to execute performance-critical operations directly on the data in the database itself. Basically, running SAP BW on SAP HANA
completely eliminates nearly every one of the nasty things that historically slowed down the system, from both a user perspective and an
administration perspective. We’ll explore all of the technical enhancements in the SAP BW on SAP HANA chapter.
SAP offers a specific “run-time only” license option to utilize SAP HANA as the primary persistence layer for SAP BW. If you are already an
SAP BW customer, the company offers several options for license credits based on previous SAP BW and BWA licensing. Consult your SAP
account executive for the details. SAP has also set up a special migration fund to provide professional services credits to migrate to SAP BW
on SAP HANA.
SAP HANA as an Application Development Platform
Probably the most wide-open innovation opportunity for SAP HANA is as an application platform. If the speed and simplification that were
achieved by porting SAP BW are any indication, users can realize an unbelievable amount of value not only by renovating existing applications
(SAP and non-SAP) to run natively on SAP HANA, but by also building entirely new applications that are designed from scratch to maximize
SAP HANA’s powerful capabilities. The performance limitations of traditional databases and processing power have often led organizations to
compromise on how to deploy business processes on their enterprise platforms. Now, these organizations can choose to liberate themselves
from these constraints and optimize business processes in ways that are more natural to the way their employees actually perform their work.
This 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 real-time insights on big data and state-of-the-art
analysis capabilities. These innovative solutions can empower organizations to transform the way they run their businesses by making smarter
and faster decisions, responding more quickly to events, unlocking new opportunities, and even inventing new data-driven business models
and processes that were simply not possible with disk-based databases. Below are a few examples of native-SAP HANA applications. We’ll
consider them in greater detail in the SAP HANA Applications chapter.
SAP BusinessObjects 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), role-specific dashboards
and customized reports to provide retailers with a deeper understanding of all factors influencing the merchandising life cycle. SAP
BusinessObjects Sales Analysis for Retail aims at providing the integration needed for improved scalability and performance for retailers
operating in separate sales, inventory and promotions systems. The new service provides Point-of-Sale (POS) analysis allow retailers to
assess performance and generate quick responses through the use of prebuilt dashboards, interactive reports and more than 70 KPIs and
inventory management to provide retailers with the ability to identify critical stock and margin issues through close inventory alignment.
SAP Smart 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 & Operations Planning
SAP Sales & Operations Planning is a next generation planning application that is powered by SAP HANA and delivered in the cloud. The
solution enables:
Planning and real-time analysis with a unified model of demand, supply chain, and financial data at any level of granularity and
dimension
Rapid, interactive simulation and scenario analysis, using the full S&OP data model to support demand-supply balancing decisions
Embedded, context-aware social collaboration enables rapid planning and decision-making across the organization
These capabilities enable companies to align demand and supply profitably, reduce supply chain costs, and drive revenue growth.
SAP Supplier InfoNet
SAP Supplier InfoNet is a cloud-based solution, powered by SAP HANA, that enables companies to:
Minimize supply chain disruption by proactively monitoring and predicting real-time supply risks across a multi-tier supplier
network
Drive stronger supplier performance by benchmarking supplier performance for your company against others in the business
network and identifying significant shifts and trends in supplier performance using leading-edge machine learning and statistical
analysis
Manage your supply base by aggregating and transforming supplier data to deliver instant insights into the operational health of
the supply base.
Recalls Plus
Recalls Plus is SAP’s first consumer mobile app that enables parents to proactively monitor recalls of their kids’ strollers, cribs, toys, and
other items for greater safety and peace of mind. Features of the app include:
Search recall history by brand or category
Create a personal watch list of items like car seats, cribs, strollers and so on
Track allergen related recalls
Share relevant recalls with others
Read and monitor recalls from all relevant US government agencies: CPSC, NHTSA, FDA and USDA
Recalls Plus is available for free and can be accessed via an iPhone app or a Facebook app:
iPhone app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/recalls-plus/id499200328
Facebook app: https://apps.facebook.com/recallsplus
Partner-built 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 just the hardware speed boost, it also results in
significantly lower TCO for companies. SAP HANA can have a massive impact on reducing TCO and improving business value. “Cheaper” isn’t
achieved only through industry-standard processors, RAM, and servers. Cheaper is a holistic mindset that starts from application design and
then progresses through user efficiency all the way to administration and operations. SAP will continue to invest heavily in many areas to
make SAP HANA the cheapest and most efficient database to operate in production environments. These efforts include innovating in new
landscape configurations such as native cloud deployments of SAP HANA.
Significantly, however, SAP isn’t satisfied to “only” be the fastest, best, and cheapest database on the planet. SAP’s goals also include
enabling the BIGGEST data scenarios by offering integrated solutions with Sybase “Big Data” products and open-source projects like Hadoop.
In addition, with a robust ecosystem of ISVs, system integrators, and SAP customers building their innovative applications on SAP HANA,
SAP intends to become the BROADEST database platform for new applications. Just as Apple provided the platform for App Store developers,
SAP will provide SAP HANA as a platform for thousands 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, on-premise applications like the SAP Business Suite; SME solutions
like SAP Business One, SAP Business ByDesign, and SAP All-in-One; and the emerging portfolio of cloud/on-demand solutions. In poker
terms, SAP is going “all in” with SAP HANA. SAP has made a passionate commitment to innovate for the future of its ecosystem, and the
benefits of this shift for SAP’s customers and partners are too overwhelming for the company to do anything less.
SAP HANA will be the heart and soul of SAP’s “real-time” design philosophy to renovate all existing applications and build amazing new
applications. The renovation work is moving very quickly inside SAP, so much so that it has surpassed even the most optimistic timelines. The
SAP BW renovation and porting to SAP HANA was the first major step towards a completely renovated SAP Business Suite. The next major
step will be for SAP to complete the renovation and porting of its flagship application, SAP ERP, to run natively on SAP HANA. The remaining
applications in the SAP Business Suite — SAP CRM, SAP SCM, SAP PLM, and SAP SRM — should follow shortly after that. In parallel, SAP is
adding SAP HANA to all of the other applications 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,”8 SAP will be able to deliver a vastly simplified landscape for its
customers. By merging OLAP and OLTP into a single SAP HANA instance, SAP can provide a massive reduction in layers and TCO in the
landscape while at the same time providing much more flexibility and business value through real-time access to all of the relevant data. It will
take SAP several years to engineer and 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.

1 Markides, C. (2002). Strategic Innovation. In: E. B. Roberts (Ed.). Innovation. Driving Product, Process, and Market Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

2 W oods, D. and W ord, J. (2004), SAP NetW eaver for Dummies, W iley Publishing Inc., Indianapolis, IA.

3 W ith the SAP HANA RDS migration package customers can migrate in ~7 w eeks, if they are already on BW 7.3 SP7, w ith Unicode, and 7.x data flow s and authorizations.

4 Magal, S. and W ord, J. (2011), Integrated Business Processes w ith ERP Systems, John W iley & Sons. Hoboken, NJ

5 People alw ays ask “if all the data is in volatile storage like RAM, w hat happens if the pow er 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 The SAP HANA RDS for database migration takes ~7 w eeks for most customers w ho are already running SAP BW 7.3.

8 Meaning “Pow ered by SAP HANA” and renovated to natively take advantage of SAP HANA.
Chapter 2
SAP HANA Architecture

COMING FALL OF 2012

Chapter 3
SAP HANA Business Cases & ROI Model

COMING FALL OF 2012

Chapter 4
SAP HANA Applications

COMING FALL OF 2012

Chapter 5
SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on SAP

COMING FALL OF 2012

Chapter 6
Data Provisioning with
SAP HANA

COMING FALL OF 2012

Chapter 7
Data Modeling with
SAP HANA

COMING FALL OF 2012

Chapter 8
Application Development with SAP HANA

COMING FALL OF 2012

Chapter 9
SAP HANA Administration & Operations

COMING FALL OF 2012

 Chapter 10
SAP HANA Hardware Overview

SAP 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 open-source and industry standards as the core platform for SAP HANA. By supporting only ONE
combination of OS and processors, SAP could invest all its development and testing resources into a single platform while still allowing
customers to choose which hardware vendor would deliver and support the appliance.
SAP had been working with Novell/SUSE for many years to support Novell SLES Linux as a certified operating system for SAP applications.
Because Linux is so technically similar to UNIX, almost any UNIX engineer could transition his or her skills easily. Moreover, because Linux
was 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 in-memory computing would
require a new breed of processors that were optimized for the new architecture, and Intel has a long history of innovating for the future needs
of the enterprise.
SAP laid out its strategy for the shift to 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. This broad support from industry-
leading hardware vendors provides customers with a choice of seven hardware partners to deploy their SAP HANA solution, each with unique
service and support offerings to fit their customers’ needs. SAP’s strategy of “solid core,” multivendor hardware support for SAP HANA has
been received extremely well by customers because it eliminates the confusing number of hardware combinations and focuses on the value-
added solutions that each vendor can offer on top of the “solid core.”
General SAP HANA Hardware Specifications
SAP HANA is sold as a pre-configured, pre-installed appliance that is delivered directly from the hardware partner. SUSE Linux SLES 11 is the
only supported operating system, and Intel E7 processors are the only supported chips. Samsung RAM is currently the primary memory used
by all of the hardware partners.
Most partner systems use on-board 15k RPM hard disks (4x ratio for main memory) for data-volume backup and Fusion I/O SSD cards (1:1
ratio for main memory) for log-volume backup.
SAP ensures the quality, 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)
The latest and most accurate PAM can always be downloaded from the SAP Service Marketplace. Here is the May 2012 SAP HANA PAM.
Additional Infrastructure
SAP recommends that customers deploy 10 gb network data connections. SAP has no preference on external storage/SAN; rather, it is
determined by the server vendor.
Multi-Node and Scale-Out Options
SAP HANA is a linearly scalable database, meaning, you can string together multiple physical servers into a single logical database instance
and achieve linear performance results for every additional server added to the landscape.
Currently, SAP HANA has certified a 16-node scale-out for production environments and is currently testing a 60 node scale-out landscape.
Literally, you just add another node/server to the landscape, and you immediately enjoy an exponential increase in performance, in addition
to the additional memory. Refer to the SAP HANA hardware partner section of this chapter for more information on the various scale-out
offerings from the individual partners.
SAP recently (April 2012) completed its first internal benchmark for the 16 node scale out solution. The data set consisted of five years of
Sales and Distribution Records (100 Billion records) and was run on a single logical server consisting of 16 nodes. Each node was a certified
IBM X5 machine with eight Intel E7-8870 processors with 10 cores, running at 2.40 GHz. The total cost of the 16 node system was roughly
USD$640K.
SAP HANA was able to scan 100 Billion rows/Sec on the 100 TB dataset and was able to load 16 million records/min. SAP HANA’s
compression algorithms were able to achieve 20x compression on the raw data when loading into memory, going from 100TB on disk to
3.8TB in memory.
Typical query results were:
BW Workload: 300ms – 500ms
Ad-Hoc Analytics: 800ms – 2s
No database tuning, indexing or caching were needed to achieve these results. To put that in context, the closest competitive database is
roughly 1000x slower in the same benchmark and several times more expensive.
High Availability
SAP HANA supports cold standby hosts, meaning a standby host is kept ready in the event that a failover situation occurs during production
operation. In a distributed system, some of the servers are designated as worker hosts, and others as standby hosts. Significantly, you can
assign multiple standby hosts to each group. Alternatively, you can group together multiple servers to create a dedicated standby host for
each group.
A standby host is not used for database processing. All of the database processes run on the standby host, but they are idle and do not
enable SQL connections.

Disaster Recovery
The SAP HANA database holds the bulk of its data in memory to ensure optimal performance, but it still uses persistent storage to provide a
fallback in case of failure.
 During normal database operations, data are automatically saved from memory to disk at regular save-points. Additionally, all data changes
are recorded in the log. The log is saved from memory to SSD after each committed database transaction. After a power failure, the database
can be restarted in the same way as a disk-based database, and it returns to its last consistent state by replaying the log since the last save-
point.
Although save-points and log writing protect your data against power failures, they do not help if the persistent storage itself is damaged.
Protecting against data loss due to disk failures requires backups. Backups save the contents of the data and log areas to different locations.
These backups are performed while the database is running, so users can continue to work normally. The impact of the backups on system
performance is negligible.

If the SAP HANA system detects a failover situation, the work of the services on the failed server is reassigned to the services running on
the standby host. The failed volume and all the included tables are reassigned and loaded into memory in accordance with the failover
strategy defined for the system. This reassignment can be performed without moving any data, because all the persistency of the servers is
stored on a shared disk. Data and logs are stored on shared storage, where every server has access to the same disks.
Before a failover is performed, the system waits for a few seconds to determine whether the service can be restarted. During this time, the
status is displayed as ”Waiting.” This procedure can take up to a minute. The entire process of failover detection and loading may take several
minutes to complete.
SAP Hardware 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 value-added services for SAP HANA implementation, support, and operations.
We encourage you to speak directly to the hardware partners for more details about their products and services for SAP HANA.
Links:
Intel
Cisco
Dell
Fujitsu
Hitachi
HP
IBM
NEC
Intel & SAP: Co-innovation for Real-Time Computing
For more than 10 years, Intel and SAP have worked together to deliver industry-leading performance of SAP solutions on Intel architecture,
and a large proportion of new SAP implementations are now deployed on Intel platforms. The latest success from that tradition of co-
innovation is available to customers of all 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 Intel Xeon® processor E7 family deliver rapid data analysis that discerns patterns and trends so you can adjust your
just-in-time supply chain rapidly. You can also model “what if” scenarios to structure sales and promotions for optimal outcomes based on the
latest sales and pipeline information.
Features of the Intel Xeon processor E7 family such as 30MB of L3 cache, Intel® QuickPath Interconnects, and quad-channel integrated
memory controllers deliver extraordinary capabilities for businesses of all sizes that implement SAP HANA for functionality such as business
intelligence and data analytics.

Performance Optimizations of SAP HANA with the Intel Xeon® Processor E7 Family
SAP HANA benefits dramatically from high-speed Intel® QuickPath processor-to-memory interconnects and the latest processor instructions,
Streaming SIMD Extensions. Those features eliminate many I/O bottlenecks, so processor headroom is available to generate excellent
throughput and responsiveness. SAP HANA is also engineered to take particular advantage of RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability)
features of the Intel Xeon processor E7family, especially error correction through Machine Check Architecture Recovery, for mission-critical
implementations.
As a result of the high level of performance optimization for servers based on the Intel Xeon processor E7 family, SAP HANA can provide
businesses of all sizes superior results for data warehousing implementations such as business intelligence and data analytics.
Assured Performance with Mission-Critical Advanced Reliability of the Intel Xeon Processor E7 Family
Machine Check Architecture Recovery, a reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) feature built into the Intel Xeon ® processor E7 family,
enables the hardware platform to generate Machine Check Exceptions. In many cases, these notifications enable the system to take corrective
action that allows SAP HANA to keep running where an outage would otherwise occur.
Hardware based on the Intel Xeon® processor E7 family enables SAP HANA to fail over from one processor socket to another in the event
of a processor failure and to handle memory errors with as little impact to workloads as possible.
Copyright© 2012 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.
Cisco Systems SAP HANA Solutions
As part of the “Unified Appliance Environment”, Cisco has developed a full portfolio of SAP HANA appliances based on Cisco Unified
Computing System ™ (Cisco UCS™) spanning from the smallest T-shirt sizing, supporting as low as 64 GB memory, up to large scale-out
solutions which can support up to 8 TB of usable memory. Depending on the compression factors, the Cisco appliances can support databases
up to 56 TB, the largest currently supported by SAP. However the Cisco technology can support up to 20 TB of usable memory, which
corresponds to uncompressed databases up to 100 TB or more.
Cisco UCS: A Unique SAP HANA Solution
Cisco UCS is a single unified system entirely programmable through unified, model-based management to simplify and speed deployment of
enterprise-class applications and services. All Cisco UCS SAP HANA appliances are intelligent infrastructure that can be managed through the
embedded, single management plane across multiple Cisco UCS rack and blade servers (Figure 1). This radically simplifies operations and
lowers costs. The model-based management applies personality and configures server, network, and storage connectivity resources. Using
Cisco service profiles, which define the model, it is simple to provision servers by applying a desired configuration to physical infrastructure.
The configuration is applied quickly, accurately, and automatically, improving business agility, staff productivity, and eliminating a major
source of errors that can cause downtime.
T he Cisco Fabric Extender Architecture reduces the number of system components to purchase, configure, manage, and maintain by
condensing three network layers into one. It eliminates both blade server and hypervisor-based switches by connecting fabric interconnect
ports directly to individual blade servers and virtual machines. Virtual networks are now managed exactly as physical networks are, but with
massive scalability. This represents a radical simplification over traditional systems, reducing capital and operating costs while increasing
business agility, simplifying and speeding deployment, and improving performance.
Cisco UCS helps organizations go beyond efficiency: it helps them become more effective through technologies that breed simplicity rather
than complexity. The result is flexible, agile, high-performance, self-integrating information technology that reduces staff costs and increases
uptime through automation, providing a more rapid return on investment.
The excellent performance combined with the broad range of usable memory make the Cisco UCS SAP Appliances an excellent, easy-to-
manage choice for analyzing massive amounts of business data.

Cisco UCS SAP HANA Architecture

SAP HANA T-Shirt Sizes Offered

The Extra Small (XS) and Small (S)-size appliances are based on the Cisco C260 M2 rack mount server with 2 Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-
4870 (2.4 GHz) and up to 256 GB of usable memory. This configuration is primarily used for development, test, and small production SAP
HANA systems with uncompressed datasets up to 1.75 TB. The Cisco UCS appliance incorporates a persistency layer, based on internal SSD
drives that require no additional drivers tainting the Linux kernel.
The Medium (M)-size appliance is based on the Cisco C460 M2 rack mount server with 4 Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-4870 (2.4 GHz) and
up to 512 GB of usable memory. This configuration is ideal for use in mid-sized and larger production environments such as the one used by
Medtronic, a large, worldwide manufacturer of medical devices (see customer example). The persistency layer is provided by two Fusion IO
cards to avoid possible bottlenecks in duo card configurations sharing the same PCI slot.
SAP HANA Scale-out offering
The Cisco UCS solution that has been certified for large SAP HANA implementations is a uniquely scalable appliance. It allows customers to
easily adapt to the growing demands of their individual environment by incrementally adding Cisco B440 M2 blade servers with 4 Intel®
Xeon® Processors E7-4870 (2.4 GHz) and up to 512 GB usable memory each, as needed. For every four Cisco UCS blade servers, the
persistency layer is provided by an EMC VNX 5300 or a NetApp FAS 3240, depending on customer preference.
The “basic configuration” of the Cisco scale-out offering is made up of redundant fabric interconnects with embedded infrastructure
management, a Cisco UCS C200 server for SAP HANA studio, a Cisco 2911 for secure remote management, and one enclosure with support
for up to 4 Cisco B440 blades. The basic configuration can easily scale by adding up to 3 extension bundles each providing an additional blade
enclosure for up to 4 more Cisco B440 M2 blade servers each and the correspondent storage from EMC or NetApp.
High Availability SAP HANA Solution
Cisco UCS SAP HANA appliances have redundancy designed-in providing no single point of failure. However, in the event of a hardware
failure on a blade or rack server, any spare Cisco UCS server can take over the role of the failed server in minutes by simply applying the
service profile to the spare server. Disaster recovery (DR) scenarios can be easily implemented by using service profiles to quickly provision
servers at the DR site in conjunction with the “classical” replication technologies of EMC and NetApp.
SAP 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, inter-chassis switches, and
network adapters required by legacy platforms. This reduces energy consumption and operational costs resulting in much lower total cost of
ownership.
Additional software
The operating system, Cisco UCS drivers, and Cisco UCS management software are all part of the appliance; therefore no additional software
is necessary to manage the entire system. However Cisco Intelligent Automation for SAP HANA is highly recommended. The Cisco Intelligent
Automation software solution supports the daily operation of a SAP HANA appliance by:
Monitoring the CPU and memory workload, and the average index read time at blade level
Automating quarterly maintenance, including firmware updates and file system validation
Ensuring configuration management assurance for all appliance components
Monitoring data services availability
Proactively monitoring SAP HANA subsystem components status
Monitoring query execution response times using the SAP HANA index for the query execution SAP HANA Query Response Time
Executing sample queries and recording total execution time and query component performance breakdown
Proactively monitoring the SAP TREX services statistics based on thresholds
Alerting CPU, memory, or throughput thresholds for SAP TREX services
Automating Cisco UCS blade and rack server provisioning for use in the appliance in minutes, instead of days
SAP HANA Installation and Support Services
Cisco SAP HANA installation services includes the assembly of all necessary hardware and software required for a SAP HANA appliance.
Cisco’s SAP HANA engineers will install the appliance into the customer’s network and connect it to source system(s).
Also included are the necessary SuSe Linux Licenses, Smartnet 24x7x4 day 2 support for the 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.
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 addition information on SAP on Cisco UCS please email saponcisco@cisco.com
Dell SAP HANA Solutions
For more than a decade, Dell has collaborated with SAP to deliver hundreds of SAP solutions across many industries. A recipient of the
distinguished SAP Pinnacle Award in the category of exceptional customer satisfaction and support, Dell can help organizations achieve
better, faster and more sustainable business results. Our solutions are high-performing, end-to-end, and standards-based.
In addition to innovative, leading-edge hardware platforms, Dell offers access to thousands of enterprise computing solutions consultants.
We incorporate lessons learned and experiences into a proven enterprise solution delivery model that spans hardware, consulting,
implementation, hosting and application management services designed to enhance value for customer investments in SAP solutions.
An SAP global technology partner, Dell offers customers a portfolio of end-to-end solutions in support of SAP HANA applications including
hardware, software and services that help reduce IT costs while helping organizations transform their business. Dell’s innovative platforms
dramatically increase the availability and speed of business information, leading to more insightful decision-making using SAP HANA.
Dell’s Unique SAP HANA Value Proposition
Dell and SAP have teamed up to offer an optimally configured SAP HANA solution that includes a hardware appliance, pre-loaded software
and a full range of services. This solution is reliable and scalable and offered in multiple configurations to meet your specific business needs.
Our end-to-end and all-in-one solutions give your organization full access to the power of SAP HANA.
Dell’s end-to-end SAP HANA solution provides:
Superior technology — Dell’s PowerEdge R910 is certified for SAP HANA and includes everything needed to support your SAP
HANA solution, including scalable memory and storage. This all-in-one solution provides for seamless and integrated implementation
and management.
Integrated system management — Dell’s VIS Creator and VIS Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) tools simplify
management of virtual and physical server, network and storage components. AIM integrates with SAP management consoles such as
Solution Manager or Adaptive Computing Controller, to add capacity to the SAP landscape or move applications between physical and
virtual resource pools based on demand.
Large-scale enterprise consulting expertise — Dell leverages its experience delivering enterprise IT and solving “big data”
issues for global companies to provide actionable and real world technology, strategies and solutions. Dell’s Center of Excellence
(CoE) is well established for SAP HANA, BWA, and Mobility.
Proven methodology — Dell’s In-Memory Computing and Analytic Methodology (DIMCAM) implementation services guides
customers by solving complex problems faster.
Comprehensive services — Dell’s portfolio of SAP full lifecycle services leverage industry best practices to deliver better business
outcomes for SAP clients.
World-Class Support Services — Dell’s world-class ProSupport and Mission Critical Services keep your SAP HANA solution
running smoothly.
The combination of Dell’s PowerEdge R910 platform and SAP HANA allows users to conduct analytics, performance management and
operations in a single system. Together, the solutions help enable a business to react faster to events impacting operations today. Through
this, an organization can quickly identify and analyze trends and patterns to improve planning, forecasting and price optimization. Enterprise
customers taking advantage of Dell’s SAP HANA platform get a cost-effective, optimized in-memory computing solution that increases
availability and reduces risk.
At Dell, we are continuously evolving our server, application and server portfolio to meet evolving enterprise needs in the virtual era. In
February 2012, we announced our PowerEdge 12th generation server platform and Dell EqualLogic PS storage arrays. Our newest servers
provide dramatic performance and management gains for high-power computing, collaboration, database ERP and business intelligence. Dell
EqualLogic PS storage arrays combine the industry’s highest Ethernet networking bandwidth — 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) — with increased
storage capacity in less space. While these solutions are not yet SAP HANA certified, they show the strength of the Dell hardware portfolio and
our commitment to innovation.
Dell’s SAP HANA Product
The Dell PowerEdge Server R910 platform has been certified by SAP to run SAP In-Memory Appliance software (SAP HANA). Offering
customers a powerful and flexible way to query and analyze large volumes of data with great speed, Dell customers running SAP HANA on
PowerEdge R910 servers can gain real-time access to information and analytics to best address rapidly evolving market environments.
Dell’s SAP HANA appliance provides:
Performance and reliability in a scalable 4U, four-socket server allowing large workload consolidation, max virtualization machine
density, and scale for the SAP HANA in-memory database.
Integrated diagnostics with Intel® Advanced RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) Technology, internal dual SD modules
for hypervisor redundancy, including design and component quality paired with Dell Lifecycle Controller.
Robust infrastructure in the form of performance resources, power efficiency, I/O, and memory scalability.
Processing power using the highest performing Xeon 7500 Series processors, up to 1TB of DDR3 memory, and 2 x 10Gb Optional
LOM with 10 PCIe slots to consolidate inefficient workloads.
Energy-efficient system design built with Energy Smart technologies includes power management features enabling power
capping, power inventory, and power budgeting within your specific environment. Logical component layout of the internal
components aids with airflow direction, helping to keep the server cool.
The SAP HANA appliance from Dell is fully contained in the PowerEdge R910 server, making use of fast internal disks for storage and
Fusion ioDrive solid state cards. The Fusion ioDrive from Dell provides high IOPs and low latency performance for the in-memory SAP HANA
database. While Fusion ioDrive is used to maintain the system’s logs, a RAID group made up of internally held 15K RPM disks is used to
maintain a copy of the data image.
T-Shirt sizes offered
Dell offers several different sizes of HANA appliances based on the Dell PowerEdge R910 platform to meet your needs.

High Availability
The Dell™ PowerEdge™ R910 is a high-performance 4-socket 4U rack server designed for reliability and scalability for mission-critical
applications. High availability features include:
Built-in reliability features at the CPU, memory, hardware and hypervisor levels
Intel advanced reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) capabilities
Redundant power supplies
Remote IDRAC6 connectivity
 Integrated systems management, Lifecycle Controller and embedded diagnostics to help maximize uptime
Internal Dual SD Module providing superior hypervisor redundancy
Dell’s focus on reliability starts with product design and ends only when we’ve delivered a platform that meets strict testing and quality
control standards.
Support infrastructure
Dell’s SAP HANA appliance is designed to be an all-inclusive solution that comes as a pre-integrated unit with all necessary hardware, storage,
and networking capabilities.
Additional software needed
Dell’s SAP HANA platform is an end-to-end and all-in-one solution that comes preloaded with all of the software and management tools
necessary.
Additionally, Dell offers its OpenManage Essentials software for no charge. Open Manage Essentials is a web-based hardware management
application that provides a comprehensive view of Dell systems, supported devices, and components in the enterprise’s network. This product
provides additional system management capabilities, including:
A simple and effective user interface
Easy installation and low touch maintenance
Tools to discover, inventory and monitor Dell Servers, storage and networking switches
Agent-free Management to discover and correlate IDRAC / Server and Blades / Chassis
Dell offers SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP for SAP HANA solutions.
Support Services
Dell is an expert in SAP HANA system support. Internally, we have over 65 instances of SAP with over 22,000 users, and globally, we have
over 500 SAP consultants. In addition, Dell has more than 1,800 ITIL-certified professionals. The result is that we have a strong systems
management and support practice and an in depth understanding of SAP hardware and software solutions. Customers are provided a
responsive service and support experience with collaborative support for SAP HANA by Dell, SAP, and SUSE based on standard and enterprise
support agreements.
Dell’s SAP HANA appliance comes with 3 years of Dell’s award winning ProSupport Mission Critical services and a 3-year extended
hardware warranty. Customers receive 24x7x365 phone support, escalation management and collaborative support leveraging Dell’s global
ProSupport infrastructure of more than 30,000 technicians supporting more than 100 countries in 55 languages. Dell’s ProSupport Mission
Critical services accelerate rapid resolution by providing quick delivery of onsite parts and or labor and providing access to Dell’s proven and
reliable Critical Situation Process.
Key support features:
Onsite Response — 4-Hour onsite service with 6-hour hardware repair available 24x7, including holidays.
CritSit Procedures — Severity level 1 issues will be reviewed by Dell and may be nominated for CritSit incident coverage through
Dell Global Command Centers. During a CritSit incident, expert resource teams are mobilized to get you back up and running fast.
Emergency dispatch — Onsite service technician dispatched in parallel with phone-based troubleshooting when you declare a
Severity level 1 incident.
Additional SAP HANA services
Dell offers additional SAP HANA services to assist with your implementation.
SAP HANA Executive Workshop — This workshop helps to develop the Use Case and Business justification for a SAP HANA solution and
helps organizations determine whether SAP HANA is a fit for their situation.
SAP HANA Proof of Concept — Using Dell DIMCAM methodology and IMPROVE jump start process, customers can see quickly the
value that SAP HANA will bring to the decision making process.
SAP Modernization Services — Dell has developed a portfolio of Modernization Service for SAP applications that features cloud
computing, real-time analytics and mobile applications. These enabling technologies can provide the savings to invest in SAP HANA
and will provide SAP customers flexible computing infrastructure, competitive knowledge through improved analytics and secure
mobile computing frameworks.
Implementation — Once the Proof of Concept is complete, a SAP HANA Implementation workshop can develop a deployment plan
and create the Business Justification for the rest of the deployment.
Analytics Factory — Dell offers global business intelligence consulting and support.
Customer success stories
Every Angle Software Solutions is an international software company that partners with Dell to deliver an add-on SAP performance and
operations management appliance solution. The Every Angle solution enables the simple, flexible and fast production of valuable business
content from an organization’s SAP database; the software then enhances the data using intelligent algorithms. Every Angle has an impressive
customer list — including companies like Heineken, Philips, Bridgestone and Hunter Douglas — and their current installations span multiple
industries globally. Every Angle is upgrading its offering by developing an SAP HANA-based appliance using Dell’s PowerEdge R910 platform.
Every Angle chooses Dell because:
 The R910 offers a complete, integrated solution including hardware, software, services and support.
Every Angle’s current SAP performance management appliance is based on the Dell PowerEdge platform, and the relationship
between our companies is proven and strong.
Dell Services consulting provided the expertise to accelerate Every Angle’s time to market.
Every Angle can rely on award-winning support from Dell ProSupport.
Every Angle has a long-standing relationship with Dell and uses Dell servers, storage and networking internally to run the company.
Every Angle’s mission is to create a solution that is not only powerful and reliable bust also simple to install, quick to implement and easily
supportable. The company’s goal is to install the Every Angle appliance and have it delivering meaningful data in under a week! Every Angle
pairs the power of SAP HANA with Dell technology and with their proprietary software solution. It will sell Dell’s R910 SAP HANA appliance
as a Dell OEM. The solution is currently in testing.
Contact information for inquiries
Contact your Dell Sales or Services Account Executive.
Fujitsu SAP HANA Solutions
Fujitsu, the recipient of the 2012 SAP® Pinnacle award in the “Technology Innovator of the Year” category, has been recognized for its
engagement and excellence in developing ingenious SAP HANA infrastructure solutions. The Fujitsu portfolio for SAP HANA addresses the
requirements of various customer segments — from specific turnkey appliances for small and midsize companies to customized solutions for
large enterprises. The end-to-end offering including consultancy services, solution appliance, integration and migration services as well as the
services for the operation and support makes the Fujitsu offering unique.
The following aspects underline the strong position of Fujitsu in combination with SAP:
Mission-critical readiness is a top priority reached by the comprehensive scale-out offering and extensive high-availability features.
Fujitsu is the first SAP partner worldwide to offer a certified platform for SAP Business One Analytics powered by SAP HANA.
Fujitsu, a global player managed services, has capabilities to offer managed SAP HANA to multinationals as well as local small and
medium enterprises.
The Fujitsu SAP HANA Global Demo Center can be used remotely by customers who wish to test and experience the business impact
of SAP HANA. A hosted proof of concept service for tests with original customer data is also in place.
In terms of TCO reduction the Fujitsu offering scores with:
Quick return on investment supported by jump-start services for fast implementation and an option for rapid deployment of SAP
HANA with pre-defined use cases
Reduced downtime via professional solution maintenance
Low operation efforts thanks to an easy administration concept for upgrade and maintenance
Fujitsu SAP HANA Product Family
Fujitsu SAP HANA infrastructure solutions are based on industry-standard PRIMERGY servers, which represent a unique combination of
Japanese-style innovation and German quality standards. With rock-solid reliability and independently proven leading price performance, one
benefits from favorable lifecycle costs. Operational costs are reduced through server management, benchmark proven energy efficiency, and
innovative market-leading technology.
Further major building blocks of the Fujitsu SAP HANA infrastructure solution are NetApp FAS3200 Series storage systems (scale-out
offering) and Fujitsu network infrastructure.
T-Shirt Sizes offered
The Fujitsu T-shirt size options are based on PRIMERGY RX600 servers. They represent a TCO-optimized entry-level offering, which provides
ample performance and capacity without investment in an external storage system. The XS configuration can be upgraded seamlessly to the M
size model.

* All configurations are constantly review ed and the latest technology is validated and made available w henever applicable.

The single node configurations are ideal for proof of concept/proof of value projects, development, tests, quality assurance, training and
initial SAP HANA implementations with a defined scope. However, these systems can also be included as building blocks in a multi-node
environment.
Scale-out offering
The Fujitsu multi-node offering for SAP HANA is based on industry-standard PRIMERGY building blocks combined with a shared NetApp
storage system and high performance Brocade Ethernet Fabric switches as the standard option. Customers can start small and easily add and
integrate PRIMERGY servers and storage capacity as requirements grow. Today the solution is certified for massive scalability of up to 16
nodes and 8 TB of main memory, however the concept is already disposed to further growth.
High Availability
Special attention was paid to high availability as a major component for mission-critical readiness of the overall SAP HANA solution. Thus
high availability is already an integral part of the building block concept. One server can be assigned as a fail-over server and quickly take over
in case a productive server breaks down.
The second pillar of the high availability concept is the utilization of NFS (Network File System) and the shared NetApp FAS 3240 series.
The pivotal idea of in-memory computing is to store data in the main memory of a computer to allow fast access. The risk of this concept is
that data stored in the main memory is volatile. Once the computer is down, data kept in the main memory is irretrievably lost. The usage of
NFS ensures that all data is constantly mirrored on the NetApp FAS system. In case of a data loss in main memory, data can be copied back
from the storage system. Besides, the inclusion of an external FAS storage system provides the classical back-up and restore functionalities.
Highest demand concerning system availability can be met by expanding the infrastructure to a two-site concept, which means that all
infrastructure components and data are reflected in a second data center. This guarantees disaster resilience with continuous operation even in
case of a total data center breakdown.
Support infrastructure
As an additional, certified component the Fujitsu SAP HANA infrastructure solution always includes a PRIMERGY RX 100 Infrastructure
Management Server (IMS). This mono socket rack server is used for:
Efficient SAP HANA software maintenance: initial installation and upgrade
Seamless integration into the customer’s systems management landscape
Easy remote support access as a key part of the solution maintenance offering (SolutionContract)
System administrators especially benefit from the IMS component when software updates are required in multi-node environments, as the
update only needs to be started once from the IMS and is then automatically distributed within the entire server environment.
Additional software needed
AISConnect software (enables remote access to the SAP HANA landscape)
Support Services
The Fujitsu end-to-end offering comprises a complete set of services for non-disruptive implementation, integration and operation of the SAP
HANA solution.
Services for HANA Implementation and Integration
Fujitsu SAP HANA SolutionContract (Services for SAP HANA Operation)
SolutionContract is the maintenance and support service for defined Fujitsu solutions. It represents a mix of proactive and reactive services,
which ensure that malfunctions are detected and corrected before they can have any impact on operations. The concept takes into account that
Fujitsu solutions consist of hardware, software and network products from different vendors. Fujitsu is the single point of contact for all
infrastructure components of a Fujitsu solution as well as their interoperability. SolutionContract offers several service-level options depending
on individual requirements. Note: SAP Software support is not part of this solution contract!
Additional SAP HANA Services
Fujitsu SmartStart — Short Time to Value Offering (Rapid Deployment)
SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions support a fast implementation and utilization by providing business users with modular, pre-packed and
ready-to-use business content. The Fujitsu SmartStart option expands this approach. SAP HANA, the Rapid Deployment Solution and
customer-specific settings are implemented and pre-tested on certified Fujitsu infrastructure in the Fujitsu staging center. The end-to-end
offering also comprises the onsite implementation plus infrastructure and application integration. Thus SmartStart combines SAP Rapid
Deployment Solutions benefits with Fujitsu expertise and services to quickly go live with SAP HANA business scenarios fully integrated with
the SAP Business Suite.
Fujitsu Global SAP HANA Demo Center
Fujitsu has set up the first Global SAP HANA Demo and Proof of Value Center to provide customers with a practical insight into the scope of
SAP HANA capabilities and services.
Customer Success Stories
SAP Business Warehouse Migration to SAP HANA
A leading international manufacturer of automotive components has to date used an SAP Business Warehouse (BW), but it took several hours
to generate reports meaning that important information was often only available the next day. To accelerate this process management opted
for the innovative SAP HANA appliance software.
The complementary portfolio of SAP HANA infrastructure and services, jointly offered by Fujitsu and TDS*, convinced the management to
entrust this vital project to the two companies in combination. SAP experts at TDS’s IT Consulting business unit were tasked with design and
implementation, and with operation and support of the production system and Fujitsu contributed the certified SAP HANA infrastructure
solution based on powerful PRIMERGY RX600 rack servers.
*(TDS — a Fujitsu company)

Mitsui
“To promote the growth of Mitsui’s businesses, it is essential to have an IT platform that flexibly adapts to change and supports rapid decision
making. The objectives of SAP HANA align with these needs. We greatly value Fujitsu’s early leadership in support of SAP HANA, as
well as Fujitsu’s capabilities in providing global support for our IT platforms, and we intend to continue to work with Fujitsu in this area in the
future. With the global cooperation from the team at Fujitsu, we have already begun implementing this technology, and look forward
to continuing to work with Fujitsu to achieve our mutual objectives”.
— Mr. Toru Nakajima
Associate Officer and General Manager of
Information Technology Promotion Division
Mitsui & Co., Ltd.
Contact information for inquiries
Global Fujitsu SAP Competence Center
expert.sap@ts.fujitsu.com
Hitachi Data Systems Converged Platform for SAP HANA
Hitachi Data Systems Converged Platform for SAP HANA is an SAP-certified, optimized, and converged infrastructure platform for SAP HANA
which gives organizations the ability to accelerate better business decisions and provides advanced business insight based on instant, intuitive
access to data.
This converged platform comprises Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) 2000 enterprise class storage and Hitachi Compute Blade
2000 with SAP in-memory computing technology for a broad range of high-speed analytic capabilities.
The HDS SAP HANA Solution is pre-integrated in Hitachi Data Systems distribution centers and architected to meet SAP’s high standards,
including SUSE Linux 11 (for SAP) and SAP HANA.
Customers can derive the following benefits from Hitachi Data Systems Converged Platform for SAP HANA:
Predictable, Repeatable, Reliable Results: Pre-validated reference architectures, pre-packaged solutions with enterprise-class
components across the entire stack, and targeted provisioning to help ensure consistent, predictable results as organizations look to
manage and store massive volumes of fast-changing data.
Exceptional Performance: High-density computing and throughput with wide-striping technology for enhanced utilization.
Customers benefit from flexible server management capabilities and scalable architectures.
Faster Time-to-Value: Quicker, simpler deployment offered from a single source for ordering and for providing services for
planning and implementation. Pre-configuration and SAP validation of key components drastically reduces onsite deployment time.
Intelligent automation of complex tasks enables rapid provisioning of resources with the assurance that the appropriate underlying
infrastructure components are in place.
As additional applications and business units use SAP HANA or data volumes increase, all three Hitachi Data Systems SAP HANA appliances
sizes, ‘Small’, ‘Medium’, and ‘Large’, offer a smooth path to easily scale system processing capability without “forklift upgrades” or complete
system overhauls.
HDS Converged Platform SAP HANA T-Shirt Sizes
Each Hitachi Data Systems Converged Platform for SAP HANA — ‘Small’, ‘Medium’, and ‘Large’ — is delivered as a single unit that is ready to
plug into the customer network, and each offers a scalable patch to easily increase system processing capability.
Hitachi Data Systems Converged Platform for SAP HANA includes:
Operating System: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 for SAP
Storage: AMS 2100 is designed for high availability, down to the dual battery backup that protects the cache during power outage. It
contains symmetric active-active controllers that self-balance workloads.
SAN: Fibre Channel host bus adaptors
Blade Servers: Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 offers large I/O capacity and onboard memory required for effective implementation of
SAP HANA. Systems include 4-way x86 blade servers with Intel 10-core processors.
SAP HANA:
SAP HANA Load Controller 1.0
SAP IMCE Server 1.0, Client, Studio
SAP Host Agent
Sybase Replication Server 15.5 +ECDA
Hitachi Data Systems Converged Platform for SAP HANA — Small, Medium, Large — meets varying performance requirements. All three
options come with Hitachi Data Systems AMS 2100 storage subsystems and with SAP HANA pre-loaded.
Hitachi supports SAP HANA from the smallest configuration with a single Compute Blade and 256GB of RAM to the largest configuration of
4 Compute Blade 2000s and 1.0 terabytes of RAM.
Operating System: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 for SAP
Storage: AMS 2100, which is designed for high availability, down to the dual battery backup that protects the cache during 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
 Hitachi Converged Platform for SAP HANA Architecture

Hitachi-SAP Alliance
Since 1994, Hitachi, Ltd., and its subsidiaries, including Hitachi Data Systems, have had a strategic relationship with SAP which includes the
sale, integration and implementation of SAP solutions. During this time, Hitachi has won numerous SAP awards for exceptional customer
satisfaction.
In 2011, Hitachi became an SAP Global Technology Partner, the highest level of partnership SAP offers. Many large global enterprises run
their business on SAP and Hitachi.
Hitachi also ensures the necessary storage performance and high throughput to meet the stringent demands of in-memory computing. By
dramatically reducing the traditional delay between operations and analytics, this platform helps business leaders gain near real-time insights
and information to make smarter business decisions, faster.
Services
Hitachi Data Systems Global Solution Services (GSS) offers experienced infrastructure consultants, proven methodologies, and comprehensive
services for Converged Platforms to help customers further streamline their SAP environments. The HANA Implementation Service ensures a
smooth integration of the Hitachi Converged Platform for SAP HANA with our customers’ SAP landscapes.
Support infrastructure
Hitachi Consulting is equipped to support every aspect of a SAP HANA solution and can supply strategy, infrastructure, HANA Appliance,
Integration, Development, and Support Services for a HANA initiative.
The lines between infrastructure, software, and applications have been blurred. Having one partner that provides one fully integrated
solution is a tremendous value. Hitachi’s full breadth of capabilities delivers one fully-integrated, highly optimized environment which ensures
the desired results in a lower cost, lower risks, and high-business-value HANA initiative.
Contact Hitachi
If you would like to get in touch with the SAP team at Hitachi please email sap@hds.com. Further information can be found at
www.hds.com/go/sap or Hitachi Consulting: http://www.hitachiconsulting.com/hana.
HP SAP HANA solutions
Through a close, collaborative partnership that spans more than 20 years, HP and SAP have worked together to offer an innovative and
comprehensive portfolio of solutions that help customers of all sizes, in all industries, solve their business problems. This strategic partnership
has ultimately resulted in jointly developed solution offerings like HP AppSystems for SAP HANA.
HP AppSystems for SAP HANA incorporate hardware, software and services into predefined configurations for a powerful and
comprehensive solution that’s designed to work together. The portfolio includes:
Multiple single node configurations (XS, S, M, M+, L) based on industry-leading HP ProLiant DL580 and DL980 G7 Servers
An XL scale-0out configuration, based on industry-leading HP BladeSystem Servers, with fully automated fail over for high availability
HP’s Unique Value Proposition for SAP HANA
HP has worked with SAP on in-memory technologies from the beginning, and was the first SAP partner to design and deliver SAP
NetWeaver® Business Warehouse Accelerator in 2006. Based on that experience, HP has developed the core competencies to deliver
successful implementations of HP AppSystems for SAP HANA, and offers a portfolio of six configurations (XS, S, M, M+, L, XL) to meet the
needs of any size business.
HP has implemented more than 77,000 SAP installations worldwide, and HP infrastructure runs nearly half of all SAP installations in the
world. In fact, HP is a global leader in SAP operations, supporting 1.7 million users in over 50 countries, and has developed a core
competency for designing and building SAP appliance-based solutions, successfully implementing them on customer sites, and offering
industry-leading support services to ensure optimal performance throughout their lifecycle.
Industry Leading Technology — Optimized for SAP HANA
HP designed the HP AppSystems for SAP HANA on industry leading x86 HP ProLiant DL580 and DL980 G7 Servers for single node SAP
HANA implementations, and on HP ProLiant BL680 G7 Server Blades for larger scale-out requirements, providing a large contiguous memory
footprint for faster in-memory applications. The scale-out solution in the portfolio of HP AppSystems for SAP HANA is based on HP ProLiant
BL680c G7 Server Blades, the industry-leading blade solution that is ideal for SAP HANA scale-out implementations.
For the SAP HANA scale-out technology, HP delivers a unique storage platform based on the HP X9300 Network Storage System that offers
unlimited scale-out capability and disaster tolerant features. Designed to be extremely scalable, flexible, and cost-efficient, HP X9300 Network
Storage Systems deliver excellent performance and a modular storage infrastructure to accommodate unprecedented storage growth and
performance.
HP AppSystems for SAP HANA
Based on HP Converged Infrastructure products
Multiple configuration choices, sized for your company’s needs (XS, S, M, M+, L, XL)
HP ProLiant DL580 G7 Servers or HP ProLiant DL980 G7 Servers for XS to L single-node configurations
HP ProLiant BL680 G7 Server Blades for XL highly scalable configurations up to 8 TB of compressed data
HP Storage for log files and data files
HP X9300 Network Storage Systems for your scale-out cluster file system
HP Networking with HP Virtual Connect and ProCurve
HP ProLiant Service packages and HP Insight Control management software
HP Fast Start Service
HP Technology Support Services
SAP HANA T-Shirt sizes offered
Scale-out offering
HP offers a unique scale-out offering that provides the high availability your business demands today, and a future-ready solution that can
grow as your needs grow. This design significantly reduces the cost, difficulty and down-time associated with future field upgrades.
HP’s scale-out solution is based on proven, industry-leading technology including:
HP ProLiant BL680c G7 Server Blades, the blade solution that is ideal for SAP HANA scale-out implementations for balanced
computing to handle the most demanding enterprise class applications.
The HP X9300 IBRIX Network Storage System is a unique storage platform that offers unlimited scale-out capability and disaster
tolerant features.
HP P6500 Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVA) delivers high-throughput, mission-critical, redundant storage for data & log files, SYS files,
config files, traces and more.
HP networking solutions like HP Virtual Connect for simplifying and virtualizing the connectivity between the HANA blade nodes, the
network, and the shared storage.
High availability is provided through a stand-by blade with automatic failover. Disaster tolerance technology is also included with HP’s scale-
out solution. When SAP certifies a disaster tolerant solution for SAP HANA, HP’s scale-out appliance design is already equipped to handle this
functionality, so you can be assured it will meet your future demands.
High Availability and Disaster Recovery
With HP AppSystems for SAP HANA, HP has delivered a fully automated failover mechanism for high availability, a stand-by blade that
automatically is activated upon a failure of any node in the cluster. Only one node is needed, regardless of the number of nodes in the cluster.
 As mentioned earlier, disaster tolerance is designed into HP’s SAP HANA technology today, so once SAP HANA software is released with
disaster tolerance capability, HP’s scale-out solution is already equipped to enable this functionality.
Storage infrastructure
HP PCIe IO Accelerator for HP ProLiant Servers is a direct-attach, solid-state, PCIe card-based solution for application performance
enhancement. Based on Multi-Level Cell (MLC) and Single Level Cell (SLC) NAND Flash technology, these devices are ideal for accelerating IO
performance and maintaining SAP HANA log file data.
For mission-critical deployments and shared-storage infrastructures, HP X9300 IBRIX Network Storage System features an NFS cluster file
system and support for single-node high availability. It’s designed for high availability and extreme scalability while delivering excellent
performance and a modular storage infrastructure to accommodate unprecedented storage growth.
Additional Software
HP ensures global quality standards by pre-loading and configuring SAP HANA software at the factory before delivery. No additional software
is necessary for the HP AppSystems for SAP HANA. All solutions are built to your specifications and include all required components, services
and support.
However, optional monitoring and backup software solutions are available from HP to further enhance your solution. HP AppSystems for
SAP HANA can be monitored by means of HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM), available as a free download from HP. SIM is also available as
a component of the Insight Control suite of management software, which is available for purchase from HP.
Support Services
HP delivers a comprehensive solution that encompasses hardware, software, services and support from a single resource. HP delivers the full
lifecyle of services required to get from assessment and design of a SAP HANA solution to the build, implementation, and support of the
solution.
Design and Build
With every SAP HANA system, HP includes the resources to assist with the sizing and configuration of an SAP HANA environment. This
includes the sizing of the appropriate system, and recommendations on the configurations to address your requirements for multiple SAP
landscapes, high availability, and disaster tolerance. Then with every SAP HANA order, HP includes its core competency process for factory
integration where we integrate the hardware, load all software components, and apply your unique environmental settings for network and
source systems. And then the system completes a burn-in test before shipment to your location.
Implementation
Delivery of the SAP HANA appliance is not the final step. Beyond the design and build of a SAP HANA solution, implementation of the
solution into your environment is equally, if not more, critical to a successful experience with getting SAP HANA up and running. So HP
includes installation, implementation, and training with every SAP HANA solution we deliver. The basic foundational service includes the
following:
Incorporation of SAP HANA in the local network
Connection of SAP HANA to source systems
Implementation of basic security and authorizations
Configuration of SAP BusinessObjects front end or Microsoft® Excel to communicate with SAP HANA
Validation of the integrated environment and the end-to-end functionality of the SAP HANA system
Review of the access to, and use of, the SAP in-memory computing studio
Installation and configuration troubleshooting
Support
After a successful implementation, support of your SAP HANA solution is turned over to HP Services’ SAP support teams. HP includes both
proactive and reactive support to ensure the highest availability of the solution. For proactive support, you are assigned a local HP engineer
responsible for delivering an “Account Support Plan”, customized to fit your needs, and consisting of delivering updates to hardware firmware
and operating system, regular system health checks, and setup of remote monitoring. For reactive support, HP delivers support from SAP
HANA trained engineers in its mission-critical response center. This team is one of the most experienced teams in the industry for resolving
issues with SAP in-memory appliances. With a connection to SAP’s support operation, HP can take first call on any SAP HANA support issue.
Based on this well established process, HP is able to deliver industry best support and minimize downtime for SAP in-memory solutions.
Additional SAP HANA services from HP
HP provides services to help you identify your strategy, quantifying the business opportunity, computing the ROI, and implementing an HP
AppSystem for SAP HANA into your SAP landscape. These services were designed exclusively for SAP HANA, and include:
The HP Business Intelligence Master Plan Service is an overarching BI strategy development service designed to assist you in the
definition of a BI strategy and the design of a landscape to enable the realization of that strategy including a roadmap for
implementation.
The HP Impact Analysis for SAP HANA helps you understand the technical feasibility of introducing SAP HANA to meet real-time and
high-volume data analysis requirements, and is highly recommended for each SAP HANA implementation.
The HP Financial Assessment for SAP HANA provides granular information to support your decision process and is formatted to be
suitable for use in supporting budgeting processes.
 The HP Solution Assessment for SAP HANA is an engagement during which HP consultants will assess the existing information
landscape in detail, identify data sets for use with SAP HANA, identify any gaps in the current environment and create a solution
blueprint based on the findings.
The HP Landscape Preparation Service for SAP HANA is designed to ensure that the surrounding solution landscape is in place and
optimized in order to allow for the inclusion of the SAP HANA appliance and speed time-to-value of the SAP HANA solution. This
includes the upgrade or installation of SAP and non-SAP components in the landscape.
HP Fast Start Service includes required services that accompany the appliance to ensure the appliance is properly installed, database
connections are made, and the replication and extract, transform, load (ETL) of data from the source systems have been tested and
confirmed as fully functional.
The HP Implementation Service for SAP HANA is a complete end-to-end SAP HANA implementation based on a solution blueprint
designed by a team of HP consultants. HP consultants follow the HP Global Implementation Methodology for Business Intelligence for
all SAP HANA implementation projects
HP Migration Services — SAP HANA Appliance Software Service Pack 3 supports the deployment of an HP AppSystem for SAP HANA
as the database for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse. HP is offering a migration package for current SAP NetWeaver BW
customers to assist in migrating from their existing database to an HP AppSystem for SAP HANA. This migration package includes
complimentary phone assessment services, asset recovery services, financial services and migration services:
On-site migration assessment workshops
SAP NetWeaver BW upgrade service
SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3 migration to a database built on SAP HANA
SAP NetWeaver BW optimization for the SAP HANA database
Customer success stories
T-Mobile selected SAP HANA to help them address the challenge of tracking their customer promotions and offers in a timely manner. With
SAP HANA, they could process POS data in real time to evaluate what offers were successful, and even micro-segment their customers for
more effective real-time promotions.
The challenge: T-Mobile had an extremely short timeline to get their SAP HANA solution up and running. They contacted HP and asked if
we could get a HANA solution built, installed and implemented in less than 3 weeks.
HP delivered.
The T-Mobile requirements were captured and an SAP HANA system was sized and built in HP’s SAP HANA factory. HP then integrated the
hardware; loaded software, customer network and host settings; all delivered within 2 weeks. With HP Fast Start Service implementation, T-
Mobile was loading data, testing the reporting use case scenario within the 3-week timeline requirement.
The T-Mobile SAP HANA project is just one example of how customers can rely on HP to provide reliable, high-performance technology for
SAP HANA, and the services required to design, build, implement, and support for a successful implementation.
Contact information for inquiries
For more information, visit www.hp.com/go/sap/hana or contact your HP sales representative.
IBM Systems and Services Solutions for SAP HANA
SAP HANA deployed on IBM System x Workload Optimized Solutions with the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) offer simple, seamless
scalability for your SAP HANA environment. In addition, IBM offers installation and managed services to help you manage your SAP HANA
infrastructure cost-effectively. IBM Global Business Services (GBS) can help you extract the business value out of your SAP HANA
implementation.
IBM and SAP team for long-term business innovation
With a unique combination of expertise, experience and proven methodologies — and a history of shared innovation — IBM can help
strengthen and optimize your information infrastructure to support your SAP applications.
IBM and SAP have worked together for 40 years to deliver innovation to their shared customers. Since 2006, IBM has been the market
leader for implementing SAP’s original in-memory appliance, the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA). Hundreds of BWA
deployments have been successfully completed in multiple industries and countries. These BWA appliances have been successfully deployed in
many of SAP’s largest business warehouse implementations, which are based on IBM hardware and DB2 — optimized for SAP.
IBM and SAP offer solutions that move business forward and anticipate organizational change by strengthening your business analytics
information infrastructure for greater operational efficiency and offering a way to make smarter decisions faster.
IBM eX5 Systems with GPFS Power SAP HANA
SAP HANA, delivered on IBM eX5 enterprise servers with fifth-generation IBM® Enterprise X-Architecture® technology (eX5), helps transform
the enterprise by addressing current needs while delivering the robust scalability and performance needed to accommodate growth. SAP
HANA running on powerful IBM eX5 enterprise servers with the Intel Xeon processor E7 family combines the speed and efficiency of in-
memory processing with the ability to analyze massive amounts of business data — enabling companies to eliminate barriers between real-
time events and real-time business decisions.
IBM is the first to decouple memory and input/output (I/O) from the processor — moving processing power from what’s theoretically
possible to what’s actually possible. IBM System x servers with fifth-generation IBM eX5 technology enable SAP HANA customers to benefit
from a shared vision that delivers simplicity and automation designed to help organizations accelerate business outcomes while lowering TCO.
IBM eX5 enterprise servers with Intel Xeon processors offer extreme memory and performance scalability. With improved hardware
economics and new technology offerings, IBM is helping SAP realize a real-time enterprise with in-memory business applications. IBM eX5
enterprise servers deliver a long history of leading SAP benchmark performance.
These System x servers are equipped with processors from the Intel Xeon processor E7 family, which combine exceptional raw compute
power with increased memory bandwidth and support for significantly greater memory capacity to deliver superior performance to previous-
generation processors. With up to ten cores in each processor, the four-socket x3850 X5 can be scaled to 40 cores and 80 threads with the
use of Intel 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 features
such as Predictive Failure Alerts warn ahead of potential hardware failures, trigger preemptive action, and help maintain application
availability. In addition, eX5 features such as eXFlash solid-state disk technology can yield significant performance improvements in storage
access, helping deliver an optimized system solution for SAP HANA. Standard features in the solution such as the High IOPS MLC Duo
Adapter for IBM System x can also provide fast access to storage.
Workload Optimized Solutions
IBM offers several Workload Optimized Solution models for SAP HANA. These models, based on the 2-socket x3690 X5 and 4-socket x3950
X5, are optimally designed and certified by SAP and can be ordered as a single appliance part number. They are delivered preconfigured with
key software components preinstalled to help 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
the choice of only solid-state disk or a combination of spinning disk and solid-state disk. The x3950 X5–based configurations leverage the
scalability of eX5 and offer the capability to pay as you grow — starting with a 2-processor, 256 GB configuration and growing to a 8-
processor, 1 TB configuration.
The IBM System x3950 X5 is the workload-optimized version of the 4U x3850 X5 server, the new flagship server of the IBM x86 server
family. These systems are designed for maximum utilization, reliability, and performance for compute-intensive and memory-intensive
workloads such as SAP HANA. This server is ideal for the medium- and large-scale SAP HANA implementations. The x3950 X5–based
configurations integrate either the 320 GB High IOPS SD Class SSD PCIe adapter or the 640 GB High IOPS MLC Duo Adapter. Note: An 8-
socket configuration uses a scalability kit that combines the 7143-H2x* with the 7143-H3x* to create a single 8-socket, 1 TB system.
IBM and SAP have worked closely together to validate each of the workload-optimized configurations and have also collaborated on
performance testing. Performance testing of SAP HANA running on IBM eX5 enterprise servers and have demonstrated the ability to handle
10,000 queries per hour against 1.3 TB of data, returning results within seconds.
Outstanding results like this are founded on years of joint product development which allows IBM and SAP offerings to be integrated for
simplified implementation. This is true of IBM’s DB2 database which is tightly aligned with SAP HANA for seamless replication of data when
using the Sybase replication server.
Simple and 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 you to achieve larger SAP HANA memory sizes simply by adding compute nodes. IBM was
the first vendor to have multi-node scale-out configurations and currently has 4-node x3690 X5 and x3950 X5 and 16 node x3950 X5
solutions validated. You can start with one 256GB node, upgrade to a 512GB node, and grow your environment to 16 nodes. This modular
approach enables you to invest in a Workload-Optimized solution for SAP HANA and grow your infrastructure as your SAP HANA
environment grows. In addition, you can handle unplanned outages by including an additional High-Availability (HA) node in your
configuration.
These multi-node scale-out configurations do not require an external Storage Area Network (SAN) or multiple SANs. The IBM General
Parallel File System ™ (GPFS™) software in these configurations has the unique capability to use the storage contained within each node
helping to simplify the infrastructure required for SAP HANA. Only IBM has a High-Availability concept which allows customers to seamlessly
extend their installation to enable High Availability using GPFS replication and an additional stand-by node.
GPFS™, with its high-performance enterprise file management, can help move beyond simply adding storage to optimizing data
management for SAP HANA. High-performance enterprise file management using GPFS gives SAP HANA applications:
Performance to satisfy the most demanding SAP HANA applications
Seamless capacity expansion to handle the explosive growth of data SAP HANA environments
High reliability and availability to help eliminate production outages and provide disruption-free maintenance and capacity upgrades
Seamless capacity and performance scaling — along with the proven reliability features and flexible architecture of GPFS — help your
company foster innovation by simplifying your environment and streamlining data workflows for increased efficiency for SAP HANA
applications.
IBM Intelligent Cluster integrated packaging and assembly can help speed installation and deployment of multi-node scale-out HA
configurations as well as reduce implementation risk if you require all of your HANA server nodes preassembled and packaged in a rack.
By implementing SAP HANA on eX5 enterprise servers with GPFS, you can realize faster performance, less complexity and greater efficiency
from a powerful and proven converged infrastructure environment of integrated technologies. These workload-optimized solutions for SAP
HANA can help simplify operations, consolidate resources and dynamically migrate functionality as business changes, while delivering the
ability to quickly change the way users look at mass amounts of data without compromising data integrity or security.
For more information about the IBM Systems solution for SAP HANA and the IBM System x Workload Optimized Solutions for SAP HANA,
please read the IBM Redpaper: SAP In-Memory Computing on IBM eX5 Systems
Services to speed deployment
To help speed deployment and simplify maintenance of your x3690 X5 and x3950 X5: Workload Optimized Solution for SAP HANA, IBM Lab
Services and IBM Global Technology Services offer quick-start services to help set up and configure the appliance and health-check services to
ensure it continues to run optimally. In addition, IBM also offers skills and enablement services for administration and management of IBM
eX5 enterprise servers. IBM offers Quick Start implementation services to help you install and configure your SAP HANA appliance and
HealthCheck services to help you manage and maintain your SAP HANA appliance. IBM also offers skills enablement services to provide
technical training to your teams that need to manage the HANA appliance. If you determine that you do not want to manage the SAP HANA
appliance, then IBM offers a Managed Service that can provide 24x7 monitoring and management of the SAP HANA appliance.
A trusted service partner
Many clients require more than software and hardware products. They need a partner to help them assess their current capabilities, identify
areas for improvement and develop a strategy for moving forward. This is where IBM Global Business Services (GBS) provides immeasurable
value with thousands of SAP consultants in 80 countries. GBS combines its SAP implementation experience and skills with the broader IBM
business intelligence competencies to create an unparalleled opportunity for our clients to not only implement SAP HANA solutions, but to
then take that implementation to new heights and identify transformational opportunities.
The GBS HANA team within IBM has leveraged the experiences gained to date on SAP HANA offerings and grouped efforts into two main
opportunities for clients who wish to deploy SAP HANA — “Do New Things” and “Run Existing Things Faster”.
The GBS Consulting Practice offers a broad range of services for SAP HANA such as:
Discovery and assessment services to maximize business impact
Architecture assessment and benchmark services
Proof of concept services
Express deployment offerings, including industry best practices
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 eX5 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 massive amount of data produced daily.
The NEC High-Performance Appliance for SAP HANA incorporates the truly innovative in-memory 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 16 years.
Currently, NEC offers three certified SAP HANA models (XS, S and L size), with future plan towards offering an M-size model also.
All the NEC SAP HANA appliances are constructed on the Express5800 Scalable Enterprise Server that offers upward scalability to 8 sockets
and 2TB memory, fault-management functionalities through EXPRESSSCOPE ® Engine SP2, and ViridentTM FlashMax device for high-
workload environments.
Why Express5800 is ideal platform for SAP HANA
High-performance Express5800 Scalable Enterprise Servers, which leverage NEC’s long heritage in the development of supercomputer and
mainframe technologies to achieve highly fault tolerant and flexible system expandability, are leveraged as the platform for SAP HANA. The
flagship NEC Express5800/A1080a model has capabilities to mount up to 8CPUs and 2TB RAM within a single 7U chassis, and NEC
Express5800/A1040a also has capabilities to mount up to 4CPU and 1TB RAM.
One noteworthy hardware feature is its EXPRESSSCOPE® Engine SP2, a uniquely developed device by NEC based on our experience in
UNIX servers, enables to monitor and control Express5800/A1080a and A1040a with remote and centralized interface regardless of the power
status of servers. It significantly increases maintainability and reduces downtime of SAP HANA.

SAP HANA T-Shirt sizes offered

Support Infrastructure
Virident FlashMax — is a Storage Class Memory (SCM) solution that offers enterprises unconditional performance combined with the
industry’s highest storage capacity in the smallest footprint. FlashMAX has been designed from the ground up to fully exploit modern
computer architectures, such as SAP HANA, which leverage many fast CPU cores and the PCI Express interconnect bus to deliver maximum
application performance. It also offers supreme performance without compromise over the entire lifetime of the device, across all application
workloads, even when the device is full or nearly full.
The scale-up configurations of NEC High-Performance Appliance for SAP HANA leverage Virident FlashMax to implement Log volume
backup which is a key component to achieving smooth collaboration with existing database tools.
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 package-updates; 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 EXPRESSSCOPE® Engine SP2 of Express5800 servers and ESMPRO/ServerAgent installed 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 NEC sales representative in your region.
 Chapter 11
SAP HANA Projects and Implementation
“He who fails to plan is planning to fail.”
— W inston Churchill

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 the 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 in-memory technologies.9 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.
It All Starts with Good 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
your 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 Implementation — 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.
Service Provider 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
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
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 Reporting
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.

Accelerated Financial Reporting

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.
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 Reporting
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.

Accelerated Shipping Reporting

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.

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.

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-to-one 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 packaged solutions such as SAP Rapid Deployment solutions or
accelerators. These solutions contain preconfigured software, technical content, and implementation services, and they are priced and scoped
for rapid implementation.
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 real-time 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. Examples are:
SAP ERP Rapid Deployment solution for accelerated finance and controlling with SAP HANA
SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for profitability analysis with SAP HANA
SAP Rapid Deployment solution for customer segmentation with SAP HANA
SAP is continuously adding more Rapid Deployment solutions. To see what’s available today, visit: www.sap.com/solutions/rds.
Now that we’ve reviewed typical implementation scenarios, let’s review what a successful implementation requires.
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, deliverable-oriented 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 you 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.
Common 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.
 T he 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.
Custom SAP HANA Application in Use at 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 Database for SAP Business Warehouse 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, you’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 case complements the technical requirements.
Remember, technology intelligence doesn’t necessarily equal business intelligence!
2. Establish ROI metrics early in the scoping process. Build them into the project/solution to ensure that success can be properly
measured and quantified.
3. Ensure proper collaboration across application delivery teams (EPR, BW, CRM, reporting, etc.), depending on project requirements.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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 “real-time” and “self-
serve” can go a long way toward preventing misunderstandings concerning both the functionality to be delivered and the value it
brings.
7. 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-or-break 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.

9 Gard Little and Elaina Stergiades, IDC, Help Rethinking the Art of the Possible with SAP HANA Services, March 2012.
Chapter 12
SAP HANA Resources

COMING FALL OF 2012

 The rest of the story….

Since the SAP HANA Essentials book is being written in “real time”, this ebook version contains the first chapters that have been made
available. 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.
Please share the website and voucher code with your colleagues so they can benefit from the information in this book as well.
 About the Author

Jeffrey Word, Ph.D.

Follow Jeff on : @jeff_word

JBusiness
effrey is responsible for creating and communicating thought leadership on SAP’s In-Memory database strategy globally. His next book,
Process Integration with SAP ERP , will be released in Fall 2012. He is also the co-author of the bestselling books,
Integrated Business Processes with ERP Systems (2011), Essentials of Business Processes and Information Systems (2009),
Business Network Transformation: Strategies to Reconfigure Your Business Relationships for Competitive Advantage (2009)
and SAP NetWeaver for Dummies (2004).
Jeffrey has more than 18 years experience in IT strategy and business consulting working with Fortune 1000 companies. Over the last 13
years at SAP, he has worked on technology strategy with focus on corporate innovation initiatives and enterprise architecture design. Prior to
joining SAP, he worked in the high tech industry for several hardware and software vendors throughout the Americas and Europe in a variety
of leadership roles.
Dr. Word earned his PhD in Information Systems at Manchester Business School in England. His research focus was on event-driven
business process design and next-generation enterprise architecture. He also earned an MBA in International Management from the
Thunderbird School of Global Management and a BA in European Studies/Spanish from the University of Oklahoma.