Copyright © 2013 Epistemy Press LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning orotherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the priorwritten permission of the Publisher. For reproduction or quotation permission, please send a written request toinfo@epistemypress.com.

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The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge SAP’s kind permission to use its trademarks in this publication.

This publication contains references to the products of SAP AG. SAP, the SAP Logo, R/3, SAP NetWeaver, SAP HANA andother SAP products and services mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and inseveral other countries all over the world. Business Objects and the Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects, CrystalReports, Crystal Decisions, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius and other Business Objects products and services mentioned hereinare trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects in the United States and/or other countries. All otherproducts mentioned in this book are registered or unregistered trademarks of their respective companies.

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ISBNs:978-0-9856008-0-8 (ePub)978-0-9856008-1-5 (Kindle)

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About the Cover Image

he cover image is a European “No Speed Limit” sign. If you’ve ever driven on theAutobahn in Germany, this sign will immediately bring a smile to your face because

you can step on the accelerator and drive as fast as you want to or as fast as your car cango (which ever comes first). In terms of SAP HANA, we selected this image because SAPHANA allows your company to run at top speed with no artificial limit to how fast it cango. If you ever go visit SAP headquarters in Germany, you’ll see this sign about 2 milessouth of the Frankfurt airport on the A5 — and there’s no speed limit on your way to visitSAP.

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Note from the Author

ince this book is about the shift to “real-time” business, it’s fitting that we’ve beenwriting 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 downand solidify before writing each chapter and expect everyone to hold their breath until theentire book is finished and ready to print. And trust me, SAP HANA is moving extremelyfast 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 lotsof ossified rules of the game, we’ll be doing much the same with this book. Who says youhave 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 soldin a bookstore?

We’ve decided to break all those traditional publishing rules and release chapters asthey are finished and then release the remaining chapters as they are completed later.Since this is a “digital-only” book, it’s important that readers keep connected to learnabout the release of new chapters and content updates. That’s pretty easy: Follow thebook on twitter @EpistemyPress and @jeff_word, sign up for the email updates from thesaphanabook.com website when you register to download the ebook and keep watchingsaphana.com.

Table of Contents

1 SAP HANA OverviewUpdated details

2 SAP HANA Architecture3 SAP HANA Business CasesNew Chapter

4 SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA (NEW)5 SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Powered by SAP HANA (NEW)6 Data Provisioning with SAP HANA7 Data Modeling with SAP HANA8 Application Development with SAP HANA (NEW)9 SAP HANA Administration & Operations10 SAP HANA HardwareUpdated PAM, Huawei, Fujitsu & NEC sections

11 SAP HANA Projects & ImplementationUpdated RDS section and new advice section

12 SAP HANA Resources

A

Acknowledgments

lthough we’re at the beginning of this journey, many people have already beenphenomenally 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 bookprogresses.

Many thanks to all of you for your support and collaboration.— Jeff

SAP ColleaguesMargaret Anderson, Puneet Suppal, Uddhav Gupta, Storm Archer, Scott Shepard, BalajiKrishna, Daniel Rutschman, Ben Gruber, Bhuvan Wadhwa, Lothar Henkes, Adolf Brosig,Thomas Zureck, Lucas Kiesow, Prasad Ilapani, Wolfram Kleis, Gunther Liebich, RalfCzekalla, 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, LoriVanourek, Bill Lawler, Scott Leatherman, Kathlynn Gallagher, David Jonker, NarenChawla, David Porter, Steve Thibodeau

SAP MentorsThomas 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 PartnersLane Goode (HP), Tag Robertson (IBM), Rick Speyer (Cisco), Andrea Voigt (Fujitsu),

Nathan Saunders (Dell), KaiGai Kohei (NEC), Chris March (Hitachi)

ProductionRobert Weiss (Development Editor)Roland Schild, Holger Fischelmanns, Daniela Geyer, Markus May (Libreka/MVB)Michelle DeFilippo (1106 Design)

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

his book is designed to provide an introduction to SAP HANA to a wide range ofreaders, 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 everyonereads about SAP HANA, but will provide easy links to Level 2 technical content to continuelearning about the various sub-topics in more detail. The content is structured so thateveryone can begin with the introduction chapter and then skip to the subsequentchapters that most interest them. Business people will likely skip to the applications andbusiness case chapters while techies will jump ahead to the application development andhardware chapters. In fact, it would probably be odd if anyone actually read this bookfrom 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 fewcompromises in the scope and depth of the content in order to reach the widest possibleaudience. If we hadn’t, this would be a 10,000-page encyclopedia that only a fewhundred people would ever read. We’ve tried to make this book as easy to read aspossible to ensure that every reader can understand the concepts and get comfortablewith the big picture of SAP HANA. We’ve also tried to cover as many of the high-levelconcepts as possible and provide copious links to deeper technical resources for easyaccess. Hopefully, you will enjoy reading the chapters and find it quite easy to “punchout” to additional technical information as you go regardless of your level of technicalknowledge or business focus.

The knowledge you will find in this book is the first step on the journey to becoming areal-time enterprise, but in many ways, it is just the “tip of the iceberg”. We’re workingon 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 andother channels. Please refer to the last chapter to get a listing of additional freeinformation sources on SAP HANA.

Given the massive strategic impact of SAP HANA on the medium and long-term ITarchitectures of its customers, SAP felt that every customer and ecosystem partner shouldhave free access to the essential information they will need to understand SAP HANA andevaluate its impact on their future landscape. SAP sponsored the writing of this book andhas funded its publication as a free ebook to ensure that everyone can easily access thisknowledge.

SAP HANA is a rapidly evolving product and its level of importance to SAP customerswill continue to increase exponentially over the next several years. We will attempt toprovide updated editions of this book on a semi-annual basis to ensure that you caneasily access the most up-to-date knowledge on SAP HANA. Please continue to visit theSAP HANA Essentials website to download updated and revised editions when they arereleased (typically in May and November of each year). You can also follow@EpistemyPress on Twitter for updates.

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ForewordBy Vishal Sikka, Ph.D.Executive Board Member, SAP AG

ime magazine picked “The Protester” as its person of the year for 2011, recognition ofindividuals who spoke up around the world — from the Arab countries to Wall Street,

from India to Greece — individuals whose voices were amplified and aggregated bymodern technology and its unprecedented power to connect and empower us. Twitterand Facebook, now approaching 800 million users (more than 10% of humanity), areoften viewed as the harbinger of social networking. But social networking is not new. Arecent issue of the Economist described Martin Luther’s use of social networking,especially the Gutenberg press, to start the Protestant Reformation. During the AmericanRevolution, Thomas Paine published his Common Sense manifesto on a derivation of theGutenberg press. Within a single year, it reached almost a million of the 1.5 millionresidents of the 13 American colonies — about two-thirds of the populace, and helpedseed 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 ensuingconnectedness dissolves away intermediary layers of inefficiency and indirection. Some ofthe most visible recent examples of this dissolving of layers are the transformations wehave seen in music, movies and books. Physical books and the bookstores they inhabitedhave 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 gothoused in more convenient, more modular vessels, which better tie into our lives, in moreconsumable ways. In the process, layers of inefficiency got dissolved. By putting 3000songs 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 insidedarkrooms and studios. 3D printing is an even more dramatic example of thistransformation. The capabilities and services provided by workshops and factories arenow embodied within a printer that can print things like tools and accessories, food andmusical instruments. A remarkable musical flute was printed recently at MIT, its soundindistinguishable from that produced by factory-built flutes of yesterday.

I see layers of inefficiency dissolving all around us. An empowered populace gets moreconnected, and uses this connectivity to bypass the intermediaries and get straight at thethings it seeks, connecting and acting in real-time — whether it is to stage uprisings orrent apartments, plan travel or author books, edit pictures or consume apps by themillions.

And yet enterprises have been far too slow to benefit from such renewal andsimplification that is pervading other parts of our lives. The IT industry has focused on toomuch repackaging and reassembly of existing layers into new bundles, ostensibly to lowerthe costs of integrated systems. In reality, this re-bundling increases the clutter thatalready exists in enterprise landscapes. It is time for a rethink.

At SAP, we have been engaged in such rethinking, or intellectual renewal, as ourchairman and co-founder Hasso Plattner challenged me, for the last several years, andour customers are starting to see its results. This renewal of SAP’s architecture, andconsequently that of our customers, is driven by an in-memory product called SAP HANAwhich, together with mobility, cloud computing, and our principle of delivering innovationwithout disruption, is helping to radically simplify enterprise computing and dramaticallyimprove the performance of businesses without disruption.

SAP HANA achieves this simplification by taking advantage of tremendous advances inhardware 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 ofinformation very inexpensively. SAP HANA was designed from the ground-up to leveragethis, 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 performanceimprovement of over 100,000 times. But even more important is the opportunity torethink 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. Theempowered store-manager can determine these at the point of sale, as the transactionunfolds. With SAP HANA, batch processing is converting to real time, and businessprocesses are being rethought. Customers like Colgate-Palmolive, the Essar Group,Provimi, Charmer Sunbelt, Nongfu Spring, our own SAP IT and many others, have seenperformance improvements of thousands to tens of thousands times. SAP HANA bringsthese 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 ofthe traditional database underneath, delivering fundamental improvements inperformance and simplification, without disruption.

SAP HANA provides a single in-memory database foundation for managing transactionalas well as analytical data processing. Thus a complex question can be posed to real-timeoperational data, instead of asking pre-fabricated questions on pre-aggregated orsummarized data. SAP HANA also integrates text processing with managing structureddata, in a single system. And it scales simply with addition of more processors or moreblades. Thus various types of applications, across a company’s lines of businesses, andacross application types, can all be run off a single, elastically-scalable hardwareinfrastructure: a grand dissolving of the layers of complexity in enterprise landscapes. SAPHANA hardware is built by various leading hardware vendors from industry standardcommodity components, and can be delivered as appliances, private or public clouds.While this architecture is vastly disruptive to a traditional relational databasearchitecture, to our customers it brings fundamental innovation without disruption.

Looking ahead, I expect that we will see lots of amazing improvements similar toYodobashi’s. Even more exciting, are the unprecedented applications that are now withinour reach. By my estimate, a cloud of approximately 1000 servers of 80-cores and 2terabytes of memory each, can enable more than 1 billion people on the planet tointeractively explore their energy consumption based on real-time information from theirenergy meters and appliances, and take control of their energy management. Themanagement and optimization of their finances, healthcare, insurance, communications,entertainment and other activities, can similarly be made truly dynamic. Banks canmanage risks in real-time, oil companies can better explore energy sources, mining vastamounts of data as needed. Airlines and heavy machinery makers can do predictivemaintenance on their machines, and healthcare companies can analyze vast amounts ofgenome data in real time. One of our customers in Japan is working on using SAP HANAto analyze genome data for hundreds of patients each day, something that wasimpossible before SAP HANA. Another customer is using SAP HANA to determine optimalroutes for taxicabs. The possibilities are endless.

Just as the iPod put our entire music libraries in our pockets, SAP HANA, combined withmobility and cloud-based delivery, enables us to take our entire business with us in ourpocket. Empowering us to take actions in real time, based on our instincts as well as ouranalysis. To re-think our solutions to solving existing problems — and to help businessesimagine and deliver solutions for previously unsolved problems. And it is thisempowerment and renewal, driven by purposeful technologies, that continually brings usall forward.

Dr. Vishal Sikka is a member of the Executive Board of SAP AG and heads thetechnology and innovation areas.

E

Chapter 1

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

very industry has a certain set of “rules” that govern the way the companies in thatindustry 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 disruptionoccurs that changes the rules or even the entire game. SAP HANA is one of thosemassively 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 publishingindustry. The book industry has operated under the same basic rules since Gutenbergmechanized the production of books in 1440. There were a few subsequent innovationswithin the industry, primarily in the distribution chain, but the basic processes of writing abook, 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 writingof 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 a500+ year-old industry in less than 5 years.

Today, SAP HANA is disrupting the technology industry in much the same way thatAmazon and Apple have disrupted the publishing industry. Before we discuss how thishappens, we need to consider a few fundamental rules of that industry.

The IT Industry: A History of Technology ConstraintsThroughout the history of the IT industry, the capabilities of applications have alwaysbeen constrained to a great degree by the capabilities of the hardware that they weredesigned to run on. This explains the “leapfrogging” behavior of software and hardwareproducts, where a more capable version of an application is released shortly after anewer, more capable generation of hardware — processors, storage, memory, and so on— is released. For example, each version of Adobe Photoshop was designed to maximizethe 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 mostpowerful PC. In contrast, the latest version, when run on current hardware, can performthe 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 ofmainframe systems, all of the software — specifically, the applications, operating system,and database — was designed to maximize the hardware resources located inside themainframe as a contained system. The transactional data from the application and thedata used for reporting were physically stored in the same system. Consequently, youcould either process transactions or process reports, but you couldn’t do both at the sametime or you’d kill the system. Basically, the application could use whatever processingpower was in the mainframe, and that was it. If you wanted more power, you had to buya bigger mainframe.

The Database Problem: BottlenecksWhen SAP R/3 came out in 1992, it was designed to take advantage of a new hardwarearchitecture — client-server — where the application could be run on multiple, relativelycheap application servers connected to a larger central database server. The majoradvantage of this architecture was that, as more users performed more activities on thesystem, you could just add a few additional application servers to scale out applicationperformance. Unfortunately, the system still had a single database server, so transmittingdata from that server to all the application servers and back again created a hugeperformance bottleneck.

Eventually, the ever-increasing requests for data from so many application serversbegan to crush even the largest database servers. The problem wasn’t that the serverslacked sufficient processing power. Rather, the requests from the application servers gotstuck in the same input/output (IO) bottleneck trying to get data in and out of thedatabase. To address this problem, SAP engineered quite a few “innovative techniques”in their applications to minimize the number of times applications needed to access thedatabase. Despite these innovations, however, each additional database operationcontinued to slow down the entire system.

This bottleneck was even more pronounced when it came to reporting data. Thetransactional data — known as online transaction processing, or OLTP — from documents

such as purchase orders and production orders were stored in multiple locations withinthe database. The application would read a small quantity of data when the purchasingscreen was started up, the user would input more data, the app would read a bit moredata from the database, and so on, until the transaction was completed and the recordwas updated for the last time. Each transactional record by itself doesn’t contain verymuch data. When you have to run a report across every transaction in a process forseveral months, however, you start dealing with huge amounts of data that have to bepulled 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 andthen sort the data into reports. This process requires the system to pull a massiveamount of data from the database, which essentially prevents users from doing anythingelse in the system while it’s generating the report. To resolve this problem, companiesbegan to build separate OLAP systems such as SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse tocopy the transaction data over to a separate server and offload all that reporting activityonto a dedicated “reporting” system. This arrangement would free up resources for thetransactional system to focus on processing transactions.

Unfortunately, even though servers were getting faster and more powerful (andcheaper), the bottleneck associated with obtaining data from the disk wasn’t gettingbetter; in fact, it was actually getting worse. As more processes in the company werebeing automated in the transactional system, it was producing more and more data,which would then get dumped into the reporting system. Because the reporting systemcontained more, broader data about the company’s operations, more people wanted touse the data, which in turn generated more requests for reports from the database underthe reporting system. Of course, as the number of requests increased, the quantities ofdata that had to be pulled correspondingly increased. You can see how this vicious (orvirtuous) cycle can spin out of control quickly.

The Solution: In-Memory ArchitectureThis 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 addedextensive internet and integration capabilities to its applications. SAP NetWeaver addedmany new users and disparate systems that talked to the applications in the SAPlandscape. Again, the greater the number of users, the greater the number of applicationservers that flooded the database with requests. Similarly, as the amount of operationaldata in the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse database increased exponentially, so didthe number of requests for reports. Looking forward, SAP could see this trend becomingeven more widespread and the bottleneck of the database slowing things down more andmore. SAP was concerned that customers who had invested massive amounts of time andmoney 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 thetransactional and analytic databases from increasing numbers of analytics users andmobile users. Both the volume of data and the volume of users requesting data were nowgrowing thousands of times faster than the improvements in database I/O.

Having become aware of this issue, in 2004 SAP initiated several projects to innovatethe core architecture of their applications to eliminate this performance bottleneck. Theobjective was to enable their customers to leverage the full capabilities of theirinvestment in SAP while avoiding the data latency issues. The timing couldn’t have beenbetter. It was around this time that two other key factors were becoming moresignificant: (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 thepressure on already stressed systems to analyze more data more quickly. The SAPprojects resulted in the delivery of SAP HANA in 2011, the first step in the transition to anew in-memory architecture for enterprise applications and databases. SAP HANA flipsthe old model on its head and converts the database from the “boat anchor” that slowseverything down into a “jet engine” that speeds up every aspect of the company’soperations.

SAP’s Early In-Memory ProjectsSAP has a surprisingly long history of developing in-memory technologies to accelerate itsapplications. Because disk I/O has been a performance bottleneck since the beginning ofthree-tier architecture, SAP has constantly searched for ways to avoid or minimize theperformance 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 thatcontained complex algorithms that needed a great deal of readily accessible data.

The Beginnings: LiveCache and SAP BWAWhen SAP introduced Advanced Planning Optimizer (APO) as part of its supply chainmanagement application in the late 1990s, the logistics planning algorithms required asignificant speed boost to overcome the disk I/O bottleneck. These algorithms — some ofthe most complex that SAP has ever written — needed to crunch massive amounts ofproduct, production, and logistics data to produce an optimal supply chain plan. SAPsolved this problem in 1999 by taking some of the capabilities of its open-sourcedatabase, 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 copyof all of the relevant application logic and master data needed in memory, thuseliminating the need to make multiple trips back and forth to the disk. LiveCache workedextremely 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 latencyissue for SAP customers.

In 2003, a team in SAP’s headquarters in Waldorf, Germany, began to productize aspecialized search engine for SAP systems called TREX (Text Retrieval and informationEXtraction). TREX approached enterprise data in much the same way that Googleapproaches internet data. That is, TREX scans the tables in a database and then createsan index of the information contained in the table. Because the index is a tiny fraction ofthe size of the actual data, the TREX team came up with the idea of putting the entireindex in the RAM memory of the server to speed up searches of the index. When thistechnology became operational, their bosses asked them to apply the same technique toa much more imposing problem: the data from a SAP BW cube. Thus, Project Euclid wasborn.

At that time, many of the larger SAP BW customers were having significantperformance issues with reports that were running on large data cubes. Cubes are thebasic mechanism by which SAP BW stores data in multidimensional structures. Runningreports 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 toincrease performance, but had run out of options in the application layer. The onlyremaining solution was to eliminate the bottleneck itself. In the best spirit of disruptiveinnovators, the TREX team devised a strategy to eliminate the database from theequation 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 queryresponses for the same reports on the same data thousands of times faster than the oldsystem. Eventually, the team discovered how to package Euclid into a stand-alone serverthat 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 somesenior-level meetings with Intel to formulate a joint-engineering project to optimizeIntel’s new dual-core chips to natively process the SAP operations in parallel, therebyincreasing performance exponentially. Intel immediately sent a team to SAP headquartersto begin the optimization work. Since that time the two companies have continuouslyworked together to optimize every successive generation of chips.

In 2005, SAP launched the product SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence Accelerator, orBIA. (The company subsequently changed the name to SAP NetWeaver BusinessWarehouse Accelerator, or BWA) BWA has since evolved into one of SAP’s best-sellingproducts, with one of the highest customer satisfaction ratings. BWA solved a huge painpoint for SAP customers. Even more importantly, however, it represented anothersuccessful use of in-memory. Along with LiveCache, the success of BWA proved to SAPand its customers that in-memory data processing just might be an architectural solutionto database bottlenecks.

The Next Step: The Tracker ProjectOnce the results for BWA and LiveCache began to attract attention, SAP decided to takethe next big step and determine whether it could run an entire database for an SAPsystem in memory. As we’ll see later, this undertaking is a lot more complicated than itsounds. Using memory as a cache to temporarily store data or storing indexes of data inmemory were key innovations, but eliminating the disk completely from the architecturetakes the concept to an entirely different level of complexity and introduces a great dealof unknown technical issues into the landscape.

Therefore, in 2005, SAP decided to build a skunkworks project to validate and test theidea. The result was the Tracker Project. Because the new SAP database was in an earlyexperimental stage and the final product could seriously disrupt the market, the TrackerProject was strictly “Top Secret,” even to SAP employees.

The Tracker team was composed of the TREX/BWA engineers, a few of the keyarchitects from the SAP MaxDB open-source database team, the key engineers who builtLiveCache, the SAP ERP performance optimization and benchmarking gurus, and severaldatabase experts from outside the company. Basically, the team was an all-star lineup ofeveryone 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 SAPHANA).

In the mid-1990s, several researchers at Stanford University had performed the firstexperiments to build an in-memory database for a project at HP Labs. Two of theStanford researchers went on to found companies to commercialize their research. Oneproduct was a database query optimization tool known as Callixa, and the other was anative in-memory database called P*Time. In late 2005, SAP quietly acquired Callixa andP*time (as well as a couple of other specialist database companies), hired several of themost distinguished database geniuses on the planet, and put them to work with theTracker team. The team completed the porting and verification of the in-memorydatabase on a server with 64gb of RAM, which was the maximum supported memory atthe time.

In early 2006, less than four months after the start of the project, the Tracker teampassed its primary performance and “reality check” goal: the SAP Standard ApplicationBenchmark for 1000 user SD two-tier benchmark with more than 6000 SAPs, whichessentially 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 MicrosoftSQL to SAP and pass the benchmark the first time. Passing the benchmark in such a shorttime with a small team — in total secrecy — was a truly amazing feat. Suddenly, anentirely new world of possibilities had opened up for SAP to fundamentally change therules of the game for database technology.

Shortly after achieving this milestone, SAP began an academic research project toexperiment 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 researchersexamined the prototypes from the Tracker team — now called NewDB — and addedsome valuable external perspectives on how to mature the technology for enterpriseapplications.

However, passing a benchmark and running tests in the labs are far removed from thelevel of scalability and reliability needed for a database to become the mission-criticalheart 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 softwareadvisor, announced SAP’s vision for delivering an entirely in-memory database layer forits application portfolio. If you haven’t seen his keynote speech, it’s worth watching. Ifyou saw it when he delivered it, it’s probably worth watching again. It’s Professor Plattnerat his best.

Different Game, Different Rules: SAP HANAOne year later, SAP announced the first live customers on SAP HANA and that SAP HANAwas 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 theserevelations 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 theworld of “real-time business”.

In November 2011, SAP achieved another milestone when it released SAP BusinessWarehouse 7.3. SAP had renovated this software so that it could run natively on top ofSAP HANA. This development sent shockwaves throughout the data warehousing world

because almost every SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse customer could immediately3

replace their old, disk-based database with SAP HANA. What made this new architectureespecially attractive was the fact that SAP customers did not have to modify their currentsystems to accommodate it. To make the transition as painless as possible for itscustomers, SAP designed Business Warehouse 7.3 to be a non-disruptive innovation.

Innovation without DisruptionClay Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma was very popular reading among theTracker team during the early days. In addition to all the technical challenges of buildinga completely new enterprise-scale database from scratch on a completely new hardwarearchitecture, SAP also had to be very thoughtful about how its customers wouldeventually adopt such a fundamentally different core technology underneath the SAPBusiness Suite.

To accomplish this difficult balancing act, SAP’s senior executives made the team’sprimary objective the development of a disruptive technology innovation that could beintroduced into SAP’s customers’ landscapes in a non-disruptive way. They realized thateven the most incredible database would be essentially useless if SAP’s customerscouldn’t make the business case to adopt it because it was too disruptive to their existingsystems. The team spoke, under NDA, with the senior IT leadership of several of SAP’slargest customers to obtain insights concerning the types of concerns they would haveabout such a monumental technology shift at the bottom of their “stacks.” The customersprovided some valuable guidelines for how SAP should engineer and introduce such adisruptive innovation into their mission-critical landscapes. Making that business caseinvolved much more than just the eye-catching “speeds and feeds” from the rawtechnology. SAP’s customers would switch databases only if the new database wasminimally disruptive to implement and extremely low risk to operate. In essence, SAPwould have to build a hugely disruptive innovation to the database layer that could beadopted and implemented by its customers in a non-disruptive way at the businessapplication layer.

The Business Impact of a New ArchitectureWhen viewed from a holistic perspective, the entire “stack” needed to run a Fortune 50company 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 inventorymore accurately, sell their products more effectively, manufacture their products moreefficiently, and purchase materials economically. At the same time, however, it also hadto 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” associatedwith it. For example, one public company might require 10 days to complete its quarterlyclosing process, while its primary competitor accomplishes this task in 5 days — eventhough both companies are using the same SAP software to manage the process. Whydoes 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 executionof 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 andbetween the various process steps. Some of that waiting is due to human activities, suchas lunch breaks or meetings. Much of it, however, occurs because people have to waitwhile their information systems process the relevant data. The old saying that “time ismoney” is still completely true, and “latency” is just a nice way of saying “money wastedwhile waiting.”

As we discussed earlier, having to wait several minutes or several hours or even severaldays to obtain an answer from your SAP system is a primary contributor to processlatency. It also discourages people from using the software frequently or as it wasintended. Slow-performing systems force people to take more time to complete theirjobs, and they result in less effective use of all the system’s capabilities. Both of thesefactors introduce latency into process execution.

Clearly, latency is a bad thing. Unfortunately, however, there’s an even darker side toslow systems. When businesspeople can’t use a system to get a quick response to theirquestions or get their job done when they need to, they invent workarounds to avoid theconstraint. The effort and costs spent on “inventing” workarounds to the performancelimitations of the system waste a substantial amount of institutional energy andcreativeness 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 nolonger have to wait for the system, and the information they need to make moreintelligent decisions is instantly available at their fingertips. Thus, companies that employin-memory systems are operating in “real time.” Significantly, once you remove all of thelatency from the systems, users can focus on eliminating the latency in the other areas ofthe 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 FlexibilityIn addition to speeding up database I/O throughput and simplifying the enterprise systemarchitecture, SAP also had to innovate in a third direction: business flexibility. Over theyears, SAP had become adept at automating “standard” business processes for 24different industries globally. Despite this progress, however, new processes werespringing up too fast to count. Mobile devices, cloud applications, and big data scenarioswere creating a whole new set of business possibilities for customers. SAP’s customersneeded a huge amount of flexibility to modify, extend, and adapt their core businessprocesses to reflect their rapidly changing business needs. In 2003, SAP released theirservice-oriented architecture, SAP NetWeaver, and began to renovate the entire portfolioof SAP apps to become extremely flexible and much easier to modify. However, none ofthat flexibility was going to benefit their customers if the applications and platform thatmanaged those dynamic business processes were chained to a slow, inflexible, andexpensive database.

The only way out of this dilemma was for SAP to innovate around the databaseproblem entirely. None of the existing database vendors had any incentive to change thestatus quo (see The Innovator’s Dilemma for all the reasons why), and SAP couldn’tafford to sit by and watch these problems continue to get worse for their customers. SAPneeded to engineer a breakthrough innovation in in-memory databases to build thefoundations for a future architecture that was faster, simpler, more flexible, and muchcheaper to acquire and operate. It was one of those impossible challenges that engineersand business people secretly love to tackle, and it couldn’t have been more critical toSAP’s future success.

Faster, Better, CheaperThere’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, andcheaper than the generation it is replacing, or customers won’t purchase it. GeoffreyMoore has some great thoughts on how game-changing technologies “cross the chasm.”He maintains, among other things, that faster, better, and cheaper are fundamentalcharacteristics that must be present for a successful product introduction.

In-memory computing fits the faster, better, cheaper model perfectly. I/O is hundredsto thousands of times faster on RAM than on disks. There’s really no comparison in howrapidly 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 integrationwith the apps, hybrid row/column store, and ease of operations. Finally, when youcompare the cost of an in-memory database to that of a disk-based database on theappropriate 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 reductionof superfluous layers and unnecessary tasks.

But faster, better, cheaper is even more important than just the raw technology. If youreally look at what the switch from an “old” platform to a “new” platform can do foroverall usability of the solutions on top of the platform, there are some amazingpossibilities.

Take the ubiquitous iPod for example. When Apple introduced the iPod in 2001, itrevolutionized the way that people listened to music, even though it wasn’t the first MP3player on the market. The key innovation was that Apple was able to fit a tiny 1.8-inchhard drive into its small case so you could carry 5gb of music in your pocket, at a timewhen most other MP3 players could hold only ~64mb of music in flash memory. (This is aclassic illustration of “changing the rules of the game.”) I/O speed wasn’t a significantconcern for playing MP3s, so the cost per megabyte per second calculation wasn’t terriblyrelevant. By that measure, 5gb of disk for roughly the same price as 64mb of RAM was ahuge difference. It wasn’t significantly faster than its competitors, but it was sophenomenally better and cheaper per megabyte (even at $399) that it became acategory killer.

In hindsight, Apple had to make several architectural compromises to squeeze thathard drive into the iPod. First, the hard drive took up most of the case, leaving very littleroom for anything else. There was a tiny monochrome display, a clunky mechanical “clickwheel” user interface, a fairly weak processor, and, most importantly, a disappointinglyshort 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 elseout there it soon took over the market.

Fast-forward six years, and Apple was selling millions of units of its most currentversion of the “classic” iPod, which contained 160gb of storage, 32 times more than theoriginal 5gb model. Significantly, the new model sold at the same price as the original. Inaddition to the vastly expanded storage capacity, Apple had added a color screen and apressure-sensitive “click wheel.” Otherwise, the newer model was similar to the originalin most ways.

By this time, however, the storage capacity of the hard drive was no longer such a bigdeal. Hard drives had become so enormous that nobody had enough music to fill them. Infact, in 2001 people had been thrilled with 5gb of storage, because they could downloadtheir entire CD collection onto the iPod. Meanwhile, Moore’s law had been in effect forfour 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 2001model.

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 hugeimpact on Apple’s design parameters, for several reasons. First, it enabled the companyto shrink the thickness and reduce the weight of the iPod, making it easier to carry andstore. In addition, it created more room for a bigger motherboard and a larger display. Infact, Apple could now turn the entire front of the device into a display, which itredesigned as a touch-screen interface (hence the name iPod Touch). Inserting a biggermotherboard in turn allowed Apple to insert a larger, more powerful processor in thedevice. Most importantly, however, eliminating the physical hard drive more than doubledthe battery life since there were no more mechanical disks to spin.

These innovations essentially transformed a simple music player into a miniaturecomputer that you could carry in your pocket. It had an operating system, long batterylife, 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 alsomake 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, itonly made sense that developers would build new applications to exploit the capabilitiesof 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 platformuntil they removed the single biggest piece of the architecture that was imposing all theconstraints. Ironically, it was the same piece of technology that made the original iPod sosuccessful. Think about that for a second: Apple had to eliminate the key technology inthe iPod that had made them so successful in order to move to the next level of successwith the iPod Touch and the iPhone. Although this might seem like an obvious choice inretrospect, 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 technologydecision Apple made to deliver the iPod Touch, iPhone, and, eventually, the iPad. Most ofthe 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 decisionfreed Apple to innovate without constraints and allowed them to change the rules of thegame again, back to the memory-as-storage paradigm that the portable music playermarket had started with.

SAP is convinced that SAP HANA represents a similar architectural shift for itsapplication platform. Eliminating the disk-based database will provide future customerswith a faster, better, and cheaper architecture. SAP also believes that this newarchitecture, like the solid-state memory in the iPod, will encourage the development of anew 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 overalliPod sales. So, somebody must be buying the “old” iPods and Apple must be making some money off of them, but do youknow anyone who’s bought a hard-drive based iPod in the last five years? You’d have to really need all that storage to giveup 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 — sothey’ll continue to support that option, but they’re predicting a similar adoption trend once the SAP Business Suite issupported on SAP HANA. At that point, you’ll need an overwhelmingly compelling business reason to forego all thegoodness of the new architecture and renovated SAP apps on top of SAP HANA.

In-Memory BasicsThus far, we’ve focused on the transition to in-memory computing and its implications forIT. 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 computingthat you’ll need to understand. Some of these concepts might be similar to what youalready know about databases and server technology. There are also some cutting-edgeconcepts, 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 withlimited RAM. As we have seen, in these systems slow disk I/O was the main bottleneck indata throughput. Today, multi-core CPUs — multiple CPUs located on one chip or in onepackage — are standard, with fast communication between processor cores enablingparallel processing. Currently server processors have up to 64 cores, and 128 cores willsoon be available. With the increasing number of cores, CPUs are able to processincreased 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 completedatabases in RAM. Significantly, this arrangement shifts the performance bottleneck fromdisk I/O to the data transfer between CPU cache and main memory (which is alreadyblazing fast and getting faster).

In a disk-based database architecture, there are several levels of caching andtemporary storage to keep data closer to the application and avoid excessive numbers ofround-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 physicaldatabase 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 adatabase 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 ifyou really want to get down into the details. What follows here is a brief summary ofsome of the key advantages of SAP HANA over its aging disk-based cousins.

Pure In-Memory DatabaseWith SAP HANA, all relevant data are available in main memory, which avoids theperformance penalty of disk I/O completely. Either disk or solid-state drives are stillrequired for permanent persistency in the event of a power failure or some othercatastrophe. This doesn’t slow down performance, however, because the required backupoperations to disk can take place asynchronously as a background task.

Parallel ProcessingMultiple CPUs can now process parallel requests in order to fully utilize the availablecomputing resources. So, not only is there a bigger “pipe” between the processor anddatabase, but this pipe can send a flood of data to hundreds of processors at the sametime so that they can crunch more data without waiting for anything.

Columnar and Row-Based Data StorageConceptually, a database table is a two-dimensional data structure with cells organized inrows 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 asa sequence of records, each of which contains the fields of one row. Conversely, incolumn storage the entries of a column are stored in contiguous memory locations. SAPHANA is a “hybrid” database that uses both methods simultaneously to provide anoptimal balance between them.

The SAP HANA database allows the application developer to specify whether a table isto be stored column-wise or row-wise. It also enables the developer to alter an existingtable 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 isthe 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 columnscontain 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 tomany 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 wouldbe low.Neither aggregations nor fast searching is required.The table has a small number of rows (e. g., configuration tables).

CompressionBecause of the innovations in hybrid row/column storage in SAP HANA, companies cantypically achieve between 5x and 10x compression ratios on the raw data. This meansthat 5TB of raw data can optimally fit onto an SAP HANA server that has 1TB of RAM. SAPtypically recommends that companies double the estimated compressed table data todetermine the amount of RAM needed in order to account for real-time calculations, swapspace, OS and other associated programs beyond just the raw table data.

Persistence LayerThe SAP HANA database persistence layer stores data in persistent disk volumes (eitherhard disk or solid-state drives). The persistence layer ensures that changes are durableand 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 poweris lost, the data in RAM is lost. However, because the persistence layer manages restorepoints and backup at such high speeds (from RAM to SSD) and recovery from disk to RAMis so much faster than from regular disk, you actually “lose” less data and recover muchfaster than in a traditional disk-based architecture.

SAP HANA Architectural OverviewNow that we’ve discussed the key concepts underlying in-memory storage, we can focusmore specifically on the SAP HANA architecture. As we noted earlier, conceptually SAPHANA is very similar to most databases you’re familiar with. Applications have to put datain and take data out of the database, data sources have to interface with it, and it has tostore and manage data reliably. Despite these surface similarities, however, SAP HANA isquite 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” thatmake 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 activitiesand problems you find in regular databases. Second, it includes all of the standardapplication interfaces and libraries so that developers can immediately get to work usingit, without re-learning any proprietary APIs.

SAP HANA in-memory appliance

Finally, SAP HANA comes with several ways to connect easily to nearly any sourcesystem 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 beand to make it a non-disruptive addition to your existing landscape. We’ll spend a fewmoments here explaining these capabilities at a basic level. We’ll discuss them in muchmore technical detail in the SAP HANA Architecture chapter.

Programming Interfaces for SAP HANA

SQLSQL is the main interface for client applications. The SQL implementation of the SAPHANA 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 areavailable for creating tables as both row-based and column-based tables and forconversion between the two formats. For most SQL statements it is irrelevant whetherthe table is column-based or row-based. However, there are some features — forexample, time-based queries and column-store specific parameters — that are supportedonly for columnar tables.

SQLScriptThe SAP HANA database has its own scripting language, named SQLScript, that offersscripting capabilities that allow application-specific calculations to run inside thedatabase. SQLScript is similar conceptually to “stored procedures,” but it contains severalmodern innovations that make it much more powerful and flexible.

MDX InterfaceThe SAP HANA database also supports MDX (MultiDimensional eXpressions), the de factostandard for multidimensional queries. MDX can be used to connect a variety of analyticsapplications like SAP Business Objects products and clients such as Microsoft Excel.

EnginesThe core of the SAP HANA database contains several engines that are used for specifictasks. The two primary engines are the planning engine and the calculation engine.

Planning EngineThe SAP HANA database contains a component called the planning engine that allowsfinancial planning applications to execute basic planning operations in the database layer.

Calculation EngineWhat truly makes SAP HANA unique is that, in addition to its being a standard SQLdatabase, it also natively supports data calculation inside the database itself. Byincorporating procedural language support — C++, Python, and ABAP — directly into thedatabase kernel through a dedicated calculation engine, it can achieve exceptionalperformance because the data do not need to be moved out of the database, processed,and then written back in.

LibrariesThe technical details of communicating with the SAP HANA database are contained in aset 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 clientsODBC driver for Windows/Unix/Linux clients, especially for MS Office integrationDBSL (Database Shared Library) for ABAP

Business Function LibrarySAP has leveraged its deep application knowledge from the ABAP stack to port specificfunctionality as infrastructure components within SAP HANA to be consumed by anyapplication logic extension. Examples of common business functions are “currencyconversion” and “calendar functionality.”

SAP HANA StudioThe SAP HANA Studio is the primary interface for developers, administrators, and datamodelers. It is based on the open-source Eclipse framework, and it consists of threeperspectives: the administration console, the information modeler, and lifecyclemanagement.

The administration console of the studio allows system administrators to administerand monitor the database. It includes database status information as well as functions tostart/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 newdata models or modify existing ones.

The lifecycle management perspective provides an automated SAP HANA servicepack (SP) for updates using the SAP Software Update Manager for SAP HANA (SUM forSAP HANA).

Data Modeling in SAP HANABusiness and IT users can either create on-the-fly non-materialized data views or buildreusable ones on top of standard SQL tables via a very intuitive user interface, whichutilizes SQLScript and stored procedures to perform business logic on the data models.Information models created in SAP HANA can be consumed directly by Business ObjectsBI clients or indirectly by using the Universe/Semantic Layer built on top of SAP HANAviews.

Information models in SAP HANA are a combination of attributes/dimensions andmeasures. 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 attributeviews.

3. Calculation views are used to create custom data sets to address complex businessrequirement using database tables, attribute views, and analytical views in on-the-fly calculations.

In traditional databases, users experience bottlenecks when changing businessrequirements requires modifications to the existing data model, which required users todelete and re-load data into materialized views. In contrast, in SAP HANA, dynamic datamodeling on the lowest granular level is loaded into the system. These raw data areconstantly available in memory for analytical purposes, and they are not pre-loaded incache, physical aggregate tables, index tables, or any other redundant data storage.

Data Provisioning for SAP HANASAP HANA offers both real-time replication and near real-time/batch replication to movedata from source systems to the SAP HANA database. Replication-based data provisioninglike Sybase Replication Server or SAP SLT (System Landscape Transformation) providenear 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 thesource to SAP HANA based on triggers such as table updates. SAP SLT can also be usedto “direct write” data back to the source system in scenarios where “write back” or “roundtrip” synchronization to the SAP source system is needed.

ETL-based data provisioning is primarily accomplished with SAP BusinessObjects DataServices (DS). DS loads snapshots of data periodically as a batch and is triggered fromthe target system. The type of data provisioning tool used is primarily determined by thebusiness 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 sourcesystems 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 andmigration projects. Trigger-Based Data Replication using SLT is based on capturingdatabase changes at a high level of abstraction in the source SAP system. It benefits frombeing database and OS agnostic, and it can parallelize database changes on multipletables or by segmenting large table changes. SLT can be installed on an existing SAPsource system or as an additional lightweight SAP system side-by-side with the sourcesystem.

Real-Time Replication with Direct Write/Write-back

SAP HANA also supports real-time replication with direct write using database sharedlibrary (DBSL) connection. Using DBSL, the SAP HANA database can be connected as asecondary database to an SAP ECC system and provide accelerated data processing forexisting SAP applications. Applications can use the DBSL on the application server layer tosimultaneously 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 therelevant business data from virtually any source system (SAP and non-SAP) to the SAPHANA database. SAP BusinessObjects Data Services is a proven ETL tool that supportsbroad connectivity to databases, applications, legacy, file formats, and unstructured data.It provides the modeling environment to model data flows from one or more sourcesystems along with transformations and data cleansing.

SAP HANA Database AdministrationThe SAP HANA Studio Administration Console provides an all-in-one environment forSystem Monitoring, Back-up & Recovery, and User provisioning.

System Monitoring

The Administration console provides tools to monitor the system’s status, its services, andthe consumption of its resources. Administrators are notified by an alert mechanism whencritical situations arise. Analytics and statistics on historical monitoring data are alsoprovided to enable efficient data center operations and for planning future resourceallocations.

Backup & Recovery

The Administration console in the SAP HANA Studio supports the following scenarios:

Recovery to the last data backupRecovery to both the last and previous data backupsRecovery to last state before the crashPoint-in-time recovery

In the event of disaster scenarios such as fires, power outages, earthquakes orhardware failures, SAP HANA supports Hot Standby using synchronous mirroring with theredundant data center concept — including a redundant SAP HANA system — in additionto Cold Standby using a standby system within one SAP HANA landscape, where thefailover is triggered automatically.

User Provisioning

SAP HANA supports user provisioning with authentication, role-based security andanalysis authorization using analytic privileges. Analytical privileges provide security tothe analytical objects based on a set of attribute values. These values can be applied to aset of users by assigning them to user/role.

SAP HANA HardwareSAP HANA is delivered as a flexible, multipurpose appliance that combines SAP softwarecomponents 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 theway 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 notimpose 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 databaseinstance, which equates to a maximum of 32TB of RAM and 128 CPUs with 1280 totalcores. 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, andthe SAP software. It may also add specific best-practices and configuration. The vendorfinalizes the installation with on-site setup and configuration of the SAP HANAcomponents, including deployment in the customer data center, connectivity to thenetwork, Solution Manager setup, SAP router connectivity, and SSL support. The customerthen establishes connectivity to the source systems and clients, including the deploymentof additional replication components on the source system(s) and, potentially, theinstallation and configuration of SAP BusinessObjects business analytics clientcomponents.

Although the term “appliance” suggests a “black box” that plugs into an outlet, inreality installing SAP HANA requires on-site activities and coordination on a high technicallevel. The appliance approach for SAP HANA systems reduces the implementation andmaintenance effort significantly, but it does not eliminate it completely.

SAP HANA Use CasesBecause 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 itshybrid table structure, however, it really shines in scenarios that involve both types ofdata. 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 keyuse cases that are most typical for SAP HANA deployments today, and we’ll considersome potential future scenarios.

In its current form, SAP HANA can be used for four basic types of use case: agile datamart, a primary database for the SAP Business Suite, a primary database forSAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, and a development platform for newapplications. As SAP HANA matures and SAP renovates its entire portfolio of solutions totake advantage of all the horsepower in SAP HANA, you can expect to see nearly everyproduct that SAP provides supported natively on SAP HANA as a primary database, aswell as many more new “native-HANA” applications.

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

Agile Data MartThe 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 centralhub to collect data from a few SAP and non-SAP source systems and then display somefairly 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 existinglandscape and (2) providing an immediate, focused solution to an urgent businessanalytics problem. These projects are also typically completed very quickly, sometimes injust a few weeks, because the business problem is well known and the relevant data andsource systems are easily identified. SAP HANA is set up as a stand-alone system in thelandscape, which is then connected to the source systems and displayed to a smallnumber of users in a simple Web-based or mobile user interface. This process involveszero disruption to the existing landscape, and companies get instant value because theycan 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” becausethey perform a few of the same functions as a traditional data mart — ETL, datamodeling, 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 thesescenarios were either completely impossible to build in a traditional database architectureor they were so cost prohibitive that companies could not justify building them. Thescenarios might be straightforward, but the deficiencies of the “old” database world madethem “unfixable.”

You can access the videos listed below to listen to a few highly satisfied customerstalking 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 SAPHANA that includes the extractors and connectors needed to obtain data from sourcesystems and the front-end tools needed to build analytical applications on top of thedata.

SAP Business SuiteThe second major scenario where SAP HANA is being used is to accelerate transactions

and reports inside the SAP Business Suite. As of mid-2013, SAP HANA can now be used asthe primary database under every application in the SAP Business Suite (excl. SAP SRM).SAP HANA can be set up as either a stand-alone system in the landscape, side-by-sidewith the database under the SAP Business Suite applications or as the primary databasefor the entire SAP Business Suite. In this scenario, however, SAP HANA is being used to“off load” some of the transactions or reports that typically take a long time (hours ordays) 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 Suitecan be very slow, due primarily to the slow I/O of the disk-based database underneaththe 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 manydifferent tables in order to run its calculations and present a result. Reports are also verydata-intensive, involving vast amounts of data contained in multiple tables. For bothtransactions 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 thechanges back to the database. Quite often, this process is iterative, meaning that theuser must run the report or transaction, review the results, make some changes, and thenrun the report or transaction again to reflect the changes. Imagine a scenario whereevery 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 oreven a day or two to run that transaction or report? Clearly, system latency can seriouslyslow down the entire company.

Please see the chapter on SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA for many moredetails.

Eliminating System Latency: The Case of Hilti

To illustrate severe system latency, let’s consider the case of Hilti, the global constructiontools manufacturer. Hilti used to generate a list of 9 million customers from 53 milliondatabase 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 thetime the system took to generate that list came from simply retrieving the records off thedisk-based database. Once the data were conveyed to the SAP application, the algorithmonly took a few fractions of a second to calculate. This major — and unnecessary — delaywas the epitome of “latency.”

To eliminate this latency problem, Hilti set up an SAP HANA system next to theirproduction SAP ERP system and then copied the relevant tables into SAP HANA. Theresults? 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, theusers didn’t even realize there had been any change to the system until they ran thereport 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, thecompleted 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 problematictransactions or reports in an SAP Business Suite application. We’ll discuss this topic that indetail in the chapter on the Accelerated SAP Business Suite. In summary, SAP has alreadydelivered the content for most of the truly problematic transactions and reports as part ofthe latest service packs for the SAP Business Suite — for free. Once the relevant tableshave been replicated to the SAP HANA system, there is a quick change in theconfiguration screen to redirect the transaction to read from the SAP HANA databaseinstead 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 alsoset up special fixed-price, fixed-scope SAP rapid deployment solutions (RDS) to assistcustomers in the rapid implementation of these “accelerated” transactions and reports.

Accelerated SAP ERP Transactions and ReportsYou can expect to see many more “problem” transactions and reports generated atpreviously unimaginable speeds as SAP introduces enhancement pack updates to SAPHANA. Here’s a short listing of some of the SAP ERP transactions and reports that arecurrently available:

Sales Reporting

Quickly identify top customers and products by channel — with real-time salesreporting. Improve order fulfillment rates and accelerate key sales processes at thesame time, with instant analysis of your credit memo and billing list.

Financial Reporting

Obtain immediate insights across your business — into revenue, customers, accountspayable and receivable, open and overdue items, top general ledger transaction, anddays 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 canbetter 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 acomplete 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 BusinessObjectsPlanning and Consolidation 10.0, version for SAP NetWeaver aims to increase agilityby helping enterprises harness big data to plan better and act faster with betterinsight into all relevant information and rapid write-back. The application is plannedto be the first enterprise performance management (EPM) application to support theSAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse component, powered by SAP HANA announcedlast year. SAP intends to allow customers running the application that have investedin SAP HANA to leverage the power of in-memory computing technology to boostperformance by accelerating planning and consolidation processing.

SAP CO-PA Accelerator

SAP CO-PA Accelerator dramatically improves the speed and depth of working withmassive volumes of financial data in ERP for faster and more efficient profitabilitycycles. The solution helps finance departments to perform real-time profitabilityreporting on large scale data volumes and to conduct instant, on-the-fly analysis atany level of granularity, aggregation, and dimension. Furthermore, finance teams canrun cost allocations at significantly faster processing time and be empowered witheasy, self-service access to trusted profitability information.

This solution can also be implemented alongside the wider SAP BusinessObjectsEnterprise Performance Management solutions portfolio to help organizations create acomplete picture of their cost and profit drivers.

You can try the solution on your own with the SAP CO-PA Accelerator TestDrive andvisit the website to discover how organizations are generating significant businessvalue with the solution.

SAP Finance and Controlling Accelerator

SAP Finance and Controlling Accelerator supports finance departments with instantaccess to vast amounts of ledger, cost and material ledger data in ERP as well aseasy exploration of trusted and detailed data. The solution offers four implementationscenarios — Financial Accounting — Controlling — Material Ledger — and ProductionCost 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, accelerateperiod-end closing, and make smarter decisions.

SAP Sales Pipeline Analysis

With SAP Sales Pipeline Analysis powered by SAP HANA, sales departments can getreal-time insight into massive volumes of pipeline data in CRM while performing onthe fly calculations and in-depth analysis on any business dimension. Sales managerscan now leverage the power of SAP HANA combined with SAP Customer RelationshipManagement (CRM) for complete and instant visibility of accurate and consolidatedpipeline data. They can react more quickly to changing sales conditions with real-timeinformation, and accelerate deals through the pipeline with powerful and user-drivenanalytics. As a result, best-run businesses can unlock hidden revenue opportunities aswell as significantly increase profits and sales effectiveness.

SAP Customer Segmentation Accelerator

T he SAP Customer Segmentation Accelerator helps marketing departments buildhighly specific segmentations on high volumes of customer data and at unparalleledspeed. Marketers can now work with large amounts of granular data to betterunderstand customer demands, behaviors and preferences — targeting the preciseaudience 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 margincustomers, and react quicker to optimize campaigns and tactics.

You can view a demonstration of the solution and discover how organizations likeyours are generating significant business value by visiting this website.

SAP HANA Rapid Deployment SolutionsA 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 deploymentsolutions streamline the implementation process bringing together software, bestpractices, and services ensuring maximum predictability with fixed cost and scopeeditions.

SAP Rapid Deployment solutions leverage an innovative delivery model to acceleratethe implementation times and lower risk. Implementation is supported by a standardizedmethodology, accelerators developed uniquely for each offering, and predefined bestpractices, meeting typical business requirements to address the customer’s immediateneeds. Even as customers benefit from prebuilt functionality, these solutions provide aplatform designed to evolve and extend as the customer’s business grows.

SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions are available through SAP as well as SAP partners bytraditional licensing or subscription pricing, transparency of price and scope eliminateproject risks for companies. A good example is the SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution foroperational 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 SAPHANA 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 SAPHANA Gain access to large volumes of secure and detailed data from cost andmaterial ledgers — quickly and easily. By running SAP HANA, you can improvedecision making through accelerated reporting, analyses, and period-end closings.

SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for operational reporting with SAP HANA Quicklyand affordably generate insightful reports from sales to shipping — in real time —using our operational reporting solution with SAP HANA. Rely on in-memorytechnology to process high volumes of data quickly, and get ready to transformdecision-making business-wide.

SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for profitability analysis with SAP HANA Analyzemassive amounts of profitability data in enterprise resource planning (ERP) (CO-PA)faster than ever before. Our ERP profitability analysis solution with SAP HANA canhelp you perform real-time reporting and conduct instant, on-the-fly analysis — formore profitable decision making across your enterprise.

SAP rapid-deployment solution for customer segmentation with SAP HANA SAP HANAcombined with SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can help you analyzeand segment massive amounts of customer data in real time. You can target theprecise audience with the right offers across customer segments, tactics, andchannels.

SAP rapid-deployment solution for sales pipeline analysis with SAP HANA Gain instantinsight into massive volumes of sales pipeline data while performing on-the-flycalculations 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 theapplications 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 includesadditional replication tools needed for the connections to the SAP source system.

SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Powered by SAP HANAIn this scenario, companies replace the entire database under their SAP BW 7.3 systemwith 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 thefirst SAP application that was renovated and updated to natively run on SAP HANA as itsprimary run-time database. Most of these renovations were necessary to more closely tiethe 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 impossiblefor the application to “see” anything in the database other than bare tables. Once theabstraction layer is removed, the SAP BW application cannot only “see” everything in thedatabase, but the entire database is designed around the needs of that specificapplication. 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-partyarchitectures. Because the entire database under the SAP BW system physically sits inmemory, 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 thenreleased the SAP HANA-enabled version into general availability in April 2012. SAP NWBW on SAP HANA is now Generally Available to all customers globally. All of the SAPHANA-specific enhancements were bundled into the SPS05 update, and customers whohad already upgraded to 7.3 could install the service pack and migrate to SAP HANA in amatter of days (seriously).

Red Bull was the first live customer of SAP BW on SAP HANA. They told the world abouttheir amazing 10-DAY project to get up and running at the Sapphire Now 2011 conferencein Madrid, Spain. The whole effort was incredibly non-disruptive. SAP is seeing similarresults with the other customers in the ramp-up project. All of the changes on the SAPBW side are delivered “under the hood” in the service pack, and the database migrationcan be performed without any changes to the SAP BW application. All of the customer’scontent and configuration are completely unchanged. Have a look at the end-to-endmigration guide for a great overview of the SAP BW database migration process. Youshould also read a great blog post by John Appleby, a consultant who performed one ofthe first SAP BW on SAP HANA migrations.

The speed and flexibility acquired by replacing the old database with SAP HANA reflecttwo fundamental benefits of keeping the entire database in memory: (1) Thisarchitecture eliminates the need to send huge amounts of data between application andDB servers, and (2) it allows users to execute performance-critical operations directly onthe data in the database itself. Basically, running SAP BW on SAP HANA completelyeliminates 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 thetechnical enhancements in the SAP BW on SAP HANA chapter.

SAP offers a specific “run-time only” license option to utilize SAP HANA as the primarypersistence layer for SAP BW. If you are already an SAP BW customer, the company offersseveral options for license credits based on previous SAP BW and BWA licensing. Consultyour SAP account executive for the details. SAP has also set up a special migration fundto 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 applicationplatform. If the speed and simplification that were achieved by porting SAP BW are anyindication, users can realize an unbelievable amount of value not only by renovatingexisting applications (SAP and non-SAP) to run natively on SAP HANA, but by also buildingentirely new applications that are designed from scratch to maximize SAP HANA’spowerful capabilities. The performance limitations of traditional databases and processingpower have often led organizations to compromise on how to deploy business processeson their enterprise platforms. Now, these organizations can choose to liberate themselvesfrom these constraints and optimize business processes in ways that are more natural tothe way their employees actually perform their work. This is where SAP sees a clearparallel to the Apple App Store evolution. When Apple first released the App Store, mostof the first apps available were “mobile-ized” versions of desktop or Web apps (email,browser, etc.). However, once developers considered the possibilities of combining thenew 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 SAPHANA.” 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 HANASAP is delivering a new class of solutions on top of the SAP HANA platform that providereal-time insights on big data and state-of-the-art analysis capabilities. These innovativesolutions can empower organizations to transform the way they run their businesses bymaking smarter and faster decisions, responding more quickly to events, unlocking newopportunities, and even inventing new data-driven business models and processes thatwere 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 HANAApplications chapter.

SAP BusinessObjects Sales Analysis for Retail powered by SAP HANA

This solution provides retailers with real-time access to critical information and allowsnearly real-time interactive analysis, which is not possible with traditional databasetechnology. 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. SAPBusinessObjects Sales Analysis for Retail aims at providing the integration needed forimproved 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 throughthe use of prebuilt dashboards, interactive reports and more than 70 KPIs andinventory management to provide retailers with the ability to identify critical stockand margin issues through close inventory alignment.

SAP Smart Meter Analytics

SAP Smart Meter Analytics is a “native-HANA” application that was designed for utilitycompanies facing an exponential increase in data volume driven by their deploymentof smart meters. This new application enables utility companies to turn massivevolumes of smart meter data into powerful insights and transform how they engagecustomers and run their businesses. With SAP Smart Meter Analytics, utilitycompanies can:

Instantly aggregate time of use blocks and total consumption profiles to analyzetheir customers’ energy usage by what neighborhood they are in, the size oftheir homes or businesses, building type, and by any other dimension and at anylevel of granularitySegment customers with precision based on energy consumption patterns thatare automatically generated by identifying customers that have similar energyusage behaviorProvide energy efficiency benchmarking based on statistical analysis so thatutility companies can help their customers understand where they standcompared to their peers and how they can improve their energy efficiencyEmpower customers with direct access to energy usage insights via web portalsand mobile devices connected to SAP Smart Meter Analytics via web services

These capabilities delivered by SAP Smart Meter Analytics enable utility companiesto increase adoption of service options such as demand response programs, launchtargeted energy efficiency programs, improve fraud detection capabilities, anddevelop new tariffs and more accurate load forecasts.

SAP Sales & Operations Planning

SAP Sales & Operations Planning is a next generation planning application that ispowered 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 dimensionRapid, interactive simulation and scenario analysis, using the full S&OP datamodel to support demand-supply balancing decisionsEmbedded, context-aware social collaboration enables rapid planning anddecision-making across the organization

These capabilities enable companies to align demand and supply profitably, reducesupply chain costs, and drive revenue growth.

SAP Supplier InfoNet

SAP Supplier InfoNet is a cloud-based solution, powered by SAP HANA, that enablescompanies to:

Minimize supply chain disruption by proactively monitoring and predicting real-time supply risks across a multi-tier supplier networkDrive stronger supplier performance by benchmarking supplier performance foryour company against others in the business network and identifying significantshifts and trends in supplier performance using leading-edge machine learningand statistical analysisManage your supply base by aggregating and transforming supplier data todeliver 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 proactivelymonitor 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 categoryCreate a personal watch list of items like car seats, cribs, strollers and so onTrack allergen related recallsShare relevant recalls with othersRead 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 Facebookapp:

iPhone app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/recalls-plus/id499200328Facebook app: https://apps.facebook.com/recallsplus

Partner-built Applications for SAP HANA

The SAP partner ecosystem provides thousands of SAP-certified software solutions thatplug into SAP’s applications to provide a variety of value-added extensions and processenhancements. From that perspective, anything that speeds up an SAP system will alsohave 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 toincrease their own performance — and to keep up with the turbocharged SAP systemscoming on top of SAP HANA in the future.

Regardless of the programming language these partner apps are written in, they all canbe ported over to SAP HANA in a fairly straightforward way. However, just as SAP isrenovating its existing applications, partners too can approach re-platforming as anopportunity to rethink some of the design parameters that they employed in the originalsolution design and to rebuild their apps to take advantage of SAP HANA’s many benefitsnatively.

Oversight Systems is one of the first ISVs to renovate their SAP-certified solution alongthese lines. Oversight Systems provides solutions that continuously monitor user activities— in real-time — inside SAP systems to detect policy violations and potentially fraudulenttransactions, 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/Operformance from databases. Therefore, the addition of SAP HANA underneath theirsolution makes perfect sense.

Custom Applications for SAP HANAAs stated earlier, SAP HANA is a full-blown, do-just-about-anything-you-want applicationplatform. It speaks pure SQL and it includes all of the most common APIs, so you canliterally 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 thelimit 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 afew unique situations. For example, if you’re building an enterprise-scale application for abusiness scenario that (1) needs to search or aggregate huge volumes of data, (2)requires detailed/granular data analysis and/or complex algorithmic or statisticalcalculations, 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 certainlycan do that (really fast). Nevertheless, the most exciting use cases SAP is seeing for SAPHANA as the foundation of custom apps are situations where a company has an urgentbusiness need that is literally impossible to automate today due to the limitations oftraditional databases or the lack of a supercomputer. If you’re a business owner who hasa killer idea that fits the above description, then SAP HANA could be the solution thatmakes the impossible, possible.

This is where the “Angry Birds” analogy really starts to make sense. Once the SAPecosystem of ISVs, SAP partners, and SAP customers starts to unleash their innovation ontop of SAP HANA, there literally is no limit to the amazing and game-changingapplications they can build. It is incredibly important for SAP to renovate its portfolio andbuild amazing new applications to exploit the vast potential of SAP HANA. It is even moreimportant, however, for the SAP ecosystem to do this, because there are millions ofunrealized business ideas in their companies that SAP HANA can bring to life.

SAP HANA RoadmapThe future roadmap for SAP HANA is actually very simple: Continue to make SAP HANAfaster, better, cheaper — plus BIGGER and BROADER.

Moore’s law doesn’t look as though it’s going to be slowing down anytime soon. It islikely, then, that we’re only a few years away from having more than 1000 cores and10TB of RAM on a single “medium” SAP HANA server. With that much processing powerand high-speed RAM available, there really are no limits to how fast SAP can speed up itsown apps and literally any other app on the planet. SAP will continue co-innovating withIntel and other hardware partners to ensure that SAP HANA is continuously updated andoptimized to take advantage of the latest and greatest technology advances to becomeeven faster than it is today.

Although the speed boost generated by the hardware is exciting, it is only half of theequation. Renovating applications to take advantage of the ever-increasing horsepower isalso critical. There’s a great deal of value that can be achieved by doing things “better” inthe applications. Renovating and re-imagining how applications work and how they dealwith data in the “no constraints” paradigm represents a fundamental philosophical shiftfor application developers. There are enormous opportunities to streamline, optimize, andsimplify application architectures by adding SAP HANA as the database engineunderneath them. SAP will invest an enormous amount of resources to extend SAPHANA’s capabilities as an application platform for both its own applications and non-SAPapplications. This investment will result in an increasingly rich and robust set of developertools to renovate and re-imagine any application and to build amazing new applications.

This opportunity for optimization and simplification not only makes things even fasterthan just the hardware speed boost, it also results in significantly lower TCO forcompanies. SAP HANA can have a massive impact on reducing TCO and improvingbusiness value. “Cheaper” isn’t achieved only through industry-standard processors, RAM,and servers. Cheaper is a holistic mindset that starts from application design and thenprogresses through user efficiency all the way to administration and operations. SAP willcontinue to invest heavily in many areas to make SAP HANA the cheapest and mostefficient database to operate in production environments. These efforts includeinnovating in new landscape configurations such as native cloud deployments of SAPHANA.

Significantly, however, SAP isn’t satisfied to “only” be the fastest, best, and cheapestdatabase on the planet. SAP’s goals also include enabling the BIGGEST data scenarios byoffering integrated solutions with Sybase “Big Data” products and open-source projectslike Hadoop.

In November of 2012, SAP showed the extreme scalability of SAP HANA by showcasinga 250TB RAM SAP HANA system with 250 nodes.

In addition, with a robust ecosystem of ISVs, system integrators, and SAP customersbuilding their innovative applications on SAP HANA, SAP intends to become theBROADEST database platform for new applications. In just the first year since SAP HANAbecame available, over 100 startups have been founded to harness this power to drivetheir innovation. Just as Apple provided the platform for App Store developers, SAP willprovide SAP HANA as a platform for thousands of amazing new enterprise applications forthe ecosystem.

SAP customers need to understand that SAP HANA not only is the engine that powersthe current generation of SAP applications, but it will be the growth engine for all kinds ofamazing NEW SAP apps. Over the next few years, SAP HANA will become the primarydatabase 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 apassionate commitment to innovate for the future of its ecosystem, and the benefits ofthis shift for SAP’s customers and partners are too overwhelming for the company to doanything less.

SAP HANA will be the heart and soul of SAP’s “real-time data platform” design

philosophy to renovate all existing applications and build amazing new applications. Therenovation work is moving very quickly inside SAP, so much so that it has surpassed eventhe most optimistic timelines. The SAP BW renovation and porting to SAP HANA was thefirst major step towards a completely renovated SAP Business Suite. The next major stepwas the release of its flagship application, SAP Business Suite — SAP CRM, SAP SCM, SAPPLM on SAP HANA. In parallel, SAP is adding SAP HANA to all of the other applications inthe 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 avoidthe I/O bottleneck associated with the database. Unfortunately, these “databaseavoidance techniques” have resulted in extensive “plaque” buildup inside theapplications, in the forms of redundant code, tedious data aggregations andtransformations, replication of data, and so on. These problems were “necessary evils” towork 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 thesystem.

Obviously, SAP’s renovation efforts will involve a great deal of streamlining andcleanup. At the same time, however, this renovation also represents a golden opportunityfor SAP’s engineers to reimagine all of the things that these applications do from theperspective of living in a world with no constraints. These experts can question theiroriginal assumptions, invent better ways of doing things, remove latency from theprocesses, and program their applications to perform calculations more efficiently deepinside the database. All of these developments will lead to lower TCO and more flexibilityfor 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 thecode of all of their apps with a fresh eye and ambitious dreams free from constraints hasrekindled a firestorm of innovation within the SAP development group. The coffee cornersin SAP labs around the world are literally buzzing with new ideas and passionatediscussions. In fact, you can often see code samples from these discussions written onthe windows because the participants ran out of whiteboard space (as in the movie “ABeautiful Mind”). This is the “intellectual renewal” that SAP executives have been talkingabout, and it is having a monumental impact on the speed and volume of innovationcoming from SAP. SAP HANA has literally awakened a sleeping giant of innovation insideSAP. Moreover, this enthusiasm appears to be contagious: People are witnessing thesame type of awakening throughout the SAP ecosystem.

In the long run, once the entire SAP portfolio has been “HANA-fied,” 8 SAP will be ableto deliver a vastly simplified landscape for its customers. By merging OLAP and OLTP intoa single SAP HANA instance, SAP can provide a massive reduction in layers and TCO inthe landscape while at the same time providing much more flexibility and business valuethrough real-time access to all of the relevant data. It will take SAP several years toengineer 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 beextraordinarily fast and exciting.

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

2 Woods, D. and Word, J. (2004), SAP NetWeaver for Dummies, Wiley Publishing Inc., Indianapolis, IA.

3 With the SAP HANA RDS migration package customers can migrate in ~7 weeks, if they are already on BW 7.3 SP7, withUnicode, and 7.x data flows and authorizations.

4 Magal, S. and Word, J. (2011), Integrated Business Processes with ERP Systems, John Wiley & Sons. Hoboken, NJ

5 People always ask “if all the data is in volatile storage like RAM, what happens if the power goes out?” We’ll talk aboutthat in more detail later, but basically, SAP HANA has some very sophisticated backup tools to prevent data loss fromdisasters.

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 weeks for most customers who are already running SAP BW 7.3.

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

Chapter 2

SAP HANA Architecture

COMING FALL 2013

Chapter 3

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

Introduction

“SAP HANA is really, really fast!”Unless you’ve missed all the SAP marketing blurbs, analyst reports, and trade articles

over the past year, it’s pretty likely that you know that SAP HANA is an incredibly fastdatabase. In fact, SAP HANA is sometimes more than 100,000 times faster thantraditional databases for query response times.

So what???In general, “fast” is regarded as a positive attribute for a product. However, that quality

alone is seldom sufficient to justify a purchase. If you can’t figure out how a super-fastdatabase can help you run your business better, then how can you justify the expenseand effort required to buy and implement it?

The approach to building a business case presented in this chapter avoids the “speedsand feeds” argument that has long plagued the software industry. Instead, it examineshow SAP HANA can enable organizations to execute their business processes more quicklyand efficiently. It also focuses on the value of the real-time information that SAP HANAmakes available, as well as the resulting level(s) of business value it delivers. Theprimary goal of this chapter is to help you address and answer the “So what?” questionand to provide some guidelines on how to construct a convincing business case in order

to justify an investment in the SAP HANA platform.

Why Do You Need A Business Case, Anyway?There are various reasons for building a convincing business case, and the relativeimportance of each reason will vary from organization to organization. Some of the mostfundamental reasons are:

To demonstrate overall business value for the projectTo provide an initial financial justification for purchase and implementationTo ensure that the project is aligned with the organization’s business goals and/orinitiativesTo establish the base-line expectations for subsequent assessment of the project’ssuccessTo provide internal documentation explaining the expected business benefits tousers (and possibly to other departments in the organization)

A well-developed business case is not just a collection of data. Rather, it is also acollection of opinions and views from relevant stakeholders — both supporters anddetractors — as well as representation from both the business and IT departments.

If the primary goal of a business case project is to calculate total cost of ownership(TCO) and/or return on investment (ROI) of an investment in new software, then thatcase will likely provide an incomplete and potentially unreliable forecast of the quality ofthat investment. An effective business case must quantify not only the tangible valueproposition of the project but also the intangible value, because both metrics arecomponents of overall business value.

A strong business case for SAP HANA typically includes multiple use cases or projects —concrete examples of how the organization will utilize the product in the course ofbusiness. The key here is to “Think big, start small.” The big picture helps shape the long-term value from the investment, but starting small enables you to build in quick wins thatestablish success early and then continue to build business momentum with laterprojects.

Going further, some uses cases should reflect “stretch” goals — ambitious projects thatmay span several years. At the same time, they should include projects that not only canbe implemented quickly, but also demonstrate measurable business value. The finalcollection of use cases can then be used to build a roadmap for current and futuredeployments of SAP HANA. The roadmap will balance each project›s business valueagainst the corresponding difficulty of implementation and/or risk involved. This approachwill enable your organization to prioritize its various projects in a thoughtful andcomprehensive manner, thus maximizing the likelihood that the entire initiative will beapproved.

MethodologyFor each business case you build, we recommend the following multistep approach:

1. CREATE the storyline2. ADD the financial dimension3. TIE it all together

The first step, creating the storyline, is fundamental to any SAP HANA business case.The storyline is what makes the business case unique to your organization. The use casesin the storyline should map to goals and processes that distinguish your organization fromthe competition.

After you have created a viable storyline, the next step is to add the financialdimension. No matter how impressive the story, by itself it isn’t sufficient to obtainfunding for the project. Adding the financial dimension extends the storyline to theexpected business value and provides some quantitative measures that can be used inthe evaluation process.

After these two steps have been completed, the final step is to package up thebusiness case in a format that is appropriate for the individuals who will evaluate theproject.

We will discuss each of these steps in greater detail throughout this chapter. Before weproceed, however, we need to consider the fundamental concept of business value.

Levels of ValueWe’ve mentioned business value a couple of times already in this chapter. Exactly whatdo we mean by this term?

“Business value” actually covers a relatively wide range of benefits, both quantitativeand qualitative. Moreover, there are different levels, or degrees, of business value. Thechart below illustrates a useful model for categorizing these levels. This model identifiesthree levels: Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Transformation. Let’s take a closer look at eachone.

1. Efficiency

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

IT Efficiency

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

Reducing the annual maintenance costs of older applications and databasesReducing the internal costs of enhancing or upgrading softwareReducing the IT FTE resources required to manage older applications anddatabasesReducing the hardware infrastructure to simplify administration and minimize floorspace/carbon footprint

Business Efficiency

The Business Efficiency level extends beyond issues that are purely related to the ITdepartment. However, business efficiency/productivity is only an intermediate step inassessing the overall value of a project.

Line of Business Examples:

To better identify the most promising sales opportunitiesTo gain an enhanced perspective on cost driversTo increase the productivity of knowledge workers

2. Effectiveness

The second level of value — Effectiveness — redirects the focus from “doing things theright way” to “doing the right things at the right time.” To properly assess this level, weneed to discard many of the prevailing assumptions that underlie current businessprocesses.

Although efficiency can deliver a fair amount of business value, effectiveness offers thepromise of much more. In fact, SAP HANA provides organizations with the opportunity tofundamentally rethink their basic business processes (i. e., what they do and when andhow they do it).

For example, organizations rarely, if ever, depend exclusively upon a total cost ofownership (TCO) analysis (i.e., Efficiency) to justify a business analytics initiative.Although cost is a concern, the top-performing companies in each industry incorporateanalytics into their infrastructure in order to create and maintain competitive advantage.

At the Efficiency level of business value, business performance is improved first throughvisibility and then through insight. Visibility provides the ability to access relevantinformation quickly and in context. Then, insight provides a deeper understanding of theunderlying causes of a situation or the likely outcome of a course of action underconsideration.

Recall from previous chapters that SAP HANA a disruptive technology. Consequently,the business benefits it delivers extend far beyond improvements in IT operations. Theexamination of effectiveness gains makes the assumption that IT is a strategic enablerand value creator, and not just an organizational cost center.

Although effectiveness gains are usually more difficult to quantify than efficiency gains,their monetary value is frequently greater. Instead of precise estimates, effectivenessgains can be expressed as ranges of financial value, as illustrated by the following list.

Higher customer valueImproved product mix (margins)Better sales pipeline conversion ratioEnhanced customer retentionMore accurate demand forecasts

More successful segmentationEnhanced understanding of real costsGreater production yieldsMore efficient order fulfillmentFaster collectionsLower production costsReduced risk/impact of risksMore timely anticipation of market changesMore efficient asset utilization

3. Transformation

Business Transformation is the highest level of business value, but also the most difficultto achieve. Transformation goes well beyond Effectiveness by enabling new businessmodels and processes. Sometimes called “innovation” or “The Art of the Possible,”business transformation can generate extraordinary financial gains. However, thepotential monetary value from this level of business value is the most difficult to quantify.By definition, Transformation involves things that have never been done before.Consequently, there are no baseline data to use for comparison.

At the Transformation level, the focus is on use cases that involve the invention of newbusiness models and processes by leveraging innovative solutions and technologies, suchas SAP HANA.

Examples:

Identifying and serving new market segments before your peers canProviding personalized customer pricing and servicesEnabling new products or pricing modelsCreating new business modelsImproving time to marketReducing inventoryIncreasing market shareImproving P/E ratio

Hopefully you now have a more nuanced understanding of business value. Havingcovered this topic, we return to our discussion of the three-step process for buildingeffective business use cases. We begin with the first step — creating the storyline.

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

cases. Specifically, try to map to each level of business value with one or more use cases.The process of creating the storyline should not be conducted exclusively by IT. Rather,

it is critical to involve the business side of the organization up front and throughout theprocess.

SAP HANA is a disruptive technology, so the typical approach to building a technicalbusiness case does not necessarily apply here.

Here are some questions to get you thinking about potential use cases:

What’s happening at other companies in your industry?What elements in your organization’s strategic plan could benefit from high-performance analytics or process optimization?Does your organization own any data that no one else has (and can that data beexploited)?What mega-trends in the industry represent opportunities for new value?

A. Categorization/Business AttributesSometimes it’s easier to create use cases when you can place each one into a convenientcategory, or container. Below we list samples of potentially useful categories. Note thatthese categories may not be mutually exclusive. Some of your use cases can crossboundaries, especially in the case of innovations. Please refer to the SAP HANA Use CaseRepository for the most current list of use cases.

Industry-specific

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

Cross-Industry

Finance: (Planning and Budgeting, Consolidation)HR: (Workforce Analytics)

IT: (Landscape Optimization)Order Management: (Available to Promise, Price Optimization)Sales and Marketing: (Marketing Analytics, Customer Segmentation, TradePromotion Management)Supply Chain: (Transportation Planning, Inventory Mgt., Demand and SupplyPlanning, Supply Network Planning)

B. Self-DiscoveryAfter reading about the methodology and techniques discussed in this chapter, somecustomers may feel comfortable building business cases on their own. The SAP HANA UseCase Repository and SAP HANA Value Calculator (described below) can provide invaluableassistance with this task.

C. Assisted DiscoveryMany other customers, however, will prefer to leverage the expertise of SAP’s ValueEngineering (VE) group in constructing a convincing business case for SAP HANA. One ofthe ways in which the VE organization can help you construct an SAP HANA business caseis through a Value Discovery Workshop. Over the course of this workshop, you will havethe opportunity to identify, validate, and prioritize a number of SAP HANA use cases.These use cases can describe your organization’s internal usage, and perhaps also howyour organization interacts with its external customers.

The workshop is intended to address business outcomes as well as technical feasibility.Therefore, the project sponsor, business unit representatives, domain experts, and ITstaff should all participate. The workshop will provide you with detailed information ondata, processes, roles, modeling, consumption, clients, and security requirements for yourapplications. In addition, it will help you identify the “degree of match,” potential value-add, and customer interest for each use case.

The figure below reproduces a sample “value map” created during the first portion of aworkshop for a customer in the chemical industry.

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

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

D. SAP HANA Use Case RepositorySAP maintains a centralized SAP HANA website (http://www.saphana.com) that containsan ever-growing number of example use cases for SAP HANA. In the Resources section ofthe site, you’ll find sample use cases of SAP HANA that have either been implemented bya customer or discussed with a prospect.

Perhaps the most obvious way to use this site is to check the category for your industryto determine which of the existing use cases reflect your organization’s needs or strategicdirection. You may not find an exact match, but it’s extremely likely that you’ll find one ormore themes that closely resemble some of your business issues and/or conditions.

A second — and perhaps more useful — approach is to use the repository as abrainstorming tool. It can be quite enlightening to study use cases from industries thatare seemingly unrelated to yours. In many instances, you will recognize a common threadthat will encourage you to adopt a broader perspective than if you limited yourexploration to use cases in your industry.

Whichever approach you adopt, a guiding principle is to focus on things that you can’tdo today. In addition, always keep in mind that SAP HANA’s strengths are in applicationsthat have never been built before. If you’re looking to SAP HANA for competitiveadvantage, then you are not likely to find a close match in the repository.

1. SAP HANA Use Case Categories

Currently, the SAP HANA website has SAP HANA Use Cases categorized by industry andselected process areas:

Aerospace & DefenseAutomotiveBankingChemicalConsumer ProductsCross-IndustryCustomer ServiceFinanceHealthcareHigh TechIndustrial Machinery & ComponentsInsuranceLife SciencesManufacturing

MarketingMediaMill ProductsMiningOil & GasProfessional ServicesPublic SectorRetailSalesSupply ChainTelecommunicationsTransportationUtilitiesWholesale Distribution

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

A. Importance of Benefits QuantificationIt is critical to acknowledge the value of IT investments through benefits measurementand post go-live monitoring. An SAP Value Management study determined thatorganizations that develop business cases and measure post-go live success are 1.9 timesmore likely to deliver projects on time. They are also 1.5 times more likely to deliver onbudget and to realize up-front benefits.

In most current use cases, the business value for SAP HANA is measured in a similarmanner to other business analytics investments. The capabilities of SAP HANA are seenacross many areas of an organization with an increasing number of benefit scenarios. Theone fundamental difference is that analytical use cases for SAP HANA consider how theavailability of real-time data impacts the organization’s ability to realize value. The SAPHANA benefits quantification evaluates what the organization can accomplish now that itcan better manage data and interpret the resulting insights at lightning-fast speeds. Datavolume is exploding, resulting inthe need to store and move significant amounts of data.As a result, it slows down the ability to analyze data. In addition, data variety iscontinually expanding with the usage of Facebook and Twitter. Therefore, the traditionalprocesses that organizations have used to consolidate and analyze data are no longersufficient in the new environment of real-time data.

IT research firms have already concluded that investing in business analytics

technology generates tangible benefits. Moreover, in 2010, IDC completed a study thatconcluded that business intelligence investments delivered the following return oninvestment:

112 % median ROI54% process benefit improvement (Business effectiveness measures)42% productivity gains (Business efficiency)4% technology gains (IT efficiency)

In February 2011 Aberdeen completed a real-time business study that found thatorganizations wanted more accurate operational information. A case study concluded thatmanufacturing organizations yielded a 2% increase in production efficiencies, returningtens of millions of dollars in savings. The independant study demonstrates thatquantitative benefits are being realized with real-time information. Production yield is anexcellent example of benefits quantification. Increased yield reduces the cost ofoperations. This section will help you identify these business areas and quantify thebenefits.

SAP has come to realize that organizations can struggle with analytics benefitsquantification. Organizations utilize various approaches to business case benefitdevelopment; however, they may not have the experience to transfer that approach tobusiness analytics and SAP HANA business cases. To address this problem, SAP’s ValueEngineering organization has taken the methodology that has been used for the pasteight years and applied it applied it to SAP HANA benefits quantification. We discuss thevalue engineering and the value management approach later in the chapter.

B. Types of QuantificationSAP Value Management has created a framework for analyzing benefits that also appliesto SAP HANA. This framework, which is illustrated below, places benefits in one of fourcategories:

Strategy EnablementMeasurable BenefitsRisk and ComplianceInnovation

Financial measurement, known as “hard” benefits, typically falls within the measurablebenefit category. However, risk mitigation and compliance can deliver millions of dollarsin savings. Strategy enablement and innovation are usually treated as “soft” benefits.

It is important to understand that an SAP HANA business case, like an analyticsbusiness case, impacts numerous process areas within an organization. SAP realized thatthe underlying transactional systems by themselves release only a percentage of theoverall benefits. Unlocking the remaining benefits requires information insight.

For example, Procuremnt leaders rely on information to understand how anorganization spends money in various categories such as materials, services and ITequipment. The procurement process controls the flow of money going out of thecompany for materials and services. This critical function ensures that an organizationmanages its spending strategically. The primary metrics that measure success in this areaare overall spending managed centrally and year-over-year annual savings achieved bythe procurement team. Spend that is not managed centrally does not leverage contractsnegotiated with preferred vendors that include already secured discount levels. Withoutreal-time business insight on spend, organizations are not fully optimizing savings withconsolidated spend. The following SAP HANA case study illustrates a procurementbusiness case involving a retail grocer.

National Grocery Retailer — SAP HANA Business Case:

The retailer had already invested in an ERP system that drove the procurement process with suppliers;however, it was implemented in a regional format. Thus, the overall spend managed by the organizationwas not visible at a national level. Supplier relationships at a regional level ran the risk of not capturingincreased discounts and creating redundancies in process.

Objective:

Deliver national spend visibility and drive procurement savings

Shift from regional vendor relationships and contract terms to a national level

Challenge:

Significant data volumes residing with four regional data warehouses. Data created from regionalprocurement systems

Four regional warehouses housing ERP structured system data

No infrastructure in place to automate the data consolidation for a national view of supplier spendlevels

Approach:

Evaluate the SAP HANA solution as the database and analytics technology to enable a single view ofconsolidated supplier data

Develop a benefits case based on the regional grocer spend performance

The four major regions each had consolidated supplier spend

Business Case Development:

The regional procurement spend performance was compared, and the grocer found that certainregions were outperforming others in year-over-year savings and negotiated discounts

The grocer utilized SAP’s global benchmarking data to compare year-over-year savings and spendmanaged strategically with retail peers

The grocer determined that additional savings would be possible if the organization better understoodthe underlying procurement data

XXX calculated a conservative benefits estimate of $50 million in savings over a multiyear period

Results and Business Benefit:

Begin realizing $50 million in savings on supplier spend with one national view of vendor spend

Remove supplier negotiation and contract administration redundancies with one process, managed bya national supplier

Significant supplier data compression with transfer of spend and supplier data from four regionalsystems to one single instance of SAP HANA

Real-time and automated data transfer that was previously not possible with four different regionalsystems

Granular reporting analysis resulting in visibility on optimal supplier discounts and redundant buying

Elimination of vendor spend with contracts that do not offer maximum discount levels.

Renegotiation of national vendor contracts demonstrating higher discount levels on aggregated spend

1. Tangible (“Hard”) Benefits

A tangible or “hard” benefit is defined as an outcome that increases revenue in for-profitorganizations and reduces cost in all organizations. In addition, hard benefits can increasethe cash flow that the organization utilizes to generate additional return on investments.An example of a cash flow benefit is the reduction of aging receivables. Efficiency gainscan result in tangible benefits if resulting costs are removed from the gain. An example ofa hard benefit efficiency gain is the reduction of people completing a manual reportingtask.

As we discussed, quantifying SAP HANA benefits follows a similar approach to other

traditional benefits quantification. The areas of improvement are derived by identifyingareas of value within major business process areas. Common benefit KPIs are brokendown within the process areas. A few of the key business benefit KPIs and key metricsare outlined below. SAP’s Value Engineering organization has a full repository of allbusiness benefits.

Demand Generation

Marketing

Benefit: Optimized marketing spend through improved campaign effectiveness

Metrics:

Average cost of a marketing campaign launchCurrent time to measure campaign effectivenessCampaign conversion rate measured in sales or pipeline generated

Outcome:

Reduced marketing spend by minimizing the cost of ineffective campaignsIncreased annual revenue through campaign execution

Sales Execution

Benefit: Increased sales conversion rate, thereby increasing annual revenue

Metrics:

Current pipeline conversion percentageCurrent revenue per sales employeeCurrent sales team efficiency measured by time with customer andadministrative time

Outcome:

Increased pipeline conversion rate and salesIncreased total revenue per salespersonReduced administrative time

Demand Fulfillment

Procurement

Benefit: Reduced annual spend with increased visibility on supplier metrics

Metrics:

Percent of spend managed strategically by category; direct, indirect and servicesYear-over-year annual savingsEvaluation of vendors utilized and product categoriesEffort spent currently managing vendor relationships

Outcome:

Reduced annual spend by categoryReduced efforts by buyers to manage and track vendor relationships

Manufacturing Process

Benefit: Reduced inventory levels and enhanced visibility of the short horizon ofstock levels

Metrics:

Current inventory levels of finished goodsCurrent inventory carrying costsPercentage of inventory obsolescence

Outcome:

Reduced inventory levels of finished goodsReduced annual inventory carrying costsGreater annual cash flowReduced cost of inventory obsolesce

Information Technology Management

Information Management

Benefit: Improved insight into information and reduced IT effort to prepare data

Metrics:

Cost of data storageCost and effort of transferring data from source systems to a centralized datarepositoryEffort to prepare data for reportingEffort to build standard reports

Outcome:

Reduced cost of information managementImproved granular insights delivered in real time

Organizational Performance Management

Profitability Analysis

Benefit: Improved profitability analysis by product, region, and segment

Metrics:

Current profit level by product, region, and segmentEffort required to deliver profitability analysisCurrent pricing processes

Outcome:

Increased profit by product, region, and segmentElimination of unprofitable itemsLess effort required to monitor profitability

Workforce Management

Benefit: Improved worker utilization levels and reduce level of overtime

Metrics:

Worker utilization levelsOvertime percentage and cost

Outcome:

Reduced labor costsImproved worker output measured

Fraud Management

Benefit: Improved fraud detection, thus reducing the costs associated withadditional insurance claims

Metrics:

Current combined ratio (claims and expense measured against premiumscollected)Measured fraud investigations

Outcome:

Reduced cost of fraud investigationsReduced combined ratio

The metrics and outcomes listed in the table span many major business process areas.However, they all have a common theme; namely, to manage information from diversedata sources and to deliver real-time insights for decision making. In each case theresults are measured in revenue, expense, and cash flow impacts.

2. Strategic (“Soft”) Benefits

Strategic or “soft” benefits are commonly linked to the tangible benefits measured above.The strategic benefits impact the organization’s overall strategies and can support thetangible benefits.

In some cases, productivity or efficiency metrics do not directly result in reduced costs.An example is a scenario in which labor costs are not reduced, but the organizationutilizes appropriate metrics to deliver greater throughput with the same staff. The labourbudget is not reduced, but the workforce is able to manage increasing workload. Often,improved employee engagement and work-life balance is another soft benefit outcome.Similarly, improved decision-making can generate indirect impacts on the organization,such as better execution of the corporate values for accountability. Many organizationsfind it difficult to drive accountability with poor information. Department leads can’t driveimprovements if there is no trust in the data comprising the actual results. In creatingand evaluating a business case, you need carefully consider both tangible and strategicbenefits.

3. New KPIs and Breakthrough Innovations

SAP HANA is an innovative technology that offers a fresh approach to informationmanagement. The ability to deliver innovations by managing complex analysis in realtime reduces time to market and generates new revenue streams. These innovations arethe most difficult to quantify because no baseline data exist. However, “first mover”advantage may result in the largest payoffs for a project.

SAP is constantly capturing new innovations delivered with SAP HANA to share theimpact. We have multiple forums to share the benefits of SAP HANA; the external websitementioned earlier in the chapter capturing use cases and the business transformationstudies captured by Value Engineering. A business transformation study is a briefdocument published jointly with our customers to capture benefits realized along with thestory of why the investment was made. It is critical to continually measure the post-implementation impact of SAP HANA to capture benefits. The best recommendation is tosimultaneously explore innovative SAP HANA scenarios while developing existing process-improvement scenarios. A simple business case can be developed based on existingprocesses and then leveraged to fund breakthrough innovations.

SAP recommends multiple scenarios by which SAP HANA delivers maximum value to theorganization. These scenarios can be incorporated into an analytics roadmap thatprioritizes value and time to value. This strategy will enable IT to jointly manage theimplementation with the relevant business functions.

C. Best Practice Business Case ApproachBefore calculating a benefit, an organization must identify a baseline metric derived fromthe current state process. After it creates this baseline, it can establish a target benefitrange.

The simple steps listed below present a framework for calculating a baseline metric.We illustrate this framework using the example of a profitability report.

Document the current state process (e.g., profitability reporting)Number of business analysts allocated to monthly reportingEffort taken in hours taken to build monthly packageAssociated IT effort to maintain profitability reportingCurrent state profitability level of the associated item tracked on the report

As stated above, an organization needs to establish baseline metrics before it cancalculate the value of a benefit. However, baseline metrics in isolation do not allow theowner of the business case to comfortably develop a target improvement range. Thesemetrics are simply utilized as a measuring stick of success. The baseline metric allowsorganizations to know how much they have improved after the technology has beenimplemented. In order to truly define a benefit beyond the current state baseline, SAPValue Engineering performs this function by providing a triangulated approach to benefitsquantification. Specifically, VE provides SAP Benchmarking data that indicate average andbest-in-class performance, past examples of measured success by other organizations,and the ability to collect current state processes to best calculate the benefit range. (Wediscuss the SAP Benchmarking database in greater detail in Section E.)

After the analysis has been completed, the next step is to identify the associated valuedriver outcome(s). The benefit as described in the process areas is typically related to itsimpact on revenue and expenses. We strongly recommend that when you calculate abenefit you apply a benefit range with a conservative and likely metric based on the SAPValue Engineering approach described above.

One final point: It is commonplace to link benefits to an overall initiative involvingprocess improvements through technology enablement. Benefits are more widelyaccepted when linked to key business initiatives such as improving spend management orimproving pricing within a certain product category. As part of the initial business casedevelopment, discussions with the business unit sponsors ensure linkage to strategy andacceptance of the SAP HANA investment.

D. SAP HANA CalculatorTo make it easier for people to build a value-based business case, SAP Value Engineeringand SAP HANA Solution Management released a web-based SAP HANA benefits calculatorto our customers. The tool covers the most common benefit areas that mostorganizations would consider. The calculator provides two or three example benefits for

each of five mega-process areas:

Customer FocusProcure to PayPlan to ProduceRecord to ReportQuote to Cash

The benefits calculator enables you to customize the revenue include the number ofemployees, and key baseline information for your particular organization. The benefitranges are based on the SAP Value Engineering triangulated methodology we justdescribed. A summary report aggregates all the benefits to determine the overallfinancial impact.

SAP designed this tool to be a great launching point for calculating benefits. Itgenerates ideas on how SAP HANA can impact your business, and it demonstrates howyou can calculate these benefits. Your organization can then continue to develop benefitseither in partnership with SAP VE or on your own.

E. SAP BenchmarkingOne of the most valuable resources available to you when building an SAP HANA businesscase is the SAP Benchmarking database. SAP Benchmarking is a global program launchedin 2004 to deliver empirical metrics, best practices, and high-impact strategies toorganizations that choose to leverage the program.

SAP Benchmarking is managed through a customer portal, SAP Value ManagementCenter (https://valuemanagement.sap.com). The link takes you right to the portal to signin and utlize the surveys to capture baseline information and determine how you areperforming against best in clauss organizations. This is a significant investment by SAP toallow organizations to measure performance and build benefit cases.

This portal offers direct access to complete surveys and analysis of results. The data inthe benchmarking resources are collected anonymously from SAP customers who haveparticipated in the program. These data are incredibly deep and rich, and they enable youto benchmark your company’s current state and potential value against real-worldexperiences from other companies in your industry.

SAP Benchmarking program Facts:

Established at the end of 2004Complimentary serviceAvailable to SAP and non-SAP customersMore than 12,000 participants from more than 3,000 companiesGlobal — in 2010 more than 60% participants of participants were from outsideNorth AmericaPartnerships with ASUG and other user groupsStudies available in 12 languagesMore than 20 business process assessments including finance, procurement, supplychain, and sales.More than 700 KPIsMore than 1,000 best practicesMore than 300 peer groups

For SAP HANA, SAP offers the Business Intelligence and Enterprise Information

Management data sets and surveys. In addition, SAP launched a High PerformanceAnalytics survey to track the importance of complexity and speed in the datamanagement environment.

As discussed previously, SAP HANA can impact many business process areas spanningthe entire organization. The SAP Benchmarking program allows you to help choose a fewkey process areas to determine where SAP HANA best fits as a starting point. Theprogram provides the flexibility to create a customized survey to capture the key metricsand best practices identified through the SAP HANA business scenario development. Thisprocess will provide the critical peer comparison that establishes the appropriate range ofimprovement. An organization can build a realistic benefit range improvement byleveraging peer benchmarking data.

Tying It All TogetherWe now shift our focus to the fourth and most vital stage in the business case process —packaging the business case in a manner that maximizes the likelihood that it will befunded. To accomplish this objective, the storyline and financial impact have to becommunicated effectively to the stakeholders and decision makers. In addition, thepresentation needs to be easily consumable by senior business executives, becausesenior management buy-in and commitment and are critical.

A. Internal DeliverablesAs mentioned throughout this chapter, SAP HANA is a disruptive technology. Accordingly,previous “rules” about internal business cases may not apply to SAP HANA cases.Fortunately, SAP Value Engineering has significant experience creating successfulbusiness cases for SAP HANA, and it can assist with your final presentation.

Although there is no set format for final deliverables, successful presentations generallycontain certain critical components, which we list below.

Use case and business process scenariosFinancial and non-financial benefitsStrategic alignment discussionRisk assessmentUse case prioritization

B. Ongoing Value ManagementMost companies realize that the successful utilization of information technologies iscritical to success in the modern business environment. Despite this realization, however,few companies actually realize the maximum value of their IT investment. SAP addressedthis problem by introducing Value Engineering, a practice that focuses on driving thecustomer value that IT is providing to the business. Over the years, SAP has learned agreat deal about how the best-in-class companies continuously select, execute, and

measure successful business-driven IT projects. Utilizing an ongoing processes calledValue Management, SAP Value Engineering has standardized and packaged these bestpractices to help organizations deliver value by aligning IT with business goals andprocesses, and through maximizing return on IT investment.

1. Value Management

Value Management is a permanent management process that ensures that investmentsin information technology are delivered on time, on budget and on value.

The discipline of Value Management is a proven way to realize the promised value fromIT investments and initiatives. The Value Management methodology is intended to keepcompanies focused on choosing the right projects, to clearly define ownership andaccountability for business results, and to deliver on these agreed-upon commitments.The SAP Value Engineering team helps identify the appropriate strategic areas to enablecompanies to become best-run businesses.

Value Management Drivers and Lifecycle:

Value Discovery: How do you align your business and IT strategies?

Value Realization: How can the business value be captured?

Value Optimization: How can you maximize the value from your investment?

2. Why Is Value Management Important?

Many companies initiate technology projects with a strong focus on their businessobjectives; over time, however, they lose this focus. As a result, they never fully realizetheir expected results. Research conducted by SAP indicates that 98% of companies canextract more value from their initiatives, yet only 35% focus on measuring the value of

these technologies after they have been implemented. This “virtuous circle” of properplanning, execution, and ongoing value analysis is critical to building a strategic ITfunction in successful companies. Failure to realize maximum benefit from IT is a commonproblem that can understandably discourage executives from making the strategic ITinvestments needed to compete in today’s unforgiving business environment.

SAP’s approach to value management focuses on helping you discover the rightprojects, measure progress during implementation, and optimize investments across yourIT portfolio. This end-to-end process helps to ensure the business value of your ITinvestments.

3. Why Do Customers Like SAP’s Value Engineering Process?

Quick turnaround process that delivers a strategic value proposition to customers inweeksMinimal disruption to customers’ ongoing operations using our collaborativeapproachFact-based, structured problem-solving approach that leverages past engagementexperiencesHands-on participation from SAP experts — solution specialists, industrypractitioners, consultants, and centers of excellence professionalsMature value management methodology based on experience with 25,000+customers; leveraging comprehensive knowledge about best practices acrossindustries and business processesScalable, disciplined approach to business value assessments that establishes acommon language between business and IT audiences

4. Role of SAP Value Engineering

Utilizing SAP Value Engineering is not a requirement for building a solid business case forSAP HANA. However, it certainly can make the process easier and more efficient.

If you’ve already identified several potential use cases for SAP HANA, VE resources canhelp you create a financial justification for the initiative. However, if you’re willing toinvest the time in a more immersive process, VE offers a SAP HANA Value DiscoveryWorkshop, which was described in greater detail earlier in this chapter.

5. Continuous Value Management

At this point, you have completed the Discovery portion of the Value Management Cycledescribed earlier in this chapter. The remaining stages in the cycle are Realization andOptimization. The Discovery phase resulted in the all-important business case, but theother two phases are no less critical to the process. One strategy to ensure continuedsuccess throughout the implementation of the SAP HANA initiative is to maintain (orestablish) a “culture of measurement” within the organization.

6. Establish a “Culture of Measurement”

How serious is your organization about performance measurement? It’s nearly impossibleto determine the degree of success of a project unless you have a way to compare the“before” and “after” states. In many organizations, such assessments are mostlysubjective opinions that are not easily validated.

In contrast, objective assessments minimize the element of personal bias and enablehistorical comparisons of assessments for different projects. This kind of measurementphilosophy needs to be deeply ingrained in the culture of an organization, ideally as aformal methodology.

Among other things, here are some of the questions that you should consider whenmeasuring performance:

What are some of your most important KPIs?What are some of the underlying metrics that you track?How do you track and communicate metrics and KPIs?What adjustments does your organization make based on regular reviews of KPIsand metrics?Are there any “new” KPIs that would be relevant to your organization but have notbeen adopted by your industry peers?

RecommendationsThe purpose of this chapter is to explain why it is critical to build business use cases and

to provide some guidelines to assist you with this process. However, we did not intendthis chapter to be used as a “cookbook” for building business cases for SAP HANA.Different organizations may follow widely varying approaches when building their internaljustifications for SAP HANA.

Whatever your situation, however, we strongly recommend that you keep the followingpoints in mind during your journey:

1) When identifying use cases, try to go beyond ideas about what you could be doingbetter. Consider:

What you can’t do todayWhat you haven’t even imagined yet

2) Think big, but start small with a quick win to build momentum in business.

Initial success will build credibility internallyThe resulting support may be necessary later when you plan and undertake moreambitious projects

3) Don’t view technology or IT as merely an expense or overhead. When leveragedproperly, technology and IT act as a:

Strategic enablerValue creator

4) Track both hard and soft benefits during the financial analysis of use cases.

Hard benefits are easier to calculate preciselySoft benefits may outweigh hard benefits

5) Ensure senior executive buy-in and sponsorship from Day 1.

This is a business case, not a technical justification

I

Chapter 4

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

n early 2006, when the project that would result in SAP HANA was in its infancy, theteam proposed several ambitious goals (dreams, really) for the eventual capabilities of

an enterprise-scale in-memory database. The most audacious goal was that this newdatabase architecture would eventually be able to power the largest, most mission-critical enterprise systems in the world. In many ways, this was SAP’s “moon shot”declaration.

On January 10th, 2012, less than two years after the first shipment of SAP HANA, SAPrealized the completion of this dream with the announcement of the availability of theSAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA (SoH). SAP thus became the first softwarecompany to provide its customers with an integrated, real-time business process platformthat unifies both analytic and transactional data into a single architecture.

It might appear that with the delivery of SoH in 2013, SAP had reached the end of itsjourney. But, just as NASA didn’t stop innovating and exploring after the first moonlanding more than 40 years ago, SAP is simply transitioning into its next phase ofinnovation and renovation. For the first time ever, SAP has created an exceptionallyperformant database platform that was engineered to its exact specifications and thatprovides a myriad of incredible new capabilities that previously were unavailable to its20,000 programmers. Having created this modern platform to power its flagshipapplications such as ERP, SAP has begun a multiyear effort to achieve three basic

objectives: (1) Become an innovation-driven enterprise: SAP Business Suite powered bySAP HANA will help organizations become an innovation-driven enterprise by allowing youto rethink business processes as and when needed and invent new business modelsSMARTER. (2) Become a data-driven enterprise: SAP Business Suite powered by SAPHANA will help organizations become a data-driven enterprise by allowing you to collect,consolidate and consume real-time data FASTER. (3) Become a people-driven enterprise:SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA will help organizations become a people-drivenenterprise by providing your business users with actionable insights — on any device — todecide and act SIMPLER. In a nutshell, SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA enablesits customers to drive their business “smarter, faster and simpler” and do amazing newthings that could never be done in a disk-based architecture.

In this chapter, we’ll

1. examine the architectural implications of running a mission-critical SAP BusinessSuite landscape on SAP HANA,

2. discuss several scenarios for adding SAP HANA to SAP Business Suite landscapes,3. review some technical and operational aspects of this switch, and4. provide some details on several of the enhanced business processes/scenarios that

will immediately benefit from the power of SAP HANA.

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

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

The SAP HANA platform provides the foundation for companies both to dramaticallyincrease the performance of their existing SAP Business Suite applications and to continueto innovate without disrupting their current systems by leveraging a new generation ofreal-time applications natively built on the platform. It is the perfect starting point tobegin taking advantage of a true real-time data platform.

Architectural Implications of SAP Business Suite powered by SAPHANAOver the years, technical limitations in the database layer have forced companies to buildtwo separate software/hardware landscapes to provide both OLTP and OLAP systems toaddress two different business needs: transaction processing and reporting/analysis. Itwas simply impossible for disk-based databases to efficiently handle both row-basedtransactional “writes” and column-based analytical “reads” at the same time. As a resultof this “performance dichotomy,” database management systems currently on the marketare typically optimized for either transactional workloads or analytical workloads, but not

both. Compounding this problem is the fact that data have to be copied between the twosystems. This inefficiency not only generates significant costs, but it forces organizationsto adopt measures to ensure data integrity and usability between multiple systems. Afinal issue is the inevitable lag time that occurs when transactional data are exported toanalytical systems on a daily or weekly basis.

SAP HANA is the first commercial database system that successfully eliminates thisfalse performance dichotomy as well as the resulting need to develop and maintainseparate OLTP and OLAP systems. Because SAP HANA can process transactional andanalytical workloads fully in-memory, it combines the best of both worlds. You don’t needto take the time to load data from your transactional database into your reportingdatabase, or even to build traditional tuning structures to enable that reporting. Astransactions are happening, you can report against them live, from the same databasetables. By consolidating two landscapes (OLAP and OLTP) into a single database, SAPHANA provides companies with massively lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) inaddition to mind-blowing speed. With all the relevant transactional and analytical dataintegrated in a single system that is updated in real time, companies can truly become“real-time businesses.”

Beyond the architectural simplification and cost savings that SAP HANA can bring toenterprise architectures, another, more transformational shift is underway. Nearly everyapplication in operation today was constructed in a programming approach where dataare transmitted from the database to the application, where they are then transformedfor calculation by the application logic or algorithm. This “bring the data to the algorithm”approach was necessary because a disk-based DBMS has very limited capability to doanything more complex than rudimentary calculations.

In contrast, SAP HANA enables application developers to completely flip that model onits head (see Chapter 8) and begin to leverage the system’s incredibly powerful enginesinside the database. Developers can now extract data-intensive operations and

algorithms from the application layer and insert them into the database layer forexecution. Applications thus become much “leaner,” and they focus on business logic. Inessence, the database becomes a “data engine” that spits out the “answers” wheneverthey are needed, rather than simply serving up chunks of data to the apps. This new“bring the algorithm to the data” approach is much more elegant than the old way ofprogramming, and it significantly reduces the amount of data being moved in and out ofthe database. Not only do these new apps increase performance by having fast access todata in memory, they also gain additional exponential speed by executing coreapplication logic and algorithms inside the database, on the raw data. This is whencompanies begin to realize process performance increases of 50,000 to 20,000 times.

Going forward, SAP will deliver “HANA-fied” versions of multiple transactions in the SAPBusiness Suite through regular Enhancement Packs. Not every transaction will receive thistreatment because not every transaction will be able to take advantage of these newdatabase capabilities or the value of renovating the transaction won’t be justified by theperformance improvements. Significantly, SAP has made the migration to SAP HANA aspainless as possible. All “HANA-fied” reports and transactions can be activated via theswitch framework, so they will not modify the existing business logic when a companyadopts the new system. Going further, all of these switches are reversible and can beactivated independently. These features ensure maximum flexibility in the consumptionof these optimizations while minimizing business disruptions for the companies thatimplement them.

Here are a few of the benefits this new architecture provides to existing SAPBusiness Suite customers:

Applications

You no longer have to run dialog processes in batch (i.e., “Batch is dead”).Remaining batch processes run faster, essentially turning them into “on demand”jobs.For details on SAP HANA optimized ABAP programs, please see the latest releasenotes for SAP SAP HANA Live Operational ReportsOperational reports now run in real time inside the SAP Business Suite.The new architecture removes the need for Operational Data Stores.It eliminates the necessity to transfer (ETL) for performance reasons.It eliminates the need to reconcile source data with copies.Interactive reports allow users to trigger OLTP transactions from the report.

Next-generation Applications

Embedded Analytics can now be performed on a single system.

Custom ABAP code

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

Operational Topics with SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANABy now it should be obvious that adding SAP HANA to an SAP Business Suite landscapeprovides several major benefits, ranging from increased performance to reductions in costand complexity. You might be asking yourself, however, “OK, but what’s the downside?”More specifically, what do I have to change in my current SAP Business Suite system toget all this goodness? You might be surprised that the answer to that question is “verylittle.” In simplistic terms, there really isn’t much more involved in migrating to thislandscape than copying the data from your old database into SAP HANA and then turningon the new system. SAP has invested a huge amount of effort and resources to ensurethat the migration process is as painless and risk-free as possible. The company has evenprovided a one-step migration wizard and an RDS package to manage the entire process(check the RDS site for more details).

Several of the features of your existing system remain the same:Configuration — IMG stays the same.Customization — Stays the same.ABAP Workbench — Stays the same.Modification — Same upgrade requirements as with any new release. BADIs stillsupported.Connectivity — Stays the same.Security — Stays the same, with enhancements.

SAP HANA EnhancementsDynamic analytical privileges

Reuse of same analytic privilege for several users with different restrictionsSupport for complex logic and situational security derived at runtime

Roles as design time objects

Offering full lifecycle management capabilities

New “Support Role”

Secure and enhance compliance process for productive systems.

Audit logging improvements

New audit events (e.g., ALTER USER)Data access loggingAudit configuration in SAP HANA Studio

Transports — CTS stays the same

Delivery via standard transport tools, SAP HANA specifics as TLOGO objects

(ABAP based)CTS+ transport integration ready for custom SAP HANA code

Monitoring — DBACockpit and Solution Manager stay the same

SAP Solution Manager offers complete solution for operations

SAP HANA monitoring and alerting integrated into SAP Solution Manager 7.1,Support Package 4, see note 1747682End-to-end workload analysis for SAP HANA planned for Support Package 8 inSolution Manager 7.1

High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) scenarios

HA and DR scenarios are supported

New with SAP HANA SPS5 (November 2012): SAP HANA synchronous system replication(formerly known as “warm standby” solution).

Further feature extensions are planned for the next service pack.

Flexible appliance platform

Third-party tools (e.g., agents for monitoring and scheduling, antivirus) allowedto run on applianceThird-party backup tools supported with SAP HANA (ongoing)

Migrating to SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANAAnother question you might be asking yourself is, “How do I get to SoH from where I’m attoday?” SAP will continue to provide customers with choice of database platforms, as italways has. Customers who choose to migrate to SAP HANA must take three steps to

incorporate their existing SAP Business Suite on top of SAP HANA:

1. Update to the latest non-SAP HANA enhancement package and the latest versionof the SAP NetWeaver technology platform

2. Update to the latest enhancement package version for SAP HANA3. Migrate from any database to SAP HANA

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

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

Current restrictions:

SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA — SAP Note 1774566

General Requirements

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

Non-SAP HANA-based development can be transported to SAP HANA-based systems

SAP HANA-based development can be transported into non-SAP HANA-based systems, ifthe development is activated only after the system is manually activated.

All optimizations specific to SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA require adedicated Business Function activation to be enabled.During upgrade, all code pertaining to SAP Business Suite, powered by SAP HANAis deactivated and is running smoothly on non SAP HANA-databases.

Dual-Stack Systems

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

Minimizing Downtime

Near-zero downtime approach: Use additional shadow database to keep DBdowntime to a minimum (available on request; see SAP Note 1680769)Several parallel processes for data export and data import, table split forparallelized export of large tablesCombined Unicode conversion and database migrationReduced downtime for system copy (e.g., relevant for Unicode conversion):

Find more details on system copy and migration: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-14257.

Unicode

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

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

Enhancement Pack Info (SAP Note 1774566)

SAP enhancement package 6 for SAP ERP 6.0, version for SAP HANASAP enhancement package 2 for SAP CRM 7.0, version for SAP HANASAP enhancement package 2 for SAP SCM 7.0, version for SAP HANASAP ERP powered by SAP HANA

Release Notes for SAP EHP 6 version for HANA, please subscribe for the latestupdates:

https://websmp202.sap-ag.de/~form/sapnet?_SHORTKEY=01100035870000755177SP0: Release Notes SAP EHP6, version for SAP HANASP1: Release notes SAP EHP6, version for SAP HANA, SP01

EHP 6 for HANA Optimizations by transactions and ABAP programs — please seeattachment in this SAP Note: 1761546

Current Restrictions SAP EHP 6 for SAP ERP 6.0,version for SAP HANA —1768031Release Restrictions for SAP Netweaver AS ABAP 7.40 — 1789659Overview Suite on HANA Restrictions: 1774566

SAP CRM Customer Relationship powered by SAP HANAhttp://help.sap.com/crmhanaRelease Notes for SAP EhP 2 for SAP CRM 7.0, version for SAP HANAOptimizations and current restrictions, please see SAP Note: 1768032

SAP SCM Supply Chain Managementhttp://help.sap.com/scm_hanaCurrent restrictions:SAP EhP 2 for SAP SCM 7.0, version for SAP HANA — 1768043

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

New SAP HANA Live for SAP Business Suite

The new SAP HANA Live for SAP Business Suite provides an open environment thatenables business users to perform operational analytics and reporting on real-time SAPBusiness Suite transactional data. Based on analytical views in a virtual data model(VDM), SAP HANA Live provides users with new strategies to analyze operational data tobuild their own reports and documents. The current offering contains predefinedanalytical content for SAP Business Suite applications (e.g., SAP ERP, SAP CRM). SAPHANA Live also serves as the foundation for a new class of analytic applications includingSAP Working Capital Analytics, DSO scope; SAP Invoice and Goods Receipt Reconciliation;SAP Supply Chain Info Center; and SAP Access Control Role Analytics. Please note: SAPHANA Live is available as a separate package for SAP Business Suite.

SAP HANA Live provides the following benefits:

Views for easy analysis of SAP Business Suite data with SAP HANA

Open for a wide variety of reporting frontendsMaintained by SAPOperational reporting based on real-time Business Suite dataFoundation for a new class of analytics applications

The SAP Live enables you to very efficiently build operational reporting on SAP BusinessSuite data. Going further, in spite of all these great capabilities, it does not make SAP BWobsolete, which remains SAP’s core enterprise datawarehouse for consolidating data fromSAP and Non-SAP sources. Think of this new capability more as an upgrade or a real-timeevolution of standard ABAP and ALV reports. It is basically a pipeline directly into thetransactional tables under an SAP Business Suite system that allows you to display real-time operational data in a very flexible and user-friendly format.

The SAP Business Suite application data models — enhanced for real-time datathroughput and top performance in transactional scenarios — are optimized for analyticpurposes using views in the SAP HANA database. These views form a virtual data modelthat customers and partners can reuse. Not only does this model benefit current users,but it serves as a foundation for future SAP analytic development.

Data provided by the virtual data model can be presented through multipurposeanalytical UIs such as SAP BusinessObjects BI Suite UIs and domain-specific Web

applications.SAP HANA Live for SAP Business Suite provides the following advantages compared to

regular reporting solutions:

OpenAny access to the reporting framework is based on standard mechanisms suchas SQL or MDX. No BW modeling or ABAP programming is required.

UniformA single approach is chosen for all Suite applications, enabling a commonreporting across application boundaries.

IntuitiveThe virtual data model will hide the complexity and customizing dependenciesof our Suite data model to make data available without requiring users topossess a deep understanding of the various SAP models.

FastThe suite features SAP HANA as the underlying computing engine, enablingfast analytics on high data volumes and high levels of data.

Real-timeBecause all reporting is based on primary data (or a real-time replication of it),there is no need to wait for data warehousing loading jobs to finish. Thus, thecycle time from recording to reporting is dramatically reduced.

More Details:

http://help.sap.com/hbaSAP HANA Live for SAP Business SuiteEnglish SAP HANA Live Browser�Last Update: February 2013SAP HANA Live for SAP CRMEnglish SAP HANA Live for SAP CRM�Last Update: February 2013SAP HANA Live for SAP ERPEnglish SAP HANA Live for SAP ERP�Last Update: February 2013English SAP Invoice and Goods Receipt Reconciliation�Last Update: February 2013SAP HANA Live for SAP solutions for GRCEnglish SAP HANA Live for SAP solutions for GRC�Last Update: February 2013English SAP Access Control Role Analytics�Last Update: February 2013SAP HANA Live for SAP GTSEnglish SAP HANA Live for SAP GTS�Last Update: February 2013SAP HANA Live for SAP SCMEnglish SAP HANA Live for SAP SCM�Last Update: February 2013English SAP Supply Chain Info Center�Last Update: February 2013

Real-Time Solutions powered by SAP HANA

SAP and its partners are delivering a new class of solutions on top of the SAP HANAplatform that provide real-time insights on “Big Data” as well as state-of-the-art analysissuch as machine learning, pattern recognition, and predictive capabilities. These solutionscan help transform the way you run your business, from enabling rapid, sense-and-respond processes and targeted actions, to even rethinking business models in your

industry. Furthermore, you can continue to utilize the SAP NetWeaver® BusinessWarehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) component — also powered by SAP HANA — as yourenterprise data warehouse.

SAP HANA apps can also help customers extend their SAP Business Suite powered bySAP HANA investments by providing them with a wide array of complementary use casesbeyond their traditional business processes. They also provide a low risk low costopportunity for customers to test the SAP HANA Platform with tried and testedapplications that solve specific industry business problems.

From a business value perspective there are 3 broad categories of In memory basedapplication that are available today from SAP.

1. Customer Engagement Applications

First and foremost there are the Customer Engagement Applications categories.These are applications that help our customers build personalized 1-on-1 sales andmarketing engagements with their customers and do things like run targeted andpersonalized marketing campaigns and deliver automated selling recommendations totheir Sales Force.

These Customer Engagement applications can also help you understand the presentand future value of your customers and be able to segment and stratify them into core,opportunistic, marginal and service drain customers and develop distinct and targetedsales and marketing strategies for each of them. This was not possible in the pastbecause customers could only rely on Revenue and Margin numbers to analyze theircustomers. But with SAP HANA you can now look into the full picture and bring in otherfactors like cost to serve, order frequency, loyalty, and buying power into the equation allbased on real time information.

SAP Customer Value Intelligence

SAP Account Intelligence

2. Sense and Response Applications

The second category is Sense and Response Applications. These are apps that are builtaround helping customers’ capture and analyze large amounts of both external andinternal data to help them detect hidden trends and capture deviations and respond tomarket changes in real time.

One example in this category of applications is SAP Demand Signal Management whichhelps Manufacturing companies in Consumer Products, High Tech, and Automotiveindustries enterprise their downstream market and demand data-like Point of Sale data,

syndicated data and social media data — to develop a consolidated view of marketdemand information that they can then leverage across their organization whether that isin Sales, Marketing or Supply Chain to optimize trade promotions, and inventory planningand launch new products.

So if you are a Consumer Product company for example running a trade promotioninstead of waiting for weeks after the trade promotion is over to understand how itperformed in the market you can do that today in near real time by accessing andanalyzing Point of Sale data directly from your retailers and understanding how yourproducts are performing on the retail shelves, which retailers are complying with yourpromotions and detecting critical issues like out of stock to reduce lost sales.

SAP Demand Signal Management powered by SAP HANA

3. Planning and Business Optimization Apps

Finally there are Planning and Business Optimization Apps, which are applicationsthat leverage the Planning and Calculation Engine and Simulation capabilities in the SAPHANA platform to help companies leverage their big data to do things like better forecasttheir cash flows, manage their liquidity risk and optimize their working capital.

One example of application in this category is SAP Liquidity Risk Management whichhelps banks manage their liquidity risk in real time. One of the problems that large banksface today is that they execute millions of cash transactions each day in differentcountries, with different currencies and across different and complex financial products.Building a solid real time understanding of their liquidity becomes a huge challenge whenoperating in such an environment. Adding to that challenge there are new and stricterregulatory requirements that are being put into place after the recent financial meltdownthat require banks not just to report on specific liquidity metrics but also to simulatethese results based on different future economic stress scenarios. SAP HANA allows banksto consolidate large numbers of cash flows and run stress simulations so they can get a

better understating of their liquidity risk profile.

SAP Liquidity Risk Management

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

SAP Fraud Management powered by SAP HANA

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

SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA

Want a super-charged data warehouse?

SAP Predictive Analysis powered by SAP HANA

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

SAP Visual Intelligence with SAP HANA

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

SAP Sales and Operations Planning

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

SAP Collections Insight

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

SAP Accelerated Trade Promotion Planning

Maximize trade with deeper and faster trade promotion planning

SAP Invoice Receipts and Goods ReceiptsAccelerate your financial close while ensuring compliance with your corporate rules

SAP Working Capital AnalyticsMonitor and analyze your Days Sales Outstanding in real time

SAP Supply Chain Info CentreFully exploit your Demand and Supply Planning data for better decision making,

SAP Access Control Role AnalyticsQuicklyWant a super-charged data warehouse?

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer with SAP HANA

Analytics and business intelligence at blazing speed

My GreenSpot

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

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

Preserve Your GreenSpot

SAP HANA for Humanity

We provide the necessary technology and the associated technical resources to helpnonprofits and governmental agencies analyze and visualize their large data sets to solvepressing global problems.

Learn More

Care Circles

Find and deliver the best care. Care Circles is a free service that helps patients and theirfamilies find best practices in caregiving from experts and caregivers around the world.

Learn More

Recalls Plus

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

Learn More

SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA — Business ScenariosSAP has set up an automated tool call Business Scenario Recommendations for SAPBusiness Suite Powered by SAP HANA to help you find and assess the areas where SAPHANA will bring the most value to your company’s SAP Business Suite implementation.This tool provides a report that includes tailored recommendations for optimizations andscenarios based on your actual current production system usage data.

To obtain your personalized assessment, you need to fill out the form atsuiteonhana.com and then upload a screenshot of your ST03N-Workload Monitor screenin your production system. The entire process takes about 5–10 minutes. SAP will theninput your actual workload data into the tool and prepare a customized report thathighlights the various scenarios that will benefit from adding SAP HANA to your SAPBusiness Suite landscape.

You can view an example of a typical business scenario recommendation report at thiss i t e : http://suiteonhana.com/assets/business_scenario_recommendations/en/cross-industry.pdf

SAP Business Suite applications using SAP HANA as (the only) database

In this scenario, applications including SAP ERP, SAP CRM, and SAP Supply ChainManagement (SAP SCM) can fully run on top of SAP HANA in an integrated manner*. Aspart of this first wave of innovations, SAP delivers optimizations for 23 business valuescenarios across key lines of business (e.g., finance, sales, marketing, service,procurement, and HR) and more than 400 industry-specific reports to achieveunprecedented performance. See the details below for examples of scenarios in the SAPBusiness Suite that leverage SAP HANA.

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

Business Scenarios that directly benefit from running on SAP HANAIn this section, we will review the current SAP HANA–enabled business scenarios includedin the SAP Business Suite. A business scenario, in this context, consists of acomprehensive set of business processes that are enabled by one or more applicationswithin the SAP Business Suite. For example, Strategic Purchase Optimization utilizes datafrom multiple areas including Supply Chain Management and Procurement, andAccelerated Organizational Changes Publishing draws primarily from HCM data.

Irrespective of the data source, the critical point conveyed in the following scenarios isthat many of these business functions can be performed much faster — and,consequently, much more frequently — by utilizing SAP HANA. For many business, thiscapability represents a wish that was difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill in the pre-HANAdays. In some cases, the ability to perform certain scenarios more frequently enablesbusinesses to perform more “what-if” type analyses, which in turn help key personnelmake better decisions in a more timely manner. This ability to perform complextransactions and reports in “real time” is a significant boost to driving value within theenterprise.

Fast Financial CloseReal-Time Financial PerformanceEfficient Receivables ManagementEfficient Payables ManagementCentral Treasury Exposure managementAccess Control Role AnalyticsAutomated Cross-System Process ControlOptimized Quote ManagementReal-Time Inventory managementEfficient ProcurementStrategic Purchase OptimizationMaximized Asset utilization and UptimeAccelerated Organizational Changes PublishingInsight-Driven Workforce Cost ManagementReal-Time material PlanningInstant Material Flow ControlComprehensive Engineer-to-Order Project ManagementMaximized Productivity and Profitability of Complex Projects

Fast Financial Close

A financial close defines the financial results of a group as required for presentation toexternal and internal stakeholders by valuating business activities from an accountingperspective. It closes the books for all individual companies. A corporate close for thegroup and subgroups and financial disclosures combine quantitative data withcomprehensive qualitative information. A fast financial close is a core element of financialexcellence.

Support for real-time, fast financial close offers a single multi-dimensional database andshared functionality for accounting and consolidation, providing governance, compliance,and transparency throughout financial close management. With deeper and faster insightdown to the lowest level of detail, it delivers quality at the source, process efficiencies, acommon view across financials (invoices) and logistics (goods receipts), and faster

reconciliation. Drill-through for simulation of organizational changes is available.

Real-Time Financial Performance

Managing performance from a financial perspective is becoming more crucial every day.On-time results for all audit- and analysis-related inquiries and an ability to react to risksand opportunities exemplify the need for a transparent and efficient process to deliverfinancial information on time and accurately. You need to manage operations and relatedperformance successfully in today’s volatile business conditions:

Integrated planning uses a case-driven environment that allows new planningscenarios and user-interaction scenarios.Real-time close helps ensure accelerated closing activities through fasterprocesses, reporting without data latency, and heterogeneous consolidationlandscapes.Product costing enables the modeling and simulation of design-to-cost product costin real time, management of the impact of product and production cost across anorganization for volatile resource and commodity prices, and comprehensiveproduct-cost management analytics.

Efficient Receivables Management

Receivables management is a core finance function to manage the payment of customerinvoices. By reducing the number of days sales outstanding (DSO) and bad-debt write-offs and by managing billing disputes and collections activities, you can constantlymonitor the credit risk of your customer base. The goal of receivables management is tooptimize the working capital to enable investment and growth.

Support for increased effectiveness of receivables management offers algorithms tomatch incoming payments and invoices, freeing headcount to focus on value-addedactivities and processes such as collections, dispute, and credit management. Allinformation is in real time, not batch, to increase the transparency of the working capitalprovided in the payment and working capital dashboard. Exceptions in the process can bepushed to a mobile device to offer immediate action from everywhere.

Efficient Payables Management

Payables management focuses on evaluating, validating, posting, and managingpayments, and archiving of an invoice. Key elements of the accounts payable processinclude integration, automation, standardization, and workflows. Close collaboration withthe treasury team optimizes DSO. In addition, e-invoicing becomes more prominent, butpaper-based invoices remain.

Support for this business scenario combines reports in payables and cash position tohelp payables clerks make the right financial decisions. Real-time and accurate insightinto vendor-opened receipts leads to better scheduling of payment runs and providesflexible and automated payments in real time through parallelization of different payment

runs.

Central Treasury Exposure management

Treasury and financial risk management involves a variety of processes, from cash andliquidity management to the management of financial transactions like money market,foreign exchange, derivatives, debt instruments, securities, and commodity paper deals.You need a holistic view of these processes to be able to respond to changes in a quick,efficient, and compliant manner, taking into account data from past, present, and futureplanning.

The treasury exposure hub powered by SAP HANA is part of support for thecomprehensive process of treasury and financial risk management. It enables globalfinancial risk management on the ERP software system at headquarters as the centralintegration platform. The platform offers a lower total cost of ownership, centralmonitoring, data consistency, and traceability of business events for financial andexternal auditing. The treasury exposure hub is the starting point for analyticalapplications that provide key performance indicators.

Access Control Role Analytics

As a result of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the United States and similar legislation in othercountries, nearly all publicly listed companies now have a dedicated compliance function.Elimination of segregation of duties was initially a main reason to implement a solution toidentify access risks. But companies are now striving to evolve many risk and compliancetools, from bottom-line savings and risk avoidance to top-line strategic advantage.

Using SAP HANA, role administrators can perform real-time analysis on the roles, theirusage, similarity with other roles, and options for reuse to advise business owners aboutthe most efficient usage to avoid creating new roles. Business executives can analyzeroles to uncover hidden downsides and reduce the uncertainty of many financial andoperational planning decisions, such as reorganization.

Automated Cross-System Process Control

You need process control to perform automated testing (focused on compliance) andcontinuous control monitoring (focused on compliance and on process efficiency andeffectiveness). Because of increasing regulations and policies, you must deliver traceablemonitoring and remedial activities to demonstrate compliance. Using queries, reports,events, and analytics, you keep business processes and systems under control.

Using SAP HANA, you can centralize all data from multiple systems into a singlerepository with excellent performance and gain the ability to use complex business rulesfor detailed analysis. SAP HANA increases the usability and power of automated testingand monitoring.

Optimized Quote Management

Informed customers expect a superior sales experience, and internal stakeholders want

to use the almost unlimited amount of Big Data on sales. It is essential to embrace thesetrends early in the order-to-cash business. Quote management thus gains importance asa step in this business process. A huge amount of customer data from diverse categoriesmust be captured in one quote.

SAP HANA enables smart and context-based recommendations based on historicalcustomer and sales information. Individually tailored offers can be made to fulfillcustomer needs in a fast and user-friendly way. The recommendations also embracepredictive information, such as the conversion rate and time from quote to order and thelikelihood of paying on time based on sales volume. Recommendations can also take intoconsideration orders and materials for sales representatives to offer the best quote in realtime to customers when serving them.

Real-Time Inventory management

Inventory management handles the recording and tracking of stocks of materials on aquantity and value basis. It covers the planning, entry, and documentation of stockmovements like goods receipts and issues, internal physical stock transfers, and transferpostings. These movements lead to a large volume of business documents. Inventorymanagement is also responsible for the performance of physical inventory control.

Real-time inventory management provides stock insight and monitoring with highperformance to support demand-driven procurement. It increases process efficiency inadjacent procurement processes such as purchase order or invoice processing. Ananalytical monitor for inventory management, including various dashboards andperformance improvements, is available to enhance the user experience and improve theefficiency of the process.

Efficient Procurement

Because of intense competitive pressure, you often absorb increased costs forcommodities, goods, or services to avoid passing them on to your customers. You aim toboost productivity and drive innovation to lower additional costs. To drive cost-effective,competitive global supply chains, you leverage procurement software to relieve slow andcostly paper-based processes, disproportionately high transaction costs, frequent errors,and maverick spending.

Because SAP HANA lets you analyze massive quantities of data in local memory, theresults of complex inquiries and transactions are available at your fingertips. You canupdate plans, run simulations, and execute decisions based on real-time data.

Accelerate lengthy processing of purchasing documents that arises from a multitude ofline items and a long purchase order history. Provide top business intelligence reports inprocurement side by side to help ensure that you get real-time data with highperformance and a modern user interface. Support fast business decisions and useradoption with flexible configuration options for procurement analysis, and providecomplete visibility into end-to-end procurement activities.

Strategic Purchase Optimization

Pressured to reduce supply costs while maintaining high-quality output, you seek greaterefficiencies and savings from your procurement operations. You know that high-performance organizations employ spend-analysis tools, sourcing and processautomation, and standardized procurement operations. A centralized model facilitatesnegotiations and better supplier relationships.

Provide the purchaser with a comprehensive, complete, and real-time workingenvironment and view of business transactions and business data related to the strategicsuppliers. Offer company-wide search for purchasing business documents to influenceactual payment conditions and rebates. Influence contract negotiations proactively bygetting insight into sales planning and sales orders.

Maximized Asset utilization and Uptime

In asset-intensive industries, you need to handle multiple maintenance plans that mustbe scheduled frequently. SAP software streamlines planning such activities withmaintenance work orders. In traditional systems, this transaction is triggered at regularintervals using a batch program. To remain competitive, you look for new ways to get themost out of your assets by ensuring that they stay up and running.

With scheduling transaction IP30H, based on SAP HANA, you can schedule all existingmaintenance plans within a specific time frame. The software now uses the power of SAPHANA to automatically preselect maintenance plans that are due. The feature avoids theneed for any parameter restrictions. This approach helps ensure that the softwareprocesses only maintenance plans that are due and that no call objects are missed. Itdelivers the results much faster and in a user-friendly transaction.

Accelerated Organizational Changes Publishing

The performance of HR applications and related reporting, analytics, and planning dependto a large extent on how quickly the software can work through hierarchies in any givencontext. More important, the resulting wait times have a direct bearing on the overalluser experience and satisfaction.

Push HR structural evaluations and authorizations to SAP HANA to accelerate thedefinition of structural authorizations (who gets access to what), organization and costcenter hierarchy, and reporting hierarchy. Determine which manager is responsible forthe organization hierarchy and define logical views in the learning catalog to providereporting and analysis without degrading performance.

Insight-Driven Workforce Cost Management

Time and payroll processes create immense amounts of valuable operational data thatcan bring positive and negative trends to light. The data can provide insight into the fullyloaded cost of employees and real-time costs associated with operations, projects,campaigns, and so on. An inability to tap this information source quickly and easilycounteracts your efforts to drive HR efficiencies and introduce agile business processes.

Effective and efficient payroll exception handling is based on real-time data throughprovision of rapid insight into payroll-related workforce costs and trends in core HRfunctions. The functions include drill-down to employee and earning details for the fullyloaded cost of employees, remuneration and overtime based on master data, and timemanagement data stored in payroll results. Hierarchical structures are based onorganizational management or cost center in reporting and analysis.

Real-Time material Planning

Material requirements planning (MRP) determines material shortages by comparing salesorders, forecast demand, and stock-transfer demand with inventory and expectedmaterial receipts. It creates planned orders or purchase requisitions for the missingmaterial. MRP is typically performed in time-consuming batch mode, so that decisions canbe based only on the data derived from periodic runs; production and sales suffer as aresult.

Faster re-planning allows more frequent MRP runs in shorter cycles by providing global,cross-plant planning where demand information is propagated faster through the supplychain. Faster reactions to demand changes reduce the risk of stock-outs and allowreduced safety stocks. This lets users run what-if scenarios in real time to make decisionsfaster regarding reallocation and outsourcing. This functionality instantly updates supplynetwork collaboration with the latest demand information to help suppliers react muchfaster.

Instant Material Flow Control

The results of MRP are stored in MRP lists. Material receipts and requirements for selectedmaterials can be checked in the stock and requirement list. Production planners canselect MRP lists with problems and stock and requirement lists with a short range ofcoverage (when critical to performance). Production planning and purchasingdepartments often make decisions based on outdated information from batch runs.

Early identification of critical materials (such as range of coverage below threshold,unconsumed forecast, overconsumed forecast, inventory without demand, and so on) anda feasibility check of production orders can be done on the fly. This functionality enablesbetter production-order sequences to help determine the fraction of demand needed forsales orders, leading to lower work in progress, shorter lead times, and better due-dateperformance when only the required quantity is produced.

Comprehensive Engineer-to-Order Project Management

Project-driven procurement and progress monitoring are vital to executing complexprojects successfully. The huge volume of real-time data and time-consumingtransactions for maintaining or analyzing project data constrain project and programengineers in making decisions when needed. Waiting for the relevant data to be providedslows engineers down significantly.

Support for this business scenario combines the speed and acceleration of SAP HANAand the integrated processes in the SAP ERP application for complex projects. Real-timeprogress monitoring along the project lifecycle, including version comparison andcombined analysis of financials and logistics data, enables faster decision making so youcan act and react to real project execution work. New project line-item reporting withacceleration and improved user experience is available to support in-depth analysis ofcomplex projects.

Maximized Productivity and Profitability of Complex Projects

Monitoring of progress is a key to successful execution of complex projects. The mainchallenge is the volume of data. Project analysis and progress monitoring are time-consuming due to high volumes of data for complex, lengthy projects. Project or programengineers cannot provide the information needed to decide on natural deviations (time,quality, and costs) in project execution. Cross-project or program monitoring is even morechallenging.

Support for monitoring and analysis of large projects and programs in real time lets youdecide faster, mitigate risks, and deliver the best resource productivity and projectprofitability. Progress monitoring along the project lifecycle can include versioncomparison, and a combined analysis of financials and logistics data enables decisions tobe made for acting and reacting within a window of opportunity. Indirect improvementsthrough SAP HANA arise in production planning, materials management, controlling, andfinancials because of tight integration.

Chapter 5

SAP NetWeaver Business WarehousePowered by SAP HANAThis chapter was contributed by Storm Archer III (@stormarcher3). ProductExpert, SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Product Management

IntroductionSAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) is the first SAP application to be “HANA-fied”to take advantage of the power of SAP HANA. With more than 14,000 SAP BWimplementations globally, SAP BW has become a critical piece of the IT landscape, and itis particularly well suited to benefit from the speed and simplicity that SAP HANA canprovide to applications.

To discuss the benefits of SAP BW Powered by SAP HANA, a brief introduction to SAPBW and some recent history of its evolution is in order. Given the scope of this book, we’llhave to assume that readers are already familiar with SAP BW concepts. Also, we’ll referto many online resources for deeper technical details. With this background, we’ll thenillustrate the additional power and functionality that SAP HANA adds to SAP BW.

SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW)SAP BW is an application that SAP developed in the 1990s. It is essentially an enterprisedata warehouse (EDW) application that includes many built-in functions to create an end-to-end EDW solution. In addition, SAP BW includes a substantial amount of content basedon best business practices. Many SAP customers work with SAP directly through influencecouncils and the global SAP User groups to define new features and validate contentadditions

Customers frequently inquire about the differences between SAP BW and their existing

EDW solution. To answer this question, we need to be familiar with the fundamentalfeatures common to all EDWs. All EDW systems include a database and a data modelingtool. Many companies that implement an EDW will choose an alternate modeling toolbased on features and functionality. In addition, there are a number of other tools thatcompanies need to add to complete their enterprise-ready data warehouse. Specifically,they will need a content-management tool, a metadata-management tool, securitysoftware, a master data manager, workflow capabilities, and many more. The challengemost companies face is integrating all of these software tools into one seamlessoperation. As you might suspect, this is often easier said than done.

SAP BW provides many of the functions needed to install an enterprise-ready EDW. Themajor difference between SAP BW and these other EDWs is that the additional softwareelements that are “add-ons” in a traditional EDW are included in SAP BW, and they worktogether right out of the box. In addition, SAP BW offers solutions to customers who needto expand the included functionality. An example is a scenario in which the includedsecurity is adequate, but the customer needs to participate in a greater identitymanagement solution (e.g., SAP Identity Management Services.)

SAP BW and In-Memory ComputingOne of the fundamental aspects of EDW systems is their ability to managemultidimensional data (cubes) and to conduct analytical operations on those data. Aspreviously mentioned, one key element of an EDW is a database. A major limitation ofmost databases is that they were designed and optimized to manipulate transactionaldata stored in a relational database management system (RDBMS). More specifically,they were configured to provide the best performance for row-based inserts importedfrom OLTP applications. EDWs are a different breed of application entirely. As OLAPrather than OLTP applications, their primary role is to read data from the database anddisplay them in reports or analytical views. EDWs almost never insert data into rows asan OLTP application does. Therefore, many of the performance issues (and relatedtechnical solutions) in the EDW are a direct result of this mismatch between the needs ofthe application for OLAP workloads and the OLTP design of the underlying databases.

For an EDW to operate with the complex data needed for advanced analytics, the datawarehouse application has developed functionality that circumvents the basic limitation ofthe database and provides better performance. This structure is referred to as theLayered Scalable Architecture (LSA) model.

Although the LSA model provides a foundation for developing data models, theadditional layers of functionality that are designed to work around the limitations ofrelational databases cause performance issues as the amount of data increases.Specifically, these additional layers limit the flexibility of the system and place heavyworkloads on the hardware. To combat this problem, SAP introduced the SAP BWAccelerator (BWA) in 2005. BWA is an in-memory appliance that can be added to the SAP

BW system landscape to provide query acceleration and to offload some SAP BWfunctions to the appliance. Basically, an index of a slice of data from the BW system, suchas a cube, is copied to BWA and stored in RAM. This function is very similar to the waythat Google indexes websites. Next, user queries are directed to the in-memory columnarindex of the data, rather than to the physical data arranged in rows on physical disks inthe BW system. SAP designed this shift to in-memory indexing for queries as aworkaround to avoid the performance penalties that must be paid when users attempt toread large datasets off a disk-based database. SAP BWA provided an in-memory,columnar system that allowed queries to operate up to 100 times faster than a disk-based system. This development was an important leap for many SAP BW customers whowere experiencing difficulties due to the limiting nature of the RDBMS. In many ways, theintroduction of BWA was the first real proof point for SAP that in-memory databases couldprovide the “magic bullet” to eliminate the horrible performance issues inherent in disk-based databases while simultaneously reducing the costs and complexity of theapplication that had to be built around these performance bottlenecks.

Figure 1: SAP BW and In-Memory Technology

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

SAP HANA — Specific Enhancements for SAP BWCompanies typically implement SAP HANA to enhance their system’s performance and to

process voluminous amounts of data. When companies evaluate their performance, theygenerally identify specific areas that need improvement; most commonly, queryperformance, data loading, and software add-on/application performance. Below weprovide examples of how in-memory computing both enhances performance andaccelerates applications.

SAP BW 7.3x offers a substantial number of improvements over traditional RDBMSconfigurations. Some of these improvements also reduce both administration costs andtotal cost of ownership (TCO). With each release, SAP BW introduces new innovations tobetter support customers’ business operations.

Query PerformanceOver the past decade, the amount of data that businesses need to query and analyze hasgrown exponentially. Unfortunately, as we’ve already discussed, relational databaseswere not designed around multidimensional data models in the EDW. To overcome thelimitations of the transactional-based databases, EDW systems incorporated functionality— aggregates, fact tables, and other features — into the LSA model. Today, however, theavailability of columnar databases and in-memory technologies has made theseadditional elements obsolete. In 2005, SAP introduced the SAP BW Accelerator as a queryaccelerator. As SAP BWA matured, SAP provided additional engines and features.Specifically, SAP BW on SAP HANA has incorporated the query acceleration and enginesfrom BWA, along with other valuable columnar database features.

As with the SAP BW Accelerator, performance is one of the key drivers for in-memorycomputing. In-memory computing improves performance in a number of areas. From theend user perspective, query response time is often one of the primary elements in systemperformance. SAP BW Accelerator delivered approximately 100 times the queryperformance compared to a relational database alone. SAP BW Powered by SAP HANAprovides similar results for end user query response times. Of course, customer resultshave varied and will vary based on configuration and content. Some customers havereported query performance greater than SAP BWA. The general rule, however, is toexpect similar query performance.

In an SAP BW with SAP BWA implementation, customers have to maintain two systems.This is one area where this architecture can reduce both TCO and administration costs.Further, when companies utilize an SAP BWA appliance, they must obtain separatelicenses for the relational database and for SAP BWA. They also need to maintain twosets of hardware and data. In contrast, implementing SAP HANA as the database for SAPBW involves only a single hardware appliance and license model. From an administrationpoint of view, then, the customer no longer needs to manage multiple data sets. Byreducing redundancy, improving data lifecycle management, and eliminating hardwareand license duplication, SAP HANA dramatically reduces a company’s TCO.

Figure 2: Migration from SAP BW & BWA to SAP BW on SAP HANA

Figure 3: SAP BW on SAP HANA Architecture

Data-Loading PerformanceIn contrast to SAP BWA, SAP HANA provides much more functionality to the SAP BW thansimply query acceleration. In the business environment for many SAP customers, theneed for real-time or near real-time data reporting has dramatically increased. With theirexisting systems, the time required to extract data from a source system is fairly staticand predictable; it generally comprises about 20% of the data load process. Theremaining 80% is spent on data activation and updates. This is where the intelligenceand deep integration of the SAP HANA appliance and the hardware are able to reduce thistime considerably.

Figure 4: In-Memory Execution in SAP BW

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

Data Loading

Figure 5: SAP BW on SAP HANA DSO Acceleration

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

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

Figure 6: Conversion of SAP BW Data Structures

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

Application ImprovementThere are a number of add-in applications for SAP BW, including Strategic EnterpriseManagement (SEM), Integrated Planning (BI-IP), and Corporate PerformanceManagement (CPM). As with data-activation processes, these applications utilizecomplete business logic as an integral part of the solution. When the application serverhas to host the business logic, the number of round trips to the database server can be

extremely large. These add-in applications are now being “HANA-fied” to fully utilize SAPHANA to process the business logic inside the database rather than up in the applicationlayer. The result is much improved performance from multiple areas within theapplication.

SAP In-Memory Planning

Figure 7: Planning in SAP BW on SAP HANA

SAP BW Operational Efficiency and SAP HANA Model InteroperabilitySAP BW 7.30 SP8 and SAP HANA SP5 have delivered new efficiency and flexibilitycapabilities. As database sizes in SAP BW landscapes have increased, SAP has been re-evaluating which data need to be in memory — that is, “active” data — and which datacan be loaded as needed — that is, “non-active” data. Significantly, SAP has configuredSAP BW 7.30 SP8 and SAP HANA SP5 to flag all PSA tables and write-optimized DSOs asnon-active. Consequently, the non-active data will remain on disk persistence until theyare needed. In addition, they will be the first data to be flushed from memory when theyare no longer needed. Customers who have implemented these new systems havereported that SAP HANA memory utilization has been reduced by roughly 20%.

In addition to the features discussed above, SAP has incorporated greater flexibility inutilizing SAP HANA data models with native SAP BW models. Some of these innovationsprovide a database connect (DB connection), virtual provider, transient provider, andopen hub services to consume SAP BW and SAP HANA data. This flexibility allows formaximum options in data consolidation and reporting.

Figure 8: Open Hub Services

SAP BW on SAP HANA Performance & TCO Benchmarks

SAP HANA Performance Benchmarks:Customers frequently ask SAP about benchmarks to verify performance claims for bothSAP BW on SAP HANA and SAP HANA standalone. Below you will find several links to thevarious performance benchmarks relevant to SAP BW and SAP HANA.

Recently, SAP has released a formal benchmark test called BW EML (Enhanced MixLoad) benchmark, which considers:

Near real-time reportingAd-hoc reporting capabilitiesReduction of TCO.

Please see these links for more details and results:http://www.sap.com/campaigns/benchmark/appbm_bweml.epxhttp://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/bweml-results.htm

In addition you can access the SAP HANA One Petabyte Test with a similar data model towhat many SAP BW customers are using:http://www.saphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2012/11/12/the-sap-hana-one-petabyte-test

Whitepaper — SAP HANA Performance

https://www.experiencesaphana.com/docs/DOC-1647

Whitepaper — SAP and HP Breaking Analytic Performance Barriers with SAP HANA and HPAppSystemshttps://www.experiencesaphana.com/docs/DOC-1769

Performance Test Report — SAP HANAhttps://www.experiencesaphana.com/docs/DOC-1755

SAP HANA Performance: 100TB Performance Test Resultshttp://www.experiencesaphana.com/docs/DOC-2381

TCO for SAP BW on SAP HANAhttps://www.experiencesaphana.com/docs/DOC-1769https://www.experiencesaphana.com/docs/DOC-1755

SAP has also conducted individual benchmarks with SAP customers who migrated theirBW systems on RDBMS to BW on SAP HANA. Please contact your account team for resultsfrom SAP reference customers.

Implementation and MigrationSAP customers who are looking to implement SAP HANA in the SAP BW environment haveseveral choices to make as to the most effective way to carry out that deployment.Customers with a mature SAP BW environment typically consider an OS/DB Migration.Other customers perceive an SAP HANA deployment as an opportunity to cleanse anexisting environment by setting up a new landscape and manually transferring theconfigurations from an existing implementation to a new installation. Both options havetheir benefits and their challenges.

MUST READ: Upgrade/Migration/Implementation — SAP NetWeaver BusinessWarehouse 7.3 and higher

The purely technical aspect of the implementation or migration is generally only aportion of the overall project plan. Customers who choose to manually moveconfigurations from an existing installation to a new implementation will need to addressa number of challenges. These customers often have to reach the minimum requirements(listed below), object optimization, and implementation of new features. In contrast,customers who implement new installations will not experience many problems in theseareas. As a general rule, before selecting a project course of action, all customers shouldperform an in-depth project scoping and system analysis to determine whether migrationor re-implementation is the better option.

Once the project direction has been fixed, the next step is to determine what additionalfunctional changes can be implemented as part of the initial project scope. Customers

often choose to break up the technical and functional phases of the implementation intodifferent projects. Project scoping generally defines the initial technical phases wherecustomers can determine what functional elements need to be included in the migration.Often, the various business units will request and require specific functionality as part offunding the overall project. In general, the greater the functional scope, the greater therequired project resources, time, and costs. Customers who have migrated havedetermined that functionality can be implemented in a number of areas withoutsignificantly impacting their existing system.

Figure 9: SAP BW Migration Process

For customers who decide to perform an OS/DB migration, SAP has provided someadditional tools they can utilize to expedite some of the technical steps. When a customerperforms a migration, SAP requires that a Certified Migration Consultant execute theproduction system activities. This person does not have to be an external, SAP, orconsultant. Companies often employ staff who are certified in migrations. Even in thesecases, however, it is often still advisable to work with a specialist who has been speciallytrained and is proficient with the following SAP BW-specific tools:

Dual-Stack Split ToolCombined Unicode conversion and Database MigrationPost-Copy Automation (PCA) toolSoftware Update Manager http://service.sap.com/sltoolset

In addition, all migrations should include an Archiving/Near Line Storage review, sizing,and post-migration review. The PCA tool provides a wizard-style interface that details thepost-copy and post-migration steps to deliver an optimized system. Every installation isunique and has specific areas that require attention. When these items are documentedand addressed, the overall project will run more smoothly and with a greater certainty ofachieving the expected results.

Software Prerequisites for SAP BW on SAP HANANow that we have defined the basics of SAP BW and the associated architecture, it istime to consider what it takes to run SAP BW Powered by SAP HANA. Below we list theminimum software requirements:

SAP NetWeaver BW 7.30 Service Pack 5 (Ramp-Up Release)SAP HANA 1.0 Service Pack 3 (Ramp-Up Release)SAP BW 7.3x Central Instance installed on separate hardware.

No sharing with SAP HANA Appliance.

Additional System Requirements:

SAP NetWeaver BW => 7.3x Unicode OnlySAP NetWeaver BW =>7.3x Analytic Authorizations (Upgrade Requirement)SAP BW Add-on software packages support confirmed.

Not all add-on software had initial support for SAP BW Powered by SAP HANA.At the time of this writing, most add-ons are supported with release-levelrequirements. Always check the SAP notes.

SAP BW and BW JAVA must be a split-stack implementation.

SAP HANA does not currently support SAP JAVA Usage Type.

Check SAP Business Objects 4.0 support.

SAP BW provides installation options for both clean installations and upgrades.Upgrades can require additional steps. Going further, these steps frequently involveadditional time, planning, and system downtime.

Check your SAP NetWeaver BW system for SAP HANA Readiness — free Checklist tool!

Use the Checklist Tool developed by SAP Customer Solution Adoption (CSA) and SAPDevelopment to automate the check of best practice guidelines for operations andprerequisites for migrating an existing SAP NetWeaver BW deployment to the SAP HANAplatform. Please see SAP Note 1729988 for detailed how-to documentation, and reviewthe corresponding ABAP code to run the check on your own system.

Scoping/Sizing Topics for SAP BW on SAP HANAIn any implementation, there are several inputs that affect the project timeline andbudget cycle. Project planning should lay out the scope, resources, and TCO benefits.Although some of these TCO improvements will be soft in terms of business efficiency,they can be categorized as elements of the overall expected results. These areas will be

identified throughout the rest of this chapter.Sizing — Any project, whether a new installation or an upgrade, should include a sizing

exercise to determine what resources will be required for a successful productive go-live.These resources are CPU, memory (SAP BW and SAP HANA), and disk storage. Customerswho are performing new installations need to determine how much volume and whatscenarios they will implement. Their SAP account executive can assist them indetermining what initial sizing is required. The SAP Service Market Place also has aquicksizer available that will help customers approximate their system requirements. Thatlink is http://service.sap.com/quicksizer. In addition, SAP has provided an ABAP-basedsizing tool. Please see SAP Note 1736976 for the program and more details.

Figure 10: SAP BW on SAP HANA Landscape Options

Upgrade project sizing can be a bit more challenging. Customers need to take intoconsideration the scope of the upgrade to determine the resource requirements. Oneexample is whether the upgrade scope includes a phase to perform a Unicode conversion.Typically, the SAP BW system will require more CPU and memory when running Unicode.Disk storage requirements for Unicode conversions can vary. When a Unicode conversionis performed, the database is re-organized, and all empty space between data blocks iseliminated. In some cases, this process reduces the database size.

When a company upgrades to SAP HANA, the size of the data on their existing systemis a direct input as to what sizing they require for the appliance and the disk storage. SAPHANA uses sophisticated compression algorithms to compress the data. This compressionaffects how much RAM is required for the data. Because SAP HANA is an in-memorydatabase, additional RAM is required for work processing space. The current rule forworking space is twice the amount of data RAM.

The amount of RAM required for a system depends on the amount of source data andthe brand of database in the current system. Some RDBMS already have some amount ofcompression. This will reduce the effective overall compression that SAP HANA willachieve after migration. Through the course of many implementations, SAP has observedvarying levels of compression. In general, the basic rule is to expect a 6:1 compressionrate. When applying the working RAM space required, the expected compression is 3:1.Some customers have reported much higher compression rates, but the makeup of thedata and the source RDBMS plays a significant role in determining the effectivecompression rate.

One additional factor for SAP HANA appliance size is based on two additional factors:

1. Data-archiving strategy (Archive and Near Line Storage)2. SAP BW and SAP HANA releases.

SAP recommends that customers create a data-archiving strategy. Archiving and nearline storage (NLS) follow a fairly similar process. Archiving is the process of exportingolder data into offline storage. Near line storage solutions also export older data, but to acompressed online storage facility. NLS solutions have the benefit of reducing the size ofthe online database while still allowing queries to access the archived data if needed. Thearchive solution requires that the data are restored to the system before queries willshow the archive data. The sooner a company develops an archiving strategy, the moremanageable their system will become.

With SAP BW 7.30 Service Pack 8 and SAP HANA 1.0 Service Pack 5, SAP introducednew functionality. This functionality is referred to as Active/Not-Active data. With therelease of the updated SAP BW and SAP HANA, certain data are not loaded into memoryby default. In addition, customers can elect to flag certain content as not-active. The not-active data are loaded into memory only when they are needed. They are also the first tobe flushed when they are no longer being used. By default, BW now automatically marksall PSA tables and all write-optimized DSOs as not-active. According to initial customerreviews, the not-active data concept reduced the SAP HANA system size by approximately20%.

The size of some SAP BW systems will require a “scale-out” implementation of the SAPHANA appliance. As with all SAP HANA implementations, the configuration has to becertified by the hardware partner. In addition, SAP provides extended monitoring for allscale-out projects. Some elements of the system require specific tuning andconfigurations to provide optimal functionality. SAP recommends that all customersimplementing SAP BW Powered by SAP HANA in a scale-out scenario register forextended monitoring with SAP Active Global Support.

For more technical details on scale-out for BW/HANA:

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

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

Landscape OptionsWhen implementing SAP BW Powered by SAP HANA, customers need to consider somespecific configurations. For example, they need to understand what software elementsneed to be run on dedicated hardware and when they can combine scenarios. SAPrecommends that each system utilize dedicated hardware. This is specifically important inProductive environments.

In an SAP BW Powered by SAP HANA landscape, the applications servers and centralinstance systems are separate from the SAP HANA Appliance system. Below we discuss anumber of configurations that SAP often observes at customer sites. From the SAP HANAappliance view, there are a number of possible configurations. SAP has defined somelimitations on these configurations, as we explain below.

DEV/SANDBOX/TRAIN

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

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

PRODUCTIONCustomers often will configure servers in non-productive systems to make maximum useof the hardware. In production, the focus should not be on maximum use of resources,but, rather, on system performance for the business. Based on this foundation, productionapplication servers should be dedicated, and they should have more-than-sufficientresources to support business operations. Customers utilize their hardware vendor’s SAPcompetency center to determine the appropriate configuration. The SAP HANA appliancecan be more complex.

SAP HANA was originally released as a data mart platform. When SAP made SAP HANAsupport available for SAP BW, it released an SAP HANA Database Only Edition specificallyfor the BW system. From a licensing perspective, this system supports SAP BW only as ause type. From a technical perspective, it is possible to run other scenarios on the sameSAP HANA appliance that is the database instance for SAP BW. However, SAP has limitedthis combination use (license permitting) to a single application and a single data mart.The application can be SAP BW, SAP ERP, or SAP Business Suite applications.

Production is limited in two specific areas: performance and lifecycle management.

Performance — When customers utilize SAP HANA, they select the amounts of CPUand memory that provide the maximum system performance for their business.When operations are run against the SAP HANA appliance, the system uses asmany resources as possible to return the best performance. This scenario couldcause other processes to become very slow or to stop completely and wait forresources to become available before they continue. This delay could causeunpredictable performance behavior within the system.Lifecycle Management — The other major production issue is software lifecyclemanagement. Applications as well as the SAP HANA system have to be updated,patched, or restarted at various points in the process. If one application needs tobe patched that requires a SAP HANA system restart, then all of the connectedsystems will be affected, even those that are operating effectively. At the time ofthis writing, backup and restore of an SAP HANA system were restricted to ALLschemas. If a system restore was required, then all schemas in the databaseswould be restored, even if only one schema restore was necessary. This limitationcould result in unplanned data loss.

Figure 11: SAP BW on SAP HANA Landscape Options

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

SAP BW on SAP HANA AdministrationAs with all software systems, SAP HANA implementations require administration. Everysoftware system has tools and functionality for operating, maintaining, and protectingthose systems. SAP has made available a number of tools to make administering thesystem easier and more consistent, regardless of the database platform. The followinglist identifies the primary focus areas of most IT organizations:

Database AdministrationHigh AvailabilityDisaster RecoveryBackup/RestoreSecurity

To assist organizations in readying the operations for SAP HANA, SAP has provided aTechnical Operations Manual (TOM) that contains a variety of topics for managing SAPHANA as an appliance (http://help.sap.com/hana_appliance). As a general rule, SAPHANA needs less administration than other databases. Regular administration dutiesinclude:

Regular backups (Database, Bare-Metal software, and

configuration backup)Patches; usually on demand in case of problems or known issues (DB, OS)Monitoring (automated or manual)

The appliance model breaks up the traditional roles that are housed primarily as part ofthe internal IT Operations. Many of the hardware tasks are provided, managed, andmaintained by the hardware provider. Other areas are the customer’s responsibility. Onthe whole, SAP will assist customers in monitoring all areas to best support the solutions.The table below should provide an overview of where the various administration dutiesare defined.

SAP has updated and enhanced its database management tools to provide a consistentand proactive interface for managing SAP HANA systems. For example, SAP has updatedits SAP DBA Cockpit and SAP Solution Manager to support SAP HANA and provide alertingand monitoring (Solution Manager 7.1 SP4). Solution Manager SP8 will further extend SAPHANA Support with End-to-End Workload Analysis. Additional administration for SAPHANA is performed via the SAP HANA Administration/Modeling Studio. Databaseadministrators have a selection of tools to choose from to manage the SAP HANA system.Within SAP BW, all support tools continue to operate normally independent of theunderlying database.

High availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) scenarios are generally considered tobe critical to production implementation. The SAP system includes functionality that

provides these services. The implementation and details of these services are theresponsibility of the hardware partner. When sizing the system for implementation, thevendor should be taking advantage of the most up-to-date SAP-delivered enhancements(e.g., New with SAP HANA SPS5: SAP HANA synchronous system replication formerlyknown as warm standby solution). Below is an overview of the current HA/DR solution.

Figure 12: SAP BW on SAP HANA Data Center Architecture

Backup and recovery is an area that customers will routinely test to ensure that allsystems are protected. As with HA and DR, SAP provides the necessary system featuresand functionality within the software delivery. Partners work with SAP to develop anddeliver solutions that integrate with the SAP HANA system. Today, partners deliveragents and tools that provide for backup, recovery, monitoring, scheduling, antivirus, andmore. Meanwhile, SAP are developing and delivering additional solutions as an ongoinginitiative to meet the needs of the SAP customer base.

Security is also a critical element in any system implementation. Many customers haveto comply with both reporting and regulatory requirements. SAP has delivered additionalsecurity functionality in SAP HANA SP5. This latest support release contains the followingadditions:

Dynamic Analytical PrivilegesReuse of Analytic Privileges for several users with customizable restrictionsSupport for Complex Logic and Situational Security

Roles as Design Time objectsNew “Support Role”

Used to secure and enhance compliance processesAudit logging enhancements

New Audit EventsData AccessAudit Configuration via SAP HANA Studio

SummarySAP BW Powered by SAP HANA offers a number of advantages over traditional RelationalDatabase Management Systems. SAP HANA provides a similar query performance as theSAP Business Warehouse Accelerator, and it extends that performance to data-loadingand software add-on performance. It also reduces TCO by combining the RDBMS and theSAP BWA Appliance into a single platform. This architecture reduces redundancy andcomplexity in the system landscape.

As SAP BW is enhanced and extended to utilize the power and functionality of SAPHANA, SAP will continue to provide regular updates to its customers at regular intervals.The most common channels for obtaining enhancement updates are through ASUGWebinars, SAP TechEd, SapphireNOW and ASUG Annual conference, saphana.com, andthe SAP Developer Network (SDN). The content delivered through each of these channelsis updated regularly to be as current as possible.

FAQ area for SAP NetWeaver BW Powered by HANA

Figure 13: SAP BW on SAP HANA Roadmap

Chapter 6

Data Provisioning with SAP HANA

COMING FALL 2013

Chapter 7

Data Modeling with SAP HANA

COMING FALL 2013

G

Chapter 8

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

iven the high-level focus of this book and the growing inventory of technicalknowledge that we will link to, we’ll avoid getting into too many code samples or

deep technical discussions in this chapter. Instead, we’ll focus on some of the mostsalient features of programming applications for SAP HANA that can maximize its speedand computational power. In addition, we’ll present examples of some of the newcapabilities that SAP HANA provides to developers. Before we proceed, we need to maketwo important points. First, this chapter discusses how to use ABAP and SQLprogramming concepts in the new SAP HANA programming paradigm. Therefore, wecomposed this chapter with the assumption that you’re familiar with these concepts.Second, the chapter focuses specifically on development in SAP landscapes. Nevertheless,most developers should obtain value from the chapter content regardless of theirprogramming language experience. We plan to incorporate additional languages andprogramming approaches in subsequent revisions.

Basic ConceptsSAP HANA is an ACID-compliant database, conceptually similar in most ways to everyother database you’ve ever worked with. It speaks SQL and MDX, it has JDBC and ODBClibraries, it stores data in tables, with rows and columns, and it requires administrationand backup. However, there are quite a few key philosophical differences and cutting-

edge development concepts that you need to consider when you’re writing apps thatleverage SAP HANA as a database. Most importantly, you’ll have to let go of some of the“rules of gravity” that existed in the “old world” order to take advantage of all of the newcapabilities that SAP HANA provides.

SAP HANA is compliant with the standard interfaces of all databases. Therefore, toimplement this system, you could simply keep your existing applications, redirect theODBC or JDBC configuration, and then run them as-is with SAP HANA as their newdatabase layer. The problem with this scenario is that SAP HANA offers capabilities thatother databases simply don’t. Some of these advantages involve the core technicalcapabilities of the database, which are superior to those of other databases. In addition,SAP HANA goes well beyond the traditional database to offer a full application anddevelopment platform as well as to extend capabilities in areas such as search, predictiveanalysis, and so on. Therefore, building an application with these SAP HANA-specificadvantages in mind will provide you with the maximum opportunities for innovative andresponsive applications.

No ConstraintsThe primary philosophical difference between developing apps in the “old world” anddeveloping apps for SAP HANA is probably the mindshift that is needed to program in aworld without constraints. Several of the early developers who worked with SAP HANAreferred to this psychological shift as “taking the red pill.” Developers are taught fromtheir very first “hello world” application that they have to achieve a compromise betweenmaximum utility of the application and maximum usage of the base infrastructuresupporting the app. There are numerous books that teach these “best practices”(including quite a few from SAP) to help developers achieve this shaky balance.

In a traditional disk-based architecture, writing a complex algorithm that calls raw datafrom 200 large (100 million rows), unique tables simultaneously and performs an on-the-fly join would be considered foolish and impossible just a couple of years ago. But, what ifit wasn’t foolish or impossible? What if that algorithm in the app would provide a hugeamount of business value to the users? What if there were no “penalties” for writing thatalgorithm? What if you could get an answer to that calculation in a few millisecondsinstead of several hours? What if you had a supercomputer dedicated to calculating thatalgorithm whenever you needed it? What if, in addition to performing these operations inthe database, you could collapse all of the other application and presentation layers downinto the database to provide a simple, low-complexity platform to run the entireapplication?

This is the type of philosophical shift required to make the leap from programing in aworld of constraints into the new world of SAP HANA. In the SAP HANA world, the oldconstraints of database I/O and computational power become largely irrelevant . Theboundaries as to where the database ends and the application server begins are also

strongly challenged.

AbstractionIn the SAP world (ABAP especially), developers are taught to abstract their applicationscompletely from the database and treat them as a “black box.” The ABAP engine is theprimary location for all application logic and SQL generation, so the database is used onlyfor data storage. ABAP developers literally have no idea what database their app is goingto be run on, so they have to assume the “lowest common denominator” and write to NOspecific database. JAVA, PHP, .NET, and various other development platforms often utilizevery similar abstraction approaches, thanks to ODBC/JDBC. Unfortunately, theseplatforms often sacrifice capabilities for compatibility. This extreme separation ofapplication logic and data storage has been one of the cornerstones of ABAP applicationdevelopment for the past 20 years, primarily because this was the most effective strategyfor SAP to compromise between broad support for many databases and performance ofthe applications.

In contrast, in the SAP HANA world, the ABAP engine knows EXACTLY which database itis going to interface with. It also knows that SAP HANA has been optimized to meet itsneeds. Consequently, the ABAP engine not only can take advantage of the native speedof memory-to-processor, it can also take advantage of all of the “under-the-hood”capabilities that SAP HANA offers for calculations and business functions.

Abstraction is also present in the JDBC interface for Java apps and ODBC for variousother development platforms. This “buffer” between the app logic and the data it needsworks well to insulate the developers from the database engine. However, it alsoprevents the developers from utilizing many of the database functions.

With SAP HANA, many of the performance-related processing tasks are actually carriedout deep inside the database (like stored procedures on steroids). Thus, SAP HANAenables developers to get deep inside the data model. In addition, SAP HANA functionsinside the database to program data-intensive operations at the data level, not inside theapplication as they do in disk-based databases.

Figure 1: New Programing Paradigm

In the old programming paradigm, developers would design the application and writethe app logic, data transformations, and algorithm/calculations while leaving thedatabase largely untouched. When the app ran, it would fetch whatever data it neededfrom the database, bring it up to the app, transform the data, and then run them throughthe algorithm or calculations to present the results to the user. In SAP HANA, that processis flipped upside down. The app contains only the business logic. A function call isinserted to fetch the ANSWER from the database. The data transformations, algorithm,and calculations are all executed INSIDE the database, and only the result is passed up tothe application. Offloading all of the data-intensive operations to the database and callingthose operations as functions from the application makes the entire architecturesignificantly more elegant and efficient. In fact, companies that employ SAP HANA haveseen their application performances improve by hundreds of thousands of times.

Figure 2: Paradigm Switch in Programming Models

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

ABAP Programming for SAP HANABecause ABAP is the primary application programming language and application serverfoundation for the SAP Business Suite, it plays an important role in SAP HANA’s adoptioninto SAP’s current customer base. Consequently, many people are interested in how theycan utilize SAP HANA within the SAP Business Suite and, by connection, how they can useABAP to access SAP HANA logic and constructs. In the next few sections we will look atvarious architectures where ABAP and SAP HANA work together to create innovativeopportunities in the SAP Business Suite. See Chapter 4 for more details on the SAPBusiness Suite Powered by SAP HANA.

In this section, we will discuss several scenarios for leveraging the power of SAP HANAwith both new and existing SAP Business Suite applications. These scenarios range fromvery simple, non-disruptive applications to accelerate a handful of problematictransactions or reports all the way to running the entire SAP Business Suite natively onSAP HANA as the primary database.

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

Figure 3: SAP HANA as a Secondary Database

ABAP Secondary Database Connection

ABAP has long possessed the capability to make a secondary database connection. Thiscapability allows ABAP programs to access a database system other than the localdatabase, even a database from a completely different DBMS vendor.

This functionality is extended to support SAP HANA for all the NetWeaver release levelsfrom 7.00 and beyond. Service Note 1597627 lists the preconditions and technical stepsrequired to connect to HANA systems, and it should always be the master guide for thesepreconditions. Below we summarize the current state of SAP HANA Development tools atthe time of publication of this book.

Preconditions

The SAP HANA Client is installed on each ABAP Application Server. The ABAPApplication Server Operating System must support the HANA Client. (Check thePlatform Availability Matrix for supported operating systems.)SAP HANA DBSL is installed. (This is the Database-specific library that is part of theABAP Kernel.)

The SAP HANA DBSL is available only for the ABAP Kernel 7.20 and higher.Kernel 7.20 is already the default kernel for NetWeaver 7.02, 7.03, 7.20, 7.30,and 7.31.Kernel 7.20 is backward compatible, so it can also be applied to NetWeaver7.00, 7.01, 7.10, and 7.11.

Your ABAP system must be Unicode or Single Code Page 1100 (Latin 1/ISO-8850-1)— See Service note 1700052 for Single Code Page Support instructions.

Next, you must configure your ABAP system to connect to this alternative database.You have one central location where you maintain the database connection string,username, and password. Your applications then need only to specify the configurationkey for the database, thereby making the connection information applicationindependent.

Secondary Database Connection Via Open SQL

The easiest solution for performing SQL operations from ABAP to your secondarydatabase connection is to use the Open SQL statements that ABAP developers arealready familiar with. If you supply the additional syntax of CONNECTION (dbcon), youcan force the Open SQL statement to be performed against the alternative databaseconnection.

For instance, let’s take a simple Select, and perform it against our HANA database:

The advantage of this approach is its simplicity. By making one minor addition toexisting SQL Statements, you can redirect your operation to SAP HANA. The downside isthat the table or view you are accessing must exist in the ABAP Data Dictionary.

That isn’t a huge problem for this Accelerator scenario, however, because all of thedata reside in the local ABAP DBMS and are replicated to SAP HANA. In this situation wewill always have local copies of the tables in the ABAP Data Dictionary. Note, however,that you can’t access SAP HANA-specific artifacts like Analytic Views and DatabaseProcedures. You also can’t access any tables that use SAP HANA as their own/primarypersistence.

Secondary Database Connection Via Native SQL

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

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

The other disadvantage of using Native SQL via EXEC SQL is that there are few, if any,syntax checks on the SQL statements you create. Errors aren’t caught until runtime, whichcan lead to short dumps if the exceptions aren’t properly handled. This limitation makestesting absolutely essential when you’re using Native SQL.

Secondary Database Connection via Native SQL — ADBC

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

In this iteration we remove the step-wise processing of the Database Cursor andinstead read an entire package of data back into our internal table all at once. The initialpackage size will return all of the resulting records by default. However, you can specifyany package size you wish, thereby tuning processing for large return result sets. Mostimportantly for SAP HANA situations, however, is the fact that ADBC also lets you accessnon-Data Dictionary artifacts including SAP HANA Stored Procedures. Given theadvantages of ADBC over EXEC SQL, SAP recommends that you always try to use theADBC class-based interfaces.

This is really just the beginning of what you could accomplish with this secondarydatabase approach to ABAP integration into SAP HANA. We’ve deliberately used verysimplistic SQL statements in these examples so that we could focus on the details of howthe technical integration works. However, the real power comes when you execute morepowerful statements (SELECT SUM … GROUP BY), access SAP HANA-specific artifacts(like OLAP Views upon OLTP tables), or database procedures.

SAP HANA as a Primary ABAP Database

Of course, SAP HANA can also be used as the primary DBMS under any ABAP-basedsystem. With the SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA offering, ABAP-based Suiteapplications like ERP can be run with SAP HANA as the primary DBMS — no replication orother databases is needed. Likewise, ABAP has evolved to provide new tools andtechniques that enable developers to directly access certain distinguishing features of SAPHANA. These features come with ABAP 7.40-based systems.

We’ve already examined how secondary database connections can be accessed viaboth Open SQL and Native SQL in ABAP. We also learned that ABAP Open SQL is limitedto objects that exist in the ABAP Data Dictionary. To address these limitations, ABAP 7.40has introduced a new concept known as Data Dictionary Proxy Views. Proxy Views allow a

developer to create an ABAP Data Dictionary entry for SAP HANA-specific view types —Analytic, Attribute, and Calculation views. Developers can utilize Proxy Views to leveragethe power and ease of use of ABAP Open SQL against these SAP HANA-specific viewtypes. This capability is particularly useful when it is combined with ABAP range types —that is, Select-Options and Parameters.

Going further, ABAP 7.40 has introduced a parallel concept for Stored Procedures calledProcedure Proxies. Procedure Proxies generate both an ABAP interface and parameterdata types for a SAP HANA Stored Procedure. A new ABAP syntax (CALL PROCEDURE)was also introduced, which makes calling Stored Procedures very similar to calling ABAPFunction Modules.

Both Proxy Views and Procedure Proxies make it unnecessary to drop into Native SQLwithin ABAP to leverage database-specific features. They streamline the amount of workthe developer must perform to design applications for code push down into SAP HANA.They also improve the data transfer efficiency between the ABAP Application Server andSAP HANA.

Transition Closer to the Database

Regardless of whether you are utilizing SAP HANA as your primary or secondary databaseconnection, ABAP developers have to adopt different design strategies if they wish totake advantage of its full power. ABAP developers tend to shy away from deeper aspectsof SQL in favor of processing the data on the application server in ABAP. For ABAPdevelopers who are reading this, when was the last time you used a sub-query or a joinin ABAP? Or even a select sum?

ABAP developers have been taught from early on to abstract the database as much aspossible. Therefore, they tend to trust the processing on the application server wherethey have total control instead of the “black box” of the DBMS. This situation has beenexacerbated in recent years because ABAP contains a greater array of tools that willgenerate the SQL for us.

This approach has served ABAP developers well for many years. Let’s take the typicalsituation of loading supporting details from a foreign key table. In this case we want toload all of the flight details from SFLIGHT and also load the carrier details from SCARR. InABAP we could write an inner join:

Figure 4 — ABAP Open SQL with Inner Join

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

Figure 5 — Typical ABAP Coding of Joining at the App Server

This approach can be beneficial when it is combined with ABAP table buffering. Keep inmind that we are comparing developer design patterns here, not the actual technicalmerits of these specific examples.

If we now added SAP HANA to the mixture, how would the developer approach change?In HANA the developer should strive to push more of the processing into the database.The question might be, why?

To answer this question, we need to keep in mind that SAP HANA is an in-memorydatabase. Almost any developer can appreciate the advantages of consolidating all ofyour data in fast memory as opposed to relatively slow disk-based storage. If this were

the only advantage that SAP HANA offers, however, we wouldn’t notice a huge differencecompared to processing in ABAP. After all, ABAP has full table buffering. Ignoring the costof updates, if we were to buffer both SFLIGHT and SCARR, our ABAP table loop join in theprevious example would be pretty fast, although it still wouldn’t be as fast as SAP HANA.

The other key points of SAP HANA’s architecture are that in addition to being in-memory, it is designed for columnar storage and parallel processing. In the ABAP tableloop, each record in the table has to be processed sequentially, one record at a time. Thecurrent version of ABAP statements, however, just isn’t designed for parallel processing.Instead, ABAP leverages multiple cores/CPUs by running different user sessions inseparate work processes. SAP HANA, in contrast, can parallelize blocks of data within asingle request. The fact that the data are consolidated in memory only further supportsthis parallelization by making access from multiple CPUs more useful, because data canbe “fed” to the CPUs that much faster. After all, parallization isn’t useful if the CPUs spendmost of their cycles waiting for data to process.

The other technical aspect at play here is the columnar architecture of SAP HANA.When tabular data are stored in columns, all of the data for a single column are storedtogether in memory. In contrast, row storage — as even ABAP internal tables areprocessed — places data in memory one row at a time.

Thus, for the join condition mentioned above, the CARRID column in each table can bescanned faster because of the arrangement of data. Scans of unneeded data in memoryaren’t nearly as expensive as performing the same operation on disk (because of theneed to wait for platter rotation), but there is a cost all the same. Storing the datacolumnar reduces that cost when performing operations that scan one or more columnsas well as when optimizing compression routines.

For these reasons, developers (and especially ABAP developers) must re-think theirapplications designs. To extract the maximum benefit of SAP HANA, they will also need topush more of the processing from ABAP down into the database. To accomplish this task,developers need to write more SQL and to interact more frequently with the underlyingdatabase. The database will no longer be a “bit bucket” to be minimized and abstracted.Rather, it will become another tool in the developer’s toolset to be fully leveraged.

SAP HANA Extended Application Services (XS)With SAP HANA SP5*, SAP has introduced an exciting new capability called SAP HANAExtended Application Services (sometimes referred to unofficially as XS or XS Engine).The core concept of XS Engine is to embed a full-featured application server, Web server,and development environment within the SAP HANA appliance itself. However, thistechnology isn’t just another piece of software installed on the same hardware as SAPHANA. Instead, SAP has decided to truly integrate this new application servicesfunctionality directly into the deepest parts of the SAP HANA database. This architecturewill enhance the performance of the app and enable it to access SAP HANA differentiating

features that no other application server has.Before SAP HANA SP5 was introduced, if you wanted to build a lightweight Web page or

REST Service that consumes SAP HANA data or logic, you would need another applicationserver in your system landscape. For example, you might use SAP NetWeaver ABAP orSAP NetWeaver Java to connect to your SAP HANA system via a network connection anduse ADBC (ABAP Database Connectivity) or JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) to passSQL Statements to SAP HANA. Because of SAP HANA’s openness, you might also use DotNet or any number of other environments or languages that support Open DatabaseConnectivity (ODBC) as well. These scenarios are all still perfectly valid. In particular,when you are extending an existing application with new SAP HANA functionality, theseapproaches are very appealing because you can integrate this SAP HANA functionalityinto your current architecture easily and with minimal disruption.

When you are building a new SAP HANA-specific application from scratch, however, itmakes sense to consider the option of the SAP HANA Extended Application Services. Thisarchitecture enables you to build and deploy your application completely self-containedwithin SAP HANA. This approach can lower your costs of development and ownershipwhile providing performance advantages because the application and control flow logicare located so close to the database.

Applications designed specifically to leverage the power of SAP HANA are frequentlydesigned to push as much of the logic down into the database as possible. It makessense to place all of your data-intensive logic into SQL, SQLScript Procedures, and SAPHANA Views, because these techniques will leverage SAP HANA’s in-memory, columnartable optimizations as well as massively parallel processing (MPP). For the end-userexperience, we are increasingly targeting HTML5 and mobile-based applications wherethe complete UI logic is executed on the client side. Therefore, we need an applicationserver in the middle that is significantly smaller than the traditional application server.This server needs to provide only some basic validation logic and service enablement.The reduced scope of the application server lends further credit to the approach of alightweight embedded approach like that of the SAP HANA Extended Application Services.

Figure 6 — Paradigm Shift in Runtime Layers

SAP HANA Studio Becomes a Development Workbench

To support developers in creating applications and services directly within SAP HANAExtended Application Services, SAP has enhanced the SAP HANA Studio to include all ofthe necessary tools. SAP HANA Studio was already based upon Eclipse; therefore, SAPwas able to extend the Studio via an Eclipse Team Provider plug-in that sees the SAPHANA Repository as a remote source code repository similar to Git or Perforce. Thisarrangement empors the SAP HANA Database to manage the entire lifecycle of all of thedevelopment resources (everything from SAP HANA Views, SQLScript Procedures, Roles,Server Side Logic, HTML and JavaScript content, etc.). These management capabilitiesinclude versioning, language translation export/import, and software delivery/transport.

The SAP HANA Studio is extended with a new perspective called SAP HANADevelopment. As Figure 7 illustrates, this new perspective combines existing tools (e.g.,the Navigator view from the Modeler perspective) with standard Eclipse tools (e.g., theProject Explorer) and new tools specifically created for SAP HANA Extended ApplicationServices development (e.g., the Server Side JavaScript editor shown in the figure or theSAP HANA Repository browser).

Because SAP HANA Studio is based on Eclipse, SAP can also integrate other Eclipse-based tools into it. For example, the SAP UI Development Toolkit for HTML5 (SAPUI5) is astandard feature in SAP HANA Extended Application Services. SAP HANA 1.0 SP5 comespreloaded with the 1.8 version of the SAPUI5 runtime, and the SAPUI5 development toolsare integrated into SAP HANA Studio and managed by the SAP HANA Repository, like allother XS-based artifacts.

Figure 7 — SAP HANA Development Perspective

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

Figure 8 — SAP HANA Specific Project Wizards

These features also include team management functionality. All development work isperformed based on standard Eclipse projects. The project files are then stored within theSAP HANA Repository along with all the other resources. Team members can utilize theSAP HANA Repository browser view to examine existing projects and import them directlyinto their local Eclipse workspace. Developers can then work on these projects offline. Inaddition, multiple developers can work on the same resources at the same time. Uponcommit back to the SAP HANA Repository, the tool will detect any conflicts, anddevelopers can access a merge tool to integrate the conflicts back into the Repository.

The SAP HANA Repository also supports the concept of active/inactive workspaceobjects. This feature allows developers to safely commit their work back to the serverand store it there without immediately overwriting the current runtime version. The newruntime version isn’t created until the developer chooses to activate the Repositoryobject.

SQLScriptAs we have described, the cornerstone of the architectural optimization for applicationsdesigned for SAP HANA is the concept of code push down. Execution of data-intensive

logic within the database begins with the usage of standard SQL and views. Developers,however, also need semantics that exceed the capabilities of SQL if they wish to createbusiness logic within the database.

To this end, SAP delivers just such an extension to SQL, called SQLScript. SQLScript isthe primary language for creating stored procedures and functions in SAP HANA. Theextensions that form SQLScript allow the developer to push down more of the data-intensive logic into the database.

Typical SQL statements are often well suited to parallel processing because of theirdeclarative nature. The primary weakness of SQL becomes apparent when you need topass the result set of one SQL operation into the input of a second operation. In thisscenario, developers traditionally had only two options: copy the result set to theapplication server, or write complex, nested SQL statements utilizing sub-queries ormultiple join conditions.

SQLScript solves this problem by providing a feature that describes the data flow fromone SQL operation to another. This feature enables developers to continue to write logicas they would with an application server and also to declare and use intermediate resultsets and variables. Yet it SQLScript often can be compiled down to database joins andsub-queries. This feature offers developers a syntax that is easier for a person to readand write while still providing a logic flow that is well suited to database execution. At thesame time, SQLScript avoids [sending] massive data copies to an application server,[thereby] leveraging sophisticated parallel execution strategies within the database.

In addition to all of these benefits, SQLScript provides enhanced control flowcapabilities as well as some limited procedural logic constructs. These features make itpossible to rewrite some of the more complex parts of the application logic and pushthem down into the database layer as well.

Overall, SQLScript will improve the readability and structure of your data-intensive logic(compared to complex SQL alone) by passing the results of one SQL statement to anotherand by breaking complex SQL into smaller chunks. It also brings the data-intensiveapplication logic close to the database by combining the existing Declarative logic of SQLwith its own built-in functions as well as with orchestration logic such as Data DefinitionLanguage (DDL), Data Manipulation Language (DML), and imperative logic constructs.

When compared to standard SQL, SQLScript has several advantages. Procedures canreturn multiple results, whereas an SQL query can return only a single result set. Goingfurther, SQLScript can decompose complex functions into smaller chunks. This capabilityenables modular programming, reuse, and a better understandability by functionalabstraction. For structuring complex queries, standard SQL allows only the definition ofSQL views. These views have neither parameters nor a fixed interface. Anotheradvantage of SQLScript over SQL is that it supports local variables for intermediateresults with implicitly defined types. With standard SQL, globally visible views have to bedefined even for intermediate steps. Going further, SQLScript has control logic such as

if/else that is not available in the SQL standard. Finally, SQLScript can increase overallperformance by utilizing parallel processing within most of its executions.

R

Stored Procedures serve a second purpose within SAP HANA: They are the mechanismthat integrates other programming languages and interfaces directly into the databaseexecution layer. The best example of this integration of third-party languages is theintroduction of R Language within Stored Procedures.

R is an open-source software language and environment for statistical computing andgraphics that includes more than 3000 add-on packages. R covers a wide range of topicsfrom Cluster Analysis to Probability Distributions to Graphic Displays to Machine Learning— to name just a few.

With the R integration into SAP HANA, developers can write their R Scripts directlywithin a stored procedure. During execution, the R script, along with any input data, aresent to the remote, open-source R server. The execution takes place on the R server, andthe results are sent back to SAP HANA. SAP provides the interfaces in both SAP HANA andthe R server to make this integration completely transparent to the application developer.

Figure 9 — R Language Integration

L

In addition to SQLScript language for the implementation of Stored Procedures, SAP alsohas the language L. L is a robust, low-level, high-performance programming languagelocated inside SAP HANA that allows code to be created at runtime. The L language isbased on concepts from the C/C++ world; it can be roughly characterized as a safesubset of C/C++ that is enriched by SAP HANA data types and concepts to simplify themanipulation of and interaction with database objects. L provides direct access to the

table and column objects that are utilized in the Calculation Engine.However, the direct access that makes L very powerful also makes it rather dangerous.

Therefore, L is currently restricted to SAP internal usage. Customers and partners shoulduse L only in close cooperation with SAP development resources. SAP’s long-term goal isto safely wrap the most useful abilities of L and integrate them into the SQLScriptlanguage. At this point, direct access to L will become unnecessary.

AFL

AFL stands for Application Function Library. It represents multiple function libraries — likeBusiness Function Library (BFL) and Predictive Analytics Library (PAL). BFL is a prebuilt,parameter-driven, basic building block library of calculations delivered at highperformance, including depreciation, capacity optimization, and time-based functions suchas year over year (YoY) and delay.

The AFLs are written in C/C++, and they become closely linked with the databasekernel itself. Significantly, only SAP can write these libraries. Because the AFLs interact soclosely with the database kernel, they operate without a virtual machine abstraction.Nevertheless, customers and partners can easily access and reuse these librariesbecause, with the introduction of SAP HANA 1.0 SP5, SAP can now generate a StoredProcedure interface for them. Therefore, consuming one of the powerful functions of theApplication Function Library is now as easy as working with any other SQLScriptprocedure. In time, SAP plans to release additional tools that make the consumption ofthese AFL-based procedures even easier. SAP may even open up development of new AFLfunctions to select partners.

Next StepsBy this point, you’re probably sick of reading, and want to get your hands dirty playingwith SAP HANA. Luckily for you, SAP offers FREE developer instances of SAP HANA as wellas all of the development tools you need to experiment with everything discussed in thischapter (and more). Simply head over to the SAP HANA One Developer Edition site to getstarted. It takes about 15 minutes to sign up, provision your instance on the cloud, andstart writing code. When you download the SAP HANA Client, it includes SDKs for JDBC,ODBC, ODBO and Python DB API. While the Client is downloading, you can pop over tothe SAP HANA Academy to watch hundreds of tutorials on how to build your first “helloworld” application or to do any number of other things with SAP HANA — for free.

Additional ResourcesApplication development with SAP HANA is such a huge topic that it could fill up severalbooks. In this chapter we’ve tried to cover some of the most critical aspects of workingwith SAP HANA as an application developer. We highly recommend that you continuelearning about development topics at the following sites:

SAP HANA Developer Center

SAP HANA Documentation (help portal)ABAP for SAP HANASAP HANA Academy (educational videos)The Road to HANA (the ultimate link collection for beginners and experts)

Development Resources on SAPHANA.comSAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA

Chapter 9

SAP HANA Administration &Operations

COMING FALL 2013

S

Chapter 10

SAP HANA Hardware Overview

AP HANA is the first SAP solution that has been built to be specifically run as anappliance and optimized for a very specific combination of processor, memory, and

operating system. This approach represents a departure from SAP’s long history of broadplatform support. SAP implemented this new policy to still provide customers withmultiple choices in hardware platforms while avoiding the TCO implications of multiple OSand processor support combinations. In order to understand why, we need to look backhistorically at some of the hardware platform changes that led SAP to adopt this policythis strategy and explore why this path offers SAP customers the best balance of broadhardware 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 thecritical benefits were the lower costs and the more standardized options associated withthe UNIX-based servers that had just become available. When the mass-adoption of SAPR/3 took off, customers began asking SAP to certify more and more new combinations ofoperating system and database on various hardware platforms. This made sense becausemany companies were employing existing landscapes from a preferred hardware vendorand had developed expertise in certain versions of operating system and database thatthey wanted to leverage for their SAP environment.

SAP happily obliged, building out a robust certification laboratory in its headquarters toconstantly test and validate new hardware and software combinations that were beingreleased by its partners for customer use. At the time, SAP believed that providingcustomers with such a broad choice would help them achieve lower TCO of their SAPsolutions 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 apartfrom the other enterprise app vendors. This “technology-neutral” strategy worked verywell for SAP for more than 30 years. At a certain point in the mid-2000s, however, thesmall number of combinations that SAP began with had exploded into a truly dizzyingcollection. Customers no longer benefited significantly from such a broad list of hardwareand technology choices, and the costs for SAP and its customers of this broad coveragewere 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 theirsupport for industry standards. Later, Linux began to displace the original UNIX operatingsystems due to its lower costs and the advantages of open-source code. Soon, theProduct Availability Matrix (PAM) for SAP ERP exceeded 200 combinations of OS anddatabase, with a vast number of hardware platforms for those combinations. At a certainpoint, choice became a liability for SAP and its customers rather than the benefit that itwas originally intended to be.

So, when SAP began development on the precursors of SAP HANA, the company madea strategic decision to avoid all of the costs and complexity of supporting so manyvariations of hardware and technology platforms. SAP was primarily concerned with thethree pieces of technology that had the greatest impact on performance and would bethe largest drivers of TCO reduction: operating system (OS), RAM, and processors. SAPdecided 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 itsdevelopment and testing resources into a single platform while still allowing customers tochoose which hardware vendor would deliver and support the appliance.

SAP had been working with Novell/SUSE for many years to support Novell SLES Linux asa certified operating system for SAP applications. Because Linux is so technically similarto 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 thelowest TCO option for running an SAP system.

In addition to selecting a single OS, SAP had to settle on a single processor family forthe new solution. Although there were many chips on the market that could handle SAP’straditional application-processing requirements, there weren’t any processors that hadbeen designed to handle in-memory processing tasks (because enterprise-scale in-memory computing didn’t exist yet). The initial SAP HANA conversations that SAP’sexecutives held with anyone outside the company were with Intel because SAP realizedthat shifting to in-memory computing would require a new breed of processors that wereoptimized for the new architecture, and Intel has a long history of innovating for thefuture needs of the enterprise.

SAP laid out its strategy for the shift to in-memory computing to Intel’s executives, andthe two parties discussed the level of co-innovation that would be needed to jointlyengineer both an in-memory database and optimized processors that could handle theunique needs of this new architecture. The top executives from each company agreedthat the they would have to establish a new level of co-innovation partnership andstarting in 2005, Intel sent a team of their best software and chip engineers to SAP HQ tobegin the work of jointly optimizing each successive version of the industry-standard IntelXeon chips for the needs of SAP’s evolving in-memory database. Since that time, SAP hasbenefitted from early access to each new generation of Xeon processor from Intel, andIntel has incorporated SAP’s unique in-memory processing requirements into its chipcapabilities.

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 abroad set of collaborations and initiatives. Some of the most visible:

Joint roadmap enablement. Early in the design process, Intel and SAP decision makers identifycomplementary features and capabilities in their upcoming products, and those insights help to directthe development cycle for maximum value.

Collaborative product optimization. Intel engineers located on-site at SAP work with their SAPcounterparts to provide tuning expertise that enables SAP HANA and other software solutions to takeadvantage of the latest hardware features.

Combined research efforts. Together, researchers from Intel and SAP continually explore and drivethe future of business computing

As a result of these efforts, customer solutions achieve performance, scalability, reliability, and energyefficiency that translate into favorable ROI and TCO, for increased business value.

Having created an optimized “core” (operating system, RAM, and processors) for SAPHANA, SAP needed to reach out to the server manufacturers to package the software andhardware into industry-standard appliances in a way that would remove as muchconfiguration 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 benearly identical (OS, RAM, and processors), the hardware vendors provide a great deal ofadditional value in the implementation, management and operations of the hardware.Plus, customers typically have a preferred hardware vendor for their enterpriselandscapes. 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) tobuild certified SAP HANA appliances and create packaged services to implement SAPHANA quickly and easily at customer sites.

In early 2011, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, IBM, and HP all jumped on the SAP HANA bandwagonand had their flagship Intel-based servers certified and in production. Hitachi joined thelist 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 partnersto deploy their SAP HANA solution, each with unique service and support offerings to fittheir customers’ needs. SAP’s strategy of “solid core,” multivendor hardware support forSAP HANA has been received extremely well by customers because it eliminates theconfusing number of hardware combinations and focuses on the value-added solutionsthat each vendor can offer on top of the “solid core.”

General SAP HANA Hardware SpecificationsSAP HANA is sold as a pre-configured, pre-installed appliance that is delivered directlyfrom 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 theprimary memory used by all of the hardware partners.

Most partner systems use on-board 15k RPM hard disks (4x ratio for main memory) fordata-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 througha rigorous process of end-to-end quality testing, performance testing, and continuousearly 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 ServiceMarketplace. Here is the August 2012 SAP HANA PAM.

Single-Node Configuration

Multi-Node Scale Out Configuration

Additional InfrastructureSAP recommends that customers deploy 10 gb network data connections. SAP has nopreference on external storage/SAN; rather, it is determined by the server vendor.

Multi-Node and Scale-Out OptionsSAP HANA is a linearly scalable database, meaning, you can string together multiplephysical servers into a single logical database instance and achieve linear performanceresults for every additional server added to the landscape.

Currently, SAP HANA has certified several vendors for multi-node scale out. Literally,you just add another node/server to the landscape, and you immediately enjoy anexponential increase in performance, in addition to the additional memory. Refer to theSAP HANA hardware partner section of this chapter for more information on the variousscale-out offerings from the individual partners.

In 2012, SAP recently completed the first 100TB benchmark for the 16 node scale outsolution. The data set consisted of five years of Sales and Distribution Records (100Billion records) and was run on a single logical server consisting of 16 nodes. Each nodewas 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 toload 16 million records/min. SAP HANA’s compression algorithms were able to achieve20x compression on the raw data when loading into memory, going from 100TB on diskto 3.8TB in memory.

Typical query results were:

BW Workload: 300ms — 500msAd-Hoc Analytics: 800ms — 2s

No database tuning, indexing or caching were needed to achieve these results. To putthat in context, the closest competitive database is roughly 1000x slower in the samebenchmark and several times more expensive.

High AvailabilitySAP HANA supports cold standby hosts, meaning a standby host is kept ready in theevent 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 cangroup 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 runon the standby host, but they are idle and do not enable SQL connections.

Disaster RecoveryThe SAP HANA database holds the bulk of its data in memory to ensure optimalperformance, 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 diskat regular save-points. Additionally, all data changes are recorded in the log. The log issaved from memory to SSD after each committed database transaction. After a powerfailure, the database can be restarted in the same way as a disk-based database, and itreturns 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 donot help if the persistent storage itself is damaged. Protecting against data loss due todisk failures requires backups. Backups save the contents of the data and log areas todifferent locations. These backups are performed while the database is running, so userscan continue to work normally. The impact of the backups on system performance isnegligible.

If the SAP HANA system detects a failover situation, the work of the services on thefailed server is reassigned to the services running on the standby host. The failed volumeand all the included tables are reassigned and loaded into memory in accordance with thefailover strategy defined for the system. This reassignment can be performed withoutmoving 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 samedisks.

Before a failover is performed, the system waits for a few seconds to determinewhether 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 failoverdetection and loading may take several minutes to complete.

For more information on HA and DR with SAP HANA, refer to this note.

SAP Hardware Partner DetailsIn the remaining section of this chapter, each Certified SAP HANA hardware partner wasgiven 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 abouttheir products and services for SAP HANA.

Links:IntelCisco

DellFujitsuHitachiHPHuaweiIBMNEC

Intel & SAP: Co-innovation for Real-Time ComputingFor more than 10 years, Intel and SAP have worked together to deliver industry-leadingperformance of SAP solutions on Intel architecture, and a large proportion of new SAPimplementations are now deployed on Intel platforms. The latest success from thattradition 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 visibleinclude the following:

Joint roadmap enablement. Early in the design process, Intel and SAP decision-makers identify complementary features and capabilities in their upcomingproducts, and those insights help to direct the development cycle for maximumvalue.Collaborative product optimization. Intel engineers located on-site at SAPwork with their SAP counterparts to provide tuning expertise that enables SAPHANA and other software solutions to take advantage of the latest hardwarefeatures.Combined research efforts. Together, researchers from Intel and SAPcontinually explore and drive the future of business computing. As a result of theseefforts, customer solutions achieve performance, scalability, reliability, and energyefficiency 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 familyenables greater business agility and innovative usage models that let companies respondto changing conditions in real time.

Scenarios such as monitoring customer and supplier activity can generate petabytes ofdata, 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 thatdiscerns patterns and trends so you can adjust your just-in-time supply chain rapidly. Youcan also model “what if” scenarios to structure sales and promotions for optimaloutcomes 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 deliverextraordinary capabilities for businesses of all sizes that implement SAP HANA forfunctionality such as business intelligence and data analytics.

Performance Optimizations of SAP HANA with the Intel Xeon® Processor E7Family

SAP HANA benefits dramatically from high-speed Intel® QuickPath processor-to-memoryinterconnects and the latest processor instructions, Streaming SIMD Extensions. Thosefeatures eliminate many I/O bottlenecks, so processor headroom is available to generateexcellent throughput and responsiveness. SAP HANA is also engineered to take particularadvantage of RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability) features of the Intel Xeonprocessor E7family, especially error correction through Machine Check ArchitectureRecovery, for mission-critical implementations.

As a result of the high level of performance optimization for servers based on the IntelXeon processor E7 family, SAP HANA can provide businesses of all sizes superior resultsfor data warehousing implementations such as business intelligence and data analytics.

Assured Performance with Mission-Critical Advanced Reliability of the IntelXeon Processor E7 FamilyMachine Check Architecture Recovery, a reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS)

feature built into the Intel Xeon® processor E7 family, enables the hardware platform togenerate Machine Check Exceptions. In many cases, these notifications enable thesystem to take corrective action that allows SAP HANA to keep running where an outagewould otherwise occur.

Hardware based on the Intel Xeon® processor E7 family enables SAP HANA to fail overfrom one processor socket to another in the event of a processor failure and to handlememory errors with as little impact to workloads as possible.Copyright© 2012 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.

Cisco Systems SAP HANA SolutionsAs part of the “Unified Appliance Environment”, Cisco has developed a full portfolio of SAP

HANA appliances based on Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS™) spanningfrom 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 thecompression factors, the Cisco appliances can support databases up to 56 TB, the largestcurrently supported by SAP. However the Cisco technology can support up to 20 TB ofusable memory, which corresponds to uncompressed databases up to 100 TB or more.

Cisco UCS: A Unique SAP HANA SolutionCisco UCS is a single unified system entirely programmable through unified, model-basedmanagement to simplify and speed deployment of enterprise-class applications andservices. All Cisco UCS SAP HANA appliances are intelligent infrastructure that can bemanaged through the embedded, single management plane across multiple Cisco UCSrack and blade servers (Figure 1). This radically simplifies operations and lowers costs.The model-based management applies personality and configures server, network, andstorage connectivity resources. Using Cisco service profiles, which define the model, it issimple to provision servers by applying a desired configuration to physical infrastructure.The configuration is applied quickly, accurately, and automatically, improving businessagility, staff productivity, and eliminating a major source of errors that can causedowntime.

The Cisco Fabric Extender Architecture reduces the number of system components topurchase, configure, manage, and maintain by condensing three network layers into one.It eliminates both blade server and hypervisor-based switches by connecting fabricinterconnect ports directly to individual blade servers and virtual machines. Virtualnetworks are now managed exactly as physical networks are, but with massivescalability. This represents a radical simplification over traditional systems, reducingcapital and operating costs while increasing business agility, simplifying and speedingdeployment, and improving performance.

Cisco UCS helps organizations go beyond efficiency: it helps them become moreeffective through technologies that breed simplicity rather than complexity. The result isflexible, agile, high-performance, self-integrating information technology that reducesstaff costs and increases uptime through automation, providing a more rapid return oninvestment.

The excellent performance combined with the broad range of usable memory make theCisco UCS SAP Appliances an excellent, easy-to-manage choice for analyzing massiveamounts of business data.

Cisco UCS SAP HANA Architecture

SAP HANA T-Shirt Sizes OfferedThe 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 ofusable memory. This configuration is primarily used for development, test, and smallproduction SAP HANA systems with uncompressed datasets up to 1.75 TB. The Cisco UCSappliance incorporates a persistency layer, based on internal SSD drives that require noadditional 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. Thisconfiguration is ideal for use in mid-sized and larger production environments such as theone used by Medtronic, a large, worldwide manufacturer of medical devices (seecustomer example). The persistency layer is provided by two Fusion IO cards to avoidpossible bottlenecks in duo card configurations sharing the same PCI slot.

SAP HANA Scale-out offeringThe Cisco UCS solution that has been certified for large SAP HANA implementations is auniquely scalable appliance. It allows customers to easily adapt to the growing demandsof 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, asneeded. 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 forSAP HANA studio, a Cisco 2911 for secure remote management, and one enclosure withsupport for up to 4 Cisco B440 blades. The basic configuration can easily scale by addingup to 3 extension bundles each providing an additional blade enclosure for up to 4 moreCisco B440 M2 blade servers each and the correspondent storage from EMC or NetApp.

High Availability SAP HANA SolutionCisco UCS SAP HANA appliances have redundancy designed-in providing no single point offailure. However, in the event of a hardware failure on a blade or rack server, any spareCisco UCS server can take over the role of the failed server in minutes by simply applyingthe service profile to the spare server. Disaster recovery (DR) scenarios can be easilyimplemented by using service profiles to quickly provision servers at the DR site inconjunction with the “classical” replication technologies of EMC and NetApp.

SAP HANA Support infrastructureAll Cisco UCS servers are interconnected with a low-latency, high-bandwidth 10-Gbpsunified Ethernet fabric. The unified fabric supports both IP and Fibre Channel overEthernet (FCoE) connections through redundant, high performance, low-latency CiscoFabric Interconnects. The Cisco Fabric Interconnect, with embedded management, is thecore of the Cisco UCS and reduces both the number of network “hops” and networklatency, critical to SAP HANA performance. The unified fabric radically reduces thenumber of cables, inter-chassis switches, and network adapters required by legacyplatforms. This reduces energy consumption and operational costs resulting in muchlower total cost of ownership.

Additional softwareThe operating system, Cisco UCS drivers, and Cisco UCS management software are allpart of the appliance; therefore no additional software is necessary to manage the entiresystem. However Cisco Intelligent Automation for SAP HANA is highly recommended. TheCisco Intelligent Automation software solution supports the daily operation of a SAPHANA appliance by:

Monitoring the CPU and memory workload, and the average index read time atblade levelAutomating quarterly maintenance, including firmware updates and file systemvalidationEnsuring configuration management assurance for all appliance componentsMonitoring data services availabilityProactively monitoring SAP HANA subsystem components status

Monitoring query execution response times using the SAP HANA index for the queryexecution SAP HANA Query Response TimeExecuting sample queries and recording total execution time and query componentperformance breakdownProactively monitoring the SAP TREX services statistics based on thresholdsAlerting CPU, memory, or throughput thresholds for SAP TREX servicesAutomating Cisco UCS blade and rack server provisioning for use in the appliance inminutes, instead of days

SAP HANA Installation and Support ServicesCisco SAP HANA installation services includes the assembly of all necessary hardware andsoftware required for a SAP HANA appliance. Cisco’s SAP HANA engineers will install theappliance into the customer’s network and connect it to source system(s).

Also included are the necessary SuSe Linux Licenses, Smartnet 24x7x4 day 2 supportfor the Cisco hardware, as well as licenses, and first-year maintenance for EMC or NetAppstorage as required.

Implementation of solutions based on Cisco SAP HANA appliances are provided throughCisco Advanced Services and Cisco’s ecosystem of systems integrators and partners.These solutions include data modeling, data load, replication, and SAP HANA applicationconfiguration.

Customer Success StoryMedtronic 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 ascustomer feedback. BI reporting on its fast-growing data warehouse was straining thecapabilities of the company’s computer infrastructure. Because employees couldn’tgenerate some types of reports (particularly using unstructured data), their ability todraw 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 productionsystems. With the fully scaled and optimized implementation now in place, Medtronichopes to cut response times even further.

Customer Benefit:

BI operations at Medtronic will use the SAP HANA platform to report on structured andunstructured data, wherever it resides, whether on SAP or non-SAP systems. The addedperformance, scalability, and flexibility of this new architecture will increase the value ofcompany data as it continues to proliferate, increasing employee efficiency and enablingsmarter decision making.

For More InformationFor more information on Cisco UCS, please visit http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsFor more information on Cisco UCS SAP HANA Appliances, please visithttp://www.cisco.com/go/sapTo learn more about Cisco Solutions, please visithttp://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns340/ns394/ns224/solutions.htmlTo contact Cisco for addition information on SAP on Cisco UCS please emailsaponcisco@cisco.com

Dell SAP HANA SolutionsFor more than a decade, Dell has collaborated with SAP to deliver hundreds of solutionsto customers across many industries. Dell helps organizations achieve rapid andsustainable business results with standards-based solutions that are high-performing andend-to-end.

In addition to innovative, leading-edge hardware platforms, Dell offers access tothousands of enterprise computing solutions consultants. Our knowledge expertsincorporate their vast experience and the knowledge they have acquired over the courseof many years into an enterprise solution delivery model that spans hardware, consulting,implementation, hosting, and application management services designed to enhancevalue for customer investments in SAP solutions.

Dell offers customers a portfolio of end-to-end solutions and services in support of SAPHANA applications. Our complement of assessment, implementation, management, datamodeling, and use case assistance services helps to reduce IT costs while helpingorganizations transform their business. Dell’s innovative platforms can dramaticallyincrease the availability and speed of business to insightful decision making using SAPHANA.

Dell’s Unique SAP HANA Value PropositionDell and SAP have teamed up to offer an optimally configured SAP HANA solution thatincludes a hardware appliance, preloaded software, and a full range of services. Thissolution is both reliable and scalable, and it is offered in multiple configurations toaddress your specific business needs. Dell’s end-to-end solutions give your organizationfull access to the power of SAP HANA.

Dell’s SAP HANA appliance solution includes:

Powerful technology — Dell’s PowerEdge R910 incorporates Intel E7 technology,is certified for SAP HANA, and includes everything needed to support your SAPHANA solution. This all-in-one solution includes powerful system-managementfeatures that provide for seamless implementation and management.Enterprise class SAN storage — Dell Compellent SAN Storage offers the FluidData storage system, a virtualized environment that provides tremendous flexibilityin storage management. Automated data tiering manages persistent storage toprovide the quickest access to the data sets most needed for analysis, and highavailability features that simplify backups, expansion, and data migration providetangible enhancements to the SAP HANA analytics engine infrastructure.Large-scale enterprise-consulting expertise — Dell leverages its experiencein delivering enterprise IT and solving “big data” issues for global companies toprovide actionable and real-world technology, strategies, and solutions. Dell’sCenter of Excellence (CoE) is well-established for SAP HANA, SAP Business

Warehouse Accelerator (BWA), and mobile solution complements.Established methodology — Dell’s In-Memory Computing and AnalyticMethodology (DIMCAM) incorporates best practices and guides customers througha streamlined and successful implementation process.Comprehensive services — Dell’s portfolio of SAP full lifecycle services leverageindustry best practices to provide better business outcomes for SAP clients.

World-class support — Dell’s ProSupport™ and Mission Critical Services helpkeep your SAP HANA solution running smoothly.

The combination of Dell’s PowerEdge R910 platform and SAP HANA software enablesusers to conduct analytics, performance management, and operations in a single system.Together, these solutions enable a business to respond more rapidly to events that areimpacting their operations.

By implementing Dell’s SAP HANA solution, an organization can position itself to identifyand analyze trends and patterns in order to improve planning, forecasting and priceoptimization. Enterprise customers taking advantage of Dell’s SAP HANA platform get acost-effective, optimized in-memory computing solution that can increase availability andreduce risk.

Dell’s SAP HANA ProductThe Dell PowerEdge Server R910 platform has been certified by SAP to run SAP HANAsoftware, thus offering customers a powerful and flexible way to query and analyze largevolumes of data with great speed. Dell customers running SAP HANA on PowerEdge R910servers can gain real-time access to information and analytics, enabling them to bestaddress rapidly evolving market environments.

Dell has also been certified by SAP to deliver the SAP Business Suite for HANA. Thissolution unites business analytics and transactions on a single in-memory platform.

Dell’s SAP HANA appliance provides:

Performance and reliability in a scalable 4U, four-socket server allowing largeworkload consolidation and scale for the SAP HANA in-memory database.

Integrated diagnostics with Intel® Advanced RAS (reliability, availability,serviceability) Technology.Robust infrastructure, including performance resources, power efficiency, I/O,and memory scalability.Processing power using high-performing Intel E7 Series processors, up to 512GBof DDR3 memory, and 2 x 10Gb Optional LOM with 10 PCIe slots.Energy-efficient system design built with Energy Smart technologies thatenable power capping, power inventory, and power budgeting within your

environment. The logical component layout of the internal components aids withairflow direction, helping to keep the server cooler.

The SAP HANA appliance from Dell is fully contained in the PowerEdge R910 server,making use of fast internal disks for storage and solid state cards. Solid state technologyfrom Dell offers high IOPs and low latency performance for the in-memory SAP HANAdatabase. While solid state drives are used to maintain the system’s logs, a RAID groupmade up of internally held 15K RPM disks is used to maintain a copy of the data image.

T-Shirt sizes offeredDell offers several different sizes of HANA appliances to meet your needs, all of which arebased on the Dell PowerEdge R910 server platform.

Larger Scale-Out ConfigurationsThe linear scalability of the SAP HANA software platform makes scaling to meet largerworkload demands a very straightforward process. In Jan-uary 2013, Dell announced 1, 2

and 4 terabyte scale-out configurations, and in May 2013, Dell further enhanced its SAPHANA appliance plat-form to support incremental, non-disruptive growth from 1 to 8terabytes, with growth increments as small as .5TB. This flexible scalability givescustomers the ability buy exactly what they need today with the confi-dence that theirinfrastructure can keep pace as their needs increase.

Using the same PowerEdge R910 servers, Dell combines the superior scalability andRAS features of this platform into a multi-node configura-tion, utilizing 10GbE networking,and sharing data across Dell Compel-lent SAN Storage.

To supplement the power, performance, and manageability of the Dell PowerEdgeservers, Dell Compellent SAN Storage offers the additional benefit of the Fluid Datastorage system, a virtualized environment that provides tremendous flexibility in storagemanagement. Automated tiering of data — standard with Dell Compellent storagesoftware — manages persistent storage to provide the quickest access to the data setsthat are most necessary for analysis. In addition, it offers high-availability features thatsimplify backups, expansion, and data migration provide tangible enhancements to theSAP HANA analytics engine infrastructure.

As always, Dell engineers its components to provide a completely integrated and fullysupported ecosystem for high-performance data analytics.

High Availability

The Dell™ PowerEdge™ R910 is a high-performance 4-socket 4U rack server designed forreliability and scalability for mission-critical applications. Its high-availability featuresinclude:

Built-in reliability features at the CPU, memory, hardware, and hypervisor levelsIntel advanced reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) capabilitiesRedundant power suppliesRemote iDRAC6 connectivityIntegrated systems management, Lifecycle Controller, and embedded diagnosticsto help maximize uptimeInternal Dual SD Module providing hypervisor redundancy

Dell’s focus on reliability starts with product design and ends only when it has delivereda solution that meets strict testing and quality con-trol standards. Dell’s SAP HANAsolution leverages SAP HANA System Replication to deliver high availability SAP HANAimplementations within a data center and disaster recovery for SAP HANA systems be-tween data centers. Disaster recovery is supported through SAP HANA’s SynchronousReplication functionality and provides remote disaster re-covery capability for any sizeSAP HANA system. Synchronous Replica-tion fully mirrors the operations of the SAP HANAsystem to another platform in a remote location. This ensures the customer’s SAP HANA

operations provide not only business continuity but also the capacity to withstand apotentially crippling data center disaster.

SAP HANA VirtualizedDell’s platform allows customers to run their development and test envi-ronments invirtualized instances of SAP HANA. Using the VMware vSphere 5.1 virtualizationenvironment, customers can deploy multiple virtual machines on a single server SAPHANA platform. Virtualization lowers development infrastructure total cost of ownershipand simplifies deployment for projects and testing.

Support infrastructureDell’s SAP HANA appliance is designed to be an all-inclusive solution that comes as a pre-integrated unit with all of the necessary hardware, storage, and networking capabilities.

Additional software neededDell’s SAP HANA appliance is an end-to-end and all-in-one solution that comes pre-loadedwith all of the software and management tools necessary.

Support ServicesDell is an expert in SAP HANA system support. Dell has a strong systems managementand support practice as well as an in-depth understanding of SAP hardware and softwaresolutions.

Dell’s SAP HANA appliance comes with 3 years of Dell’s award-winning ProSupportMission Critical services and a 3-year extended hardware warranty. Customers receive24x7x365 phone support, escalation management, and collaborative support leveragingDell’s global ProSupport infrastructure of more than 30,000 technicians supporting morethan 100 countries in 55 languages.

Dell’s ProSupport Mission Critical services are designed to accelerate rapid resolution ofyour technical problems by ensuring that parts and/or technicians will arrive promptly andby providing access to Dell’s Critical Situation Process.

Key support features:

Onsite Response — 4 hour onsite service with 6-hour hardware repair available24x7, including holidays.CritSit Procedures — Severity Level 1 issues will be reviewed by Dell and may benominated for CritSit incident coverage through Dell Global Command Centers.During a CritSit incident, expert resource teams are mobilized to get you back upand running as quickly as possible.Emergency dispatch — Onsite service technicians are dispatched in parallel withphone-based troubleshooting when you declare a Severity Level 1 incident.

Optional SAP HANA servicesDell offers optional SAP HANA services to assist with your implementation.

SAP HANA Executive Workshop — This workshop helps you develop the UseCase and Business justification for a SAP HANA solution. In addition, it assistsorganizations in determining whether SAP HANA is a fit for their situation.SAP HANA Proof of Concept — Using the Dell DIMCAM methodology andIMPROVE jump start process, customers can quickly appreciate the value that SAPHANA can bring to the decision-making process.SAP Modernization Services — Dell has developed a portfolio of ModernizationServices for SAP applications that features cloud computing, real-time analytics,and mobile applications.Implementation — SAP HANA Implementation workshops facilitate the planningand creation of the Business Justification for the rest of the deployment.Analytics Factory — Dell offers global business intelligence consulting andsupport.

Customer success storiesGesellschaft für Information und Bildung (G.I.B), based in Siegen, Germany, is anexpert in SAP software. The company builds add-ons for SAP environments, and isexperiencing growing success with its G.I.B Dispo-Cockpit solution, which improves supplychain management. G.I.B customers want faster access to supply chain data to help themincrease efficiency and make better decisions. To achieve these objectives, G.I.B

welcomed the development of SAP® HANA™, which enables businesses to analyze SAPdata faster and in real time.

The company was looking for a partner with significant SAP expertise, data centercredibility, robust support and consulting services, and an accredited SAP HANAappliance. So, it turned to its long-standing IT partner: Dell. They specifically needed tomeet a very tight deadline to develop a SAP HANA platform for their new Dispo-Cockpitapplication for an upcoming customer demonstration event. Together with Dell, G.I.B

installed an SAP HANA appliance based on Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers, and they

collaborated with Dell ProSupport™ to help the project stay on schedule.

The benefits the new system provided to G.I.B. include:

G.I.B clients can now analyze critical data in seconds, and not minutes, as waspreviously the caseBusiness ensures SAP HANA demonstration is ready for key eventFlexible support helps G.I.B meet its business needsG.I.B drives SAP HANA success globally with customer support

Dell’s technical expertise ensures that work stays on schedule

As a result of its collaboration with Dell, G.I.B successfully completed its demonstrationenvironment to show customers how much faster its Dispo-Cockpit software operateswith SAN HANA.

“Our Dispo-Cockpit solution running on a Dell SAP HANA appliance offers customerseven more value. The response of customers has been positive and we are lookingfor pilot customers to jointly install the solution. Dell supported us well, highlightingthe close relationship we have with our technology partners.”

— Nikolaj Schmitz, IT Manager, G.I.B

Koehler Paper Group is a manufacturing company based in Germany. World leadersin specialist paper manufacturing, Koehler Paper Group sells 500,000 tons of paper eachyear. It employs around 1,800 staff and reports an annual turnover of more than €700million.

Koehler wanted to replace its conventional database environment with a more efficientinfrastructure. The company worked with Dell and SAP to introduce a new databasesolution based on SAP HANA and Dell PowerEdge servers in three days.

Dell’s SAP HANA solution delivered many benefits to Koehler Paper Group, including:

New system cuts data loading times from five minutes to five secondsFirm reduces cost of business warehouse by one-thirdEase of use simplifies reporting processEfficient reporting helps employees make smarter decisions fasterStrong partnership provides expert consultancy

I was very pleased with the technical know-how of the Dell and SAP teams. Not onlywas the level of expertise impressive, but on a personal level, everyone collaboratedwell to make the project a success.

— Karl Schindler, Head of IT, Koehler Paper Group, Germany

Contact information for inquiriesDell offers customers a complete portfolio of end-to-end solutions in support of SAP HANAapplications that reduce IT costs while helping organizations transform their business.Contact your Dell Sales or Services Account Executive to learn more.

Fujitsu SAP HANA SolutionsThe global partnership between Fujitsu and SAP has functioned as an innovation enginefor customers for decades. In its role as a pioneering SAP HANA partner, Fujitsu offerssolutions and services that deliver optimal support towards a SAP real-time data platform.The features of our broad approach to support SAP’s in-memory technology are:

A smart HANA infrastructure architecture for highest flexibility, scalability, andavailabilityRapid time to value and a quick return on investment thanks to a uniquehigh-quality pre-installation and staging processDedicated services that go far beyond traditional infrastructure services and thatsupport decision making, project preparation, financing, and migration.The Fujitsu SAP HANA Global Demo Center, which customers can access remotelyto test and tangibly experience the business impact of SAP HANAThe innovative FlexFrame Orchestrator, a consistent and uniform managementplatform for SAP landscapes, including SAP HANA, that reduces the overalladministration work and helps customers to save money

By combining expertise in infrastructure solutions with BI knowledge, Fujitsuprofessionally supports SAP HANA projects in every respect. This outstandingengagement and excellence in driving in-memory technology has been recognized by thebestowing of several prestigious awards; for example, SAP Pinnacle Awards in thecategory “Technology Innovator of the Year.”

Fujitsu SAP HANA Infrastructure OfferingThe Fujitsu portfolio for SAP HANA addresses the requirements of various customersegments — from specific turnkey appliances for small and midsize companies tocustomized solutions for large enterprises:

The Fujitsu Compact Appliance is optimized for HANA implementations incombination with SAP Business One and SAP Business All-in-One.The Fujitsu Power Appliance for SAP HANA is designed as an optimal foundation forthe SAP HANA database. It comprises both single-node and multi-nodeconfigurations that are suitable for all existing usage scenarios; for example, SAPNetWeaver BW on HANA, Business Suite on HANA, and the entire set of acceleratoroptions.

All Fujitsu infrastructure solutions for SAP HANA are based on industry-standardPRIMERGY servers, which represent a unique combination of Japanese-style innovationand German quality standards. Solid reliability and excellent price performance contributeto the very favorable lifecycle costs. Fujitsu solutions reduce operational costs through

server management; benchmark-proven energy efficiency; and innovative, market-leading technology.

Fujitsu Compact Appliance for SAP HANA (designed for SAP Business One incombination with SAP HANA or SAP Business All-in-One with SAP HANA)Fujitsu’s portfolio for SAP Business One or SAP Business All-in-One in combination withSAP HANA is the product of the company’s experience as the exclusive SAP infrastructurepartner in the ramp-up phase of more than 100 successful implementations over a 12-month period. The Fujitsu offering has been designed based on a building-block principleto ensure optimal flexibility. It allows more than 100 combinations of certifiedinfrastructures, staging options, and additional services.

Fujitsu PRIMERGY TX300 S7 and PRIMERGY RX350 S7 servers are SAP-certifiedplatforms for SAP Business One, for analytics powered by SAP HANA, and for SAPBusiness One on HANA. The tower and rack systems, which are available with fourdifferent main memory options—64 GB, 96 GB, 128 GB and 256 GB—enable customers totailor their configurations to suit their distinctive environments and use cases.

Going further, Fujitsu’s high-quality pre-installation ensures a ready-to-connect deliveryfor fast and non-disruptive HANA implementation. Note, however, that pre-installation isan optional service. Alternatively, the partner can install the software components onsite.The staging options are:

SAP Business One, analytics powered by SAP HANA SW stack, and SUSE Linuxinstallation plus all necessary HW settings.SAP Business One on HANA Appliance software and SUSE Linux installation plus allnecessary HW settings.SUSE Linux installation only plus all necessary HW settings

The Fujitsu Compact Appliance for SAP HANA is rounded off by a set of optional servicesincluding SAP Business One Migration, partner coaching, extended maintenance forhardware or the SUSE Linux operating system, and many others.

Fujitsu Power Appliance — Single-Node (Scale-up)The single-node configurations based on Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX600 S6 and RX900 S2server technology represent an attractive TCO-optimized entry-level offering thatprovides high performance and capacity. These offerings are ideal for:

SAP HANA proof of concept/proof of value projectsSAP HANA environments for development, tests, quality assurance, and trainingInitial SAP HANA implementations with limited scopeBusiness Suite on HANA

The single-node systems are available in different T-shirt sizes and also as a virtualized

system with VMware vSphere 5.1 ideally suited to drive several development and testprojects simultaneously.

Finally, customers can employ HANA single-node systems as building blocks in multi-node environments should they decide to shift from a scale-up to a scale-out scenario.

Fujitsu Power Appliance — Multi-Node (scale-out)Fujitsu designed its multi-node offering concept for SAP HANA for productiveenvironments and mission-critical use. The concept is based on industry-standardPRIMERGY RX600 or RX900 building blocks combined with a shared NetApp FAS storagesystem.

One major benefit of the multi-node system is that it enables customers to start smalland then easily add and integrate PRIMERGY servers and storage capacity as theirrequirements expand. The existing solution is certified for up to 16 TB of main memory.However, the architecture is designed for almost unlimited scalability.

In developing this system, Fujitsu paid special attention to high availability as a majorcomponent for mission-critical readiness of the overall SAP HANA solution. Highavailability is thus already built into the smart concept, thanks to the differentiationbetween the worker nodes and the standby nodes that take over when a productive

server fails. The second pillar ensuring high availability is the Network File System (NFS)and the shared NetApp FAS storage system, which ensure that all data are constantlymirrored. Thus, if the main memory experiences a data loss, then the data can be copiedback from the storage system. Significantly, customers can satisfy their greatest systemavailability demands by expanding the infrastructure to a two-site concept, in which all ofthe infrastructure components and data are mirrored in a second data center. Thisarchitecture guarantees disaster resilience with continuous operation, even in the eventof a complete data center failure.

Support InfrastructureAs an additional, certified component, the Fujitsu SAP HANA infrastructure solution alwaysincludes a PRIMERGY RX 100 Infrastructure Management Server (IMS). This mono-socketrack server supports the following functions:

Efficient SAP HANA software maintenance: initial installation and upgradeSeamless integration into the customer’s systems management landscapeEasy remote support access as a key element of the solution-maintenance offering(SolutionContract)

System administrators benefit from the IMS component when software updates arerequired in multi-node environments because the update needs to be started only oncefrom the IMS. It is then automatically distributed within the entire server environment.

Additional Required SoftwareThe AISConnect software enables customers to remotely access to the SAP HANAlandscape. It is therefore a prerequisite component for the solution-maintenance offering(SolutionContract).

Support Services

Fujitsu offers its customers a complete set of infrastructure-related services that cover allproject phases — from a customer-specific solution concept to continuous solutionsupport ensured by the Fujitsu SolutionContract. All of these services are based on provenmethods, and they follow strict guidelines to ensure high-quality projects.

Additional information on the Fujitsu Pre-installation (SolutionImplementation)Pre-installation allows fast time-to-value and a rapid return on investment. Consequently,Fujitsu values a sophisticated and unique approach that goes well beyond the mereassembly of hardware components and the pre-installation of the HANA software stackand the SUSE Linux operating system. Customer-specific settings such as IP addressesand switch configurations are also prepared in the dedicated Fujitsu staging center. Theinstallation is steered by dedicated scripts that help to avoid human failure and ensurethe highest possible quality. The Fujitsu Power Appliance for SAP HANA is delivered as acompletely installed, individually staged, and comprehensively tested system on thecustomer’s premises. Consequently, it can be implemented and integrated rapidly usingproven methods. Single-node implementations are generally completed within 48 hours.Multi-nodes typically require a few days, depending on the project size and complexity.

Additional Information on the Fujitsu SolutionContract (Solution Support)The Fujitsu SolutionContract is the maintenance and support service for specific Fujitsusolutions. It represents a mix of proactive and reactive services that ensure thatmalfunctions are solved before they can have any impact on the customer’s operations.This concept takes into account the fact that Fujitsu solutions consist of hardware,software, and network products provided by multiple vendors. However, Fujitsu is thesingle-point-of-contact for all of the infrastructure components involved in a Fujitsusolution as well as their interactions. The SolutionContract offers several service leveloptions depending on individual requirements. One caveat: SAP software support is notpart of this contract.

Additional SAP HANA ServicesThe SmartStart Toolbox is a Fujitsu service portfolio that helps customers answer typicalquestions such as: How can SAP HANA help me solve specific problems in my businessenterprise? How can we migrate our existing data securely? How much will the SAP HANAimplementation actually cost? The portfolio includes demos, test offerings, andprofessional database optimization and migration as well as decision-making supportbased on cost estimates and financing options. The services are partly provided by theFujitsu SAP HANA Global Demo Center, which is operated by our subsidiary TDS. Thedemo center hosts a remotely accessible environment comprised of a system landscapefor SAP HANA applications that is maintained by a professional team of developers andconsultants for solution, database, BI, and business process matters.

Smart Start Toolbox Overview

This offering is under constant development and extension.

Innovation — Uniform Management for All SAP Environments including SAPHANA with FlexFrame OrchestratorThis new Fujitsu platform solution is based on knowledge accumulated from more than300 projects that successfully utilized the Fujitsu FlexFrame for SAP solution. FlexFramefor SAP increases efficiency and reduces costs by more than 50% when it managesenvironments running SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications. FlexFrameOrchestrator supports consistent and uniform management of all SAP landscapes,including SAP HANA infrastructures, thus adding even more comprehensive high-availability and disaster-recovery capabilities. This solution is designed for all enterpriseenvironments and for every kind of IT provisioning model, regardless of whether theapplications are run in the customer’s data center, delivered as a managed service or ahosting service from an external provider, or deployed from the cloud.

Customer Success Story

Publiacqua

Since January 1, 2002, Publiacqua S.p.A. has been contracted to manage the integratedwater services for Italy’s Local Authority Water Board No 3 – Medio Valdarno. Thecompany has 648 employees and turnover of €160 million. It provides services across fourItalian provinces—Florence, Prato, Pistoia, and Arezzo—and 49 municipalities. Overall itserves roughly 1,277,000 people across more than 380,000 properties.

Publiacqua launched a technology audit with an eye to building a business intelligenceenvironment that is flexible, fast, and helps optimize business processes. The project’sprimary goal was to consolidate operating and management reporting – together withstrategic planning — within a single data warehouse architecture that was capable of

handling a growing number of users.After considering a number of alternatives, Publiacqua opted to integrate SAP HANA

into its existing SAP infrastructure. The company was convinced that SAP HANA was theperfect system to create an environment that would ensure maximum infrastructurestability while providing the most flexible and rapid processing functions.

The process of updating Publiacqua’s business services required a major effort from theIT Systems Department, which had to perform to extraordinary standards whilemaintaining a tight focus on the principles outlined in the business plan. With this inmind, Fujitsu and TAI (Top SELECT Expert Partner of Fujitsu) were the perfect technologypartners to help Publiacqua successfully complete this phase of its development. Thanksto the updated infrastructure provided by Fujitsu and TAI, an ever-increasing number ofusers can now utilize the business’s data assets. In addition, all levels of managementhave easy, fast, and flexible access to all of the necessary reporting functions.Furthermore, the new architecture has reduced the TCO of the business intelligenceinfrastructure. In sum, then, the project has achieved all of its investment containmentgoals.

“The choice was made to go with SAP HANA technology and Fujitsu TechnologySolutions systems, which ensure simple and certified native recovery ofenvironments in the event of failure,” says Mauro Cacciafani, TechnologyInfrastructure Manager at Publiacqua.

SAP Internal Project: SAP NetWeaver BW Powered by SAP HANAThe new SAP Internal SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA performs a central rolein the corporate analytics architecture; for example, for the combined and integratedplanning with BW IP and SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation.

For this system, SAP decided to implement a Fujitsu Scale-Out HANA solution based onPRIMERGY servers. The solution’s key features are:

The HANA scale-out infrastructure is designed so there is no single point of failure.Consequently, any failure in the infrastructure — server, storage, network — will becorrected automatically with minimal, if any, downtime.If a server fails, its functions are taken over by a standby node. More than onestandby node can be configured as an option.The storage is designed for highest availability — many disks or even a storagecontroller can fail without causing operations to stop.Last but not least, the complete network infrastructure — NICs, cables, switches —is designed to cope with component failures without the user even noticing thatsomething has broken.

For further information see SAP Blog

Further InformationFor more information please visit:

www.fujitsu.com/fts/hana

www.fujitsu.com/fts/flexframe

www.fujitsu.com/fts/sap

Feel free to get in touch with your local Fujitsu sales representative, or contact us at:expert.sap@ts.fujitsu.com.

Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Select for SAP HANAHitachi Unified Compute Platform Select for SAP HANA is an SAP-certified, optimized, andconverged infrastructure platform for SAP HANA that enhances an organization’s decision-making capabilities while providing advanced business insights based on instant, intuitiveaccess to data. This platform is comprised of Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 and HitachiUnified Storage (HUS) 130, an enterprise-class storage system rated at 99.999% uptimewith SAP in-memory computing technology for a broad range of high-speed analyticcapabilities.

The HDS SAP HANA Solution is pre-integrated in Hitachi Data Systems distributioncenters and is architected to meet SAP’s high standards, including SUSE Linux 11 (forSAP) and SAP HANA.

Customers can derive the following benefits from Hitachi Unified Compute PlatformSelect for SAP HANA:

Predictable, repeatable, reliable results: Pre-validated referencearchitectures, pre-packaged solutions with enterprise-class components across theentire stack, and targeted provisioning to help ensure consistent, predictableresults as organizations look to manage and store massive volumes of rapidlychanging data.Exceptional performance: High-density computing and throughput with wide-striping technology for enhanced utilization. Customers benefit from flexible servermanagement capabilities and scalable architectures.Faster time-to-value: Quicker, simpler deployment offered from a single sourcefor ordering and for providing services for planning and implementation. Pre-configuration and SAP validation of key components drastically reduce onsitedeployment time. Intelligent automation of complex tasks enables rapidprovisioning of resources with the assurance that the appropriate underlyinginfrastructure components are in place.

As additional applications and business units use SAP HANA or the organization’s datavolumes increase, all three Hitachi SAP HANA appliances sizes — ‘Small’, ‘Medium’, and‘Large’ —enable users to easily scale system processing capability without “forkliftupgrades” or complete system overhauls. Customers may elect to start with a ‘Small’configuration and easily scale to ‘Medium’ or ‘Large’ by inserting additional blades into theserver chassis. There is no need to change server models because scaling requires a‘Medium’ or ‘Large’ appliance size.

Hitachi SAP HANA Appliances Sizes

Each Hitachi Data Systems Converged Platform for SAP HANA – ‘Small’, ‘Medium’, and‘Large’– is delivered as a single unit that is ready to plug into the customer network. Inaddition, each platform offers a scalable patch to easily increase the system’s processing

capability.

Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Select for SAP HANA includes:

Operating System: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 for SAP

Storage: Hitachi Unified Storage 130, with a 99.999% uptime rating, is designed forhigh availability, down to the dual battery backup that protects the cache duringpower outages. It contains symmetric active-active controllers that self-balanceworkloads.

SAN: Fibre Channel host bus adaptors

Blade servers: Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 offers the considerable I/O capacity andonboard memory that are 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 1.0SAP IMCE Server 1.0, Client, StudioSAP Host AgentSybase Replication Server 15.5 +ECDA

Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Select for SAP HANA — Small, Medium, Large —meets varying performance requirements. All three options come with Hitachi UnifiedStorage 130 storage subsystems and with SAP HANA pre-loaded.

Hitachi supports SAP HANA from the smallest configuration with a single ComputeBlade and 256 GB of RAM to the largest configuration of 4 Compute Blade 2000s and 1.0terabytes of RAM.

Operating System: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 for SAPStorage: Hitachi HUS 130, which is designed for high availability, down to the dualbattery backup that protects the cache during power outage. It contains symmetricactive-active controllers that self-balance workloads.Network: Fibre Channel host bus adaptorsCompute: Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 offers the large I/O capacity and onboardmemory required for effective implementation of SAP HANA

Figure 1 — Hitachi SAP HANA Appliance Architecture

Hitachi-SAP Alliance

Since 1994, Hitachi, Ltd., and its subsidiaries, including Hitachi Data Systems, have had astrategic relationship with SAP that includes the sale, integration, and implementation ofSAP solutions. During this time, Hitachi has won numerous SAP awards for exceptionalcustomer satisfaction.

In 2011, Hitachi became an SAP Global Technology Partner, the highest level ofpartnership SAP offers. Many large global enterprises run their business on SAP andHitachi.

Hitachi also ensures the necessary storage performance and high throughput to meetthe stringent demands of in-memory computing. By dramatically reducing the traditionaldelay between operations and analytics, this platform helps business leaders gain nearreal-time insights and information to make smarter business decisions, faster.

Services

Hitachi Data Systems Global Solution Services (GSS) offers experienced infrastructureconsultants, proven methodologies, and comprehensive services for converged platformsto help customers further streamline their SAP environments. The HANA ImplementationService ensures a smooth integration with lower risk and accelerated deployment of theHitachi Unified Compute Platform Select for SAP HANA tailored to our customer’s specificneeds. Along with our consulting partners such as Hitachi Consulting, we can integrateand customize the solution into the customer’s SAP environment.

Support Infrastructure

Hitachi Data Systems Global Services and Hitachi Consulting are equipped to supportevery aspect of an SAP HANA solution. In addition, they provide strategy; infrastructure;and HANA Appliance, Integration, Development, and Support Services for a HANAinitiative.

Modern information technologies have blurred the lines between infrastructure,software, and applications. Given this reality, having one partner who provides a single,fully integrated solution is a tremendous benefit. Hitachi’s full breadth of capabilitiesdelivers one fully integrated, highly-optimized environment that ensures the desiredresults in a lower-cost, lower-risk, high-business-value HANA initiative.

Contact Hitachi

If you would like to get in touch with the SAP team at Hitachi, please emailsap@hds.com. You can find additional information at www.hds.com/go/sap or HitachiConsulting: http://www.hitachiconsulting.com/hana.

HP SAP HANA SolutionsThrough a close, collaborative partnership that spans more than 20 years, HP and SAPhave worked together to offer an innovative and comprehensive portfolio of products andservices that help more than 25,000 joint customers around the world of all sizes, in allindustries, solve their business problems. This strategic partnership has ultimatelyresulted in product offerings like HP AppSystems for SAP HANA as well as value-addedservices to implement rapid-deployment solutions for SAP HANA.

During this partnership, HP received numerous SAP Innovation and Impact awardsacross all three geographic regions, with the most recent ones being:

Technology Partner of the Year/SAP HANA Impact Award (APJ)Innovation Partner of the Year Award (EMEA/DACH)North American SAP Services Partner of the Year for SAP HANASAP Services Partner of the Year, SAP HANA

HP has also recently received the following Pinnacle awards:

Run SAP Partner of the Year winnerGlobal Software Solution Partner of the Year finalistGlobal Technology Partner of the Year finalist

HP AppSystems for SAP HANA are built on an HP converged infrastructure for purpose-built, integrated solutions that address the growing and complex needs of our customers.This solution portfolio incorporates hardware, software, and services into predefinedconfigurations for a powerful and comprehensive set of solutions that are designed towork together. The portfolio includes:

Multiple single-node configurations (XS, S, M, M+, L) based on industry-leading HPProLiant DL580 and DL980 G7 ServersAn XL scale-out configuration, based on industry-leading HP BladeSystem Servers,with fully automated failover for high availability

HP’s Unique Value Proposition for SAP HANAHP has collaborated with SAP on in-memory technologies from the beginning In 2006 it

became the first SAP partner to design and deliver SAP NetWeaver® Business WarehouseAccelerator. Based on that experience, HP has developed the core competencies todeliver successful implementations of HP AppSystems for SAP HANA. The company offersa portfolio of six configurations (XS, S, M, M+, L, XL) to meet the needs of any-sizedbusiness.

HP has implemented more than 77,000 SAP installations worldwide, and HPinfrastructure 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 more than 50 countries. inaddition, it 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 HANAHP designed the HP AppSystems for SAP HANA on industry-leading x86 HP ProLiantDL580 and DL980 G7 Servers for single-node SAP HANA implementations, and on HPProLiant BL680 G7 Server Blades for larger scale-out requirements, providing a largecontiguous memory footprint for faster in-memory applications. The scale-out solution inthe portfolio of HP AppSystems for SAP HANA is based on HP ProLiant BL680c G7 ServerBlades, the industry-leading blade solution that is ideal for SAP HANA scale-outimplementations.

For the SAP HANA scale-out technology, HP delivers a unique storage platform basedon the HP X9300 Network Storage System that offers unlimited scale-out capability anddisaster-tolerant features. Designed to be extremely scalable, flexible, and cost-efficient,HP X9300 Network Storage Systems deliver excellent performance and a modular storageinfrastructure to accommodate unprecedented storage growth and performance.

HP AppSystems for SAP HANA

Based on HP Converged Infrastructure productsMultiple 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 Lsingle-node configurationsHP ProLiant BL680 G7 Server Blades for XL highly scalable configurations forup to 8 TB of compressed dataHP Storage for log files and data filesHP X9300 Network Storage Systems for scale-out cluster file systemsHP Networking with HP Virtual Connect and ProCurveHP ProLiant Service packages and HP Insight Control management software

HP Fast Start ServiceHP Technology Support Services

SAP HANA T-Shirt Sizes Offered

Scale-out OfferingHP offers a unique scale-out offering that provides the high availability your businessdemands today, as well as a future-ready solution that can grow as your needs grow.This design significantly reduces the costs, difficulties, and down-time associated withfuture field upgrades.

HP’s scale-out solution is based on proven, industry-leading technology including:

HP BL680c G7 Server Blades are the blade solution that is ideal for SAP HANAscale-out implementations for balanced computing to handle the most demandingenterprise class applications.The HP X9300 IBRIX Network Storage System is a unique storage platform thatoffers unlimited scale-out capability and disaster-tolerant features.HP P6500 Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVA) delivers high-throughput, mission-critical,redundant storage for data and log files, SYS files, config files, traces, and more.

HP networking solutions like HP Virtual Connect for simplifying and virtualizing theconnectivity between the HANA blade nodes, the network, and the shared storage.

HP’s scale-out solution provides high availability through a stand-by blade withautomatic failover, in addition to disaster-tolerant technology. HP offers both synchronousand asynchronous disaster-tolerance solutions, available either as standard integratedfunctionality of the scale-out solution or as an add-on. These solutions are designed toprotect your information systems in the event of a catastrophic event. In doing so theyhelp to mitigate risk, improve IT availability, and reduce the costs of downtime.

High Availability and Disaster RecoveryWith HP AppSystems for SAP HANA, HP has delivered a fully automated failovermechanism for high availability, a stand-by blade that automatically is activated upon afailure of any node in the cluster. Only one node is needed, regardless of the number ofnodes in the cluster.

As mentioned earlier, disaster tolerance is designed into HP’s SAP HANA technologytoday. Consequently, once SAP HANA software is released with disaster-tolerancecapability, HP’s scale-out solution is already equipped to enable this functionality.

Storage InfrastructureHP PCIe IO Accelerator for HP ProLiant Servers is a direct-attach, solid-state PCIe card-based solution for enhancing application performance. Based on Multi-Level Cell (MLC)and Single-Level Cell (SLC) NAND Flash technology, these devices are ideal foraccelerating I/O performance and maintaining SAP HANA log file data.

For mission-critical deployments and shared-storage infrastructures, the HP X9300IBRIX Network Storage System features an NFS cluster file system and support for single-node high availability. This system is designed for high availability and extreme scalabilitywhile delivering excellent performance and a modular storage infrastructure toaccommodate unprecedented storage growth.

Additional SoftwareHP ensures global quality standards by preloading and configuring SAP HANA software atthe factory before delivery. No additional software is necessary for the HP AppSystems forSAP HANA. All solutions are built to your specifications, and they include all requiredcomponents, services and support.

HP also provides monitoring and backup software solutions HP to further enhance yoursolution. HP AppSystems for SAP HANA can be easily monitored utilizing HP SystemsInsight Manager (SIM), available both with HP ProLiant servers and as a free downloadfrom HP. This powerful yet intuitive solution provides hardware-level management forsystem administrators to improve system uptime and health. SIM is also available as acomponent of the Insight Control suite of management software, which is available for

purchase from HP.HP Insight Control server management software unleashes the management

capabilities built into every HP ProLiant server. The result is superior management ofphysical and virtual servers, from any location. Insight Control integrates specificmanagement functionality into HP Systems Insight Manager to manage server health,deploy and migrate servers quickly, optimize power consumption and performance, andcontrol servers from anywhere.

Support ServicesHP delivers a comprehensive solution that encompasses hardware, software, and servicesfrom a single resource. HP delivers the full lifecyle of services required to progress fromthe assessment and design of an SAP HANA solution to the build, implementation, andsupport of the solution.

Design and BuildWith every SAP HANA system, HP includes the resources to assist with the sizing andconfiguration of an SAP HANA environment. This includes the sizing of the appropriatesystem, in addition to recommendations concerning the configurations to address yourrequirements for multiple SAP landscapes, high availability, and disaster tolerance. Then,with every SAP HANA order, HP includes its core competency process for factoryintegration, where we integrate the hardware, load all of the software components, andapply your unique environmental settings for network and source systems. Finally, thesystem completes a burn-in test before we ship the order to your location.

ImplementationDelivery of the SAP HANA appliance is not the final step. Beyond the design and build of aSAP HANA solution, integration of the solution into your environment is equally, if notmore, critical to successfully getting SAP HANA up and running. HP understands this, sothey include installation, implementation, and training with every SAP HANA solution wedeliver. The basic foundational service includes the following:

Incorporation of SAP HANA in the local networkConnection of SAP HANA to source systemsImplementation of basic security and authorizations

Configuration of SAP BusinessObjects front end or Microsoft® Excel tocommunicate with SAP HANAValidation of the integrated environment and the end-to-end functionality of theSAP HANA systemReview of the access to, and use of, the SAP in-memory computing studioInstallation and configuration troubleshooting

SupportAfter a successful implementation, HP turns over support of your SAP HANA solution toHP’s support services team, which delivers HP Proactive Care Service. Proactive CareService includes proactive support as well as hardware and software support to providean additional level of support for organizations that are managing complex ITenvironments. Geared for converged, virtualized, and cloud-based environments,Proactive Care Service features remote and onsite support, proactive scans and reports,and regular consultations with HP technology experts. You can purchase an option thatincludes an assigned local HP specialist who delivers an “Account Support Plan”customized to fit your needs. Each customized plan includes delivering updates to yourhardware firmware and operating system, regular system health checks, and setup ofremote monitoring. For hardware and software support, HP delivers enhanced supportfrom trained specialists in its Advanced Solution Center. With a connection to SAP’ssupport operation, HP can take the first call on any SAP HANA support issue. Based onthis well-established process, HP is able to deliver industry-leading support and helpimprove performance of SAP HANA solutions.

Additional SAP HANA services from HPHP provides services to help you identify your strategy, quantify your businessopportunity, computing your ROI, and implementing an HP AppSystem for SAP HANA intoyour SAP landscape. These services were designed exclusively for SAP HANA. Theyinclude the following services.

The HP Business Intelligence Master Plan Service is an overarching BI strategy-development service designed to help you define a BI strategy and a landscape toenable your organization to realize that strategy. This service includes a roadmapfor implementation.The HP Impact Analysis for SAP HANA helps you understand the technicalfeasibility of introducing SAP HANA to meet your real-time and high-volume dataanalysis requirements. It is highly recommended for each SAP HANAimplementation.The HP Financial Assessment for SAP HANA provides granular information tosupport your decision-making process. It is formatted to be suitable for use insupporting budgeting processes.The HP Solution Assessment for SAP HANA is an engagement during which HPconsultants will assess your existing information landscape in detail, identify datasets for use with SAP HANA, detect any gaps in the current environment, andcreate a solution blueprint based on the findings.The HP Landscape Preparation Service for SAP HANA is designed to ensure that thesurrounding solution landscape is in place and is optimized to allow for the

inclusion of the SAP HANA appliance and to speed time-to-value of the SAP HANAsolution. This service includes upgrading or installing SAP and non-SAP componentsin the landscape.HP Fast Start Service includes required services that accompany the appliance toensure that the appliance is properly installed; database connections are made;and the replication and extract, transform, load (ETL) of data from the sourcesystems have been tested and confirmed as fully functional.The HP Implementation Service for SAP HANA is a complete end-to-end SAP HANAimplementation based on a solution blueprint designed by a team of HPconsultants. These consultants follow the HP Global Implementation Methodologyfor Business Intelligence for all SAP HANA implementation projectsImplementation services for rapid-deployment solutions covering a wide range ofbusiness reporting and analytics.HP Migration Services—SAP HANA Appliance Software Service Pack 3 supports thedeployment of an HP AppSystem for SAP HANA as the database for SAP NetWeaverBusiness Warehouse. HP is offering a migration package for current SAPNetWeaver BW customers to assist them in migrating from their existing databaseto an HP AppSystem for SAP HANA. In addition to migration services, this packageincludes complimentary phone assessment services, asset recovery services, andfinancial services, as listed below.

On-site migration assessment workshopsSAP NetWeaver BW upgrade serviceSAP NetWeaver BW 7.3 migration to a database built on SAP HANASAP NetWeaver BW optimization for the SAP HANA database

HP Financial Services

HP Financial Services can make your transition to SAP HANA easy and cost effective, andit can help you get started even sooner. You can expand your organization’s SAP HANAinitiatives by taking advantage of an efficient, effective way to maximum return from ITand BI solutions, while minimizing risk and aggressively managing costs. HP FinancialServices offers new HP hardware leasing and SAP software license loans plus a complete,global solution that recovers value from older assets. This solution also helps safeguardprivacy, and it complies with applicable environmental regulations for disposing of SAPinfrastructure assets that are displaced by your new HP AppSystems for SAP HANA. Forfurther information please go to: www.hp.com/go/asset_recovery.

Migration Assistance

For existing SAP NetWeaver BW and SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator software customers,HP and SAP recognize that migrating your environment to SAP HANA will involve extraeffort and incremental costs. To help ease the transition, HP and SAP offer a migration-assistance package that features a combination of HP financing options and a portfolio of

migration services you can use to clear the path to faster data analysis.

HP Leads the Way with First-ever Benchmark Results for SAP HANA

SAP partnered with HP to co-develop the new SAP standard application benchmark for theSAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse application, called the enhanced mixed load (EML)benchmark. SAP standard application benchmarks are designed to represent customer-relevant scenarios in many different business contexts. This new SAP EML standardapplication benchmark simulates the current demands of typical SAP NetWeaver BWcustomers. These demands are shaped primarily by three major requirements: near real-time reporting, ad-hoc reporting capabilities, and reduction of TCO.

The results achieved by HP on the standard performance benchmark demonstrate theability of an HP AppSystem for the SAP HANA database to deliver on today’s newcustomer requirements. These systems have revolutionized user access to data, and theydeliver outstanding, scalable analytic performance in seconds versus hours on massive,multidimensional databases.

Posting the FIRST RESULT on the SAP EML standard application benchmark, a single-node, medium-sized HP AppSystem for SAP HANA configuration achieved an amazing65,990 ad-hoc query navigation steps per hour with 1 billion records (certification number2012023) on the SAP HANA platform. (These are the results as of May 16, 2012.)Additional details can be found at http://www.sap.com/benchmark

Customer Success StoriesFor an example of the outstanding results that can flow from an HP–SAP collaboration,consider the case of T-Mobile. The U.S. wireless operation of Deutsche Telekom AG, T-Mobile provides more than 33 million customers with customized wireless plans thatreflect their smartphone and data needs. A key component of the company’s marketingstrategy is to conduct highly targeted customer communications concerning mobile phoneservices and offers. Unfortunately, its previous analytics solution was too complex andcould not track customer offers in a timely way.

The solution—built on HP Converged Infrastructure in collaboration with SAP AG anddeployed in just two weeks—enhances T-Mobile’s ability to deliver targeted marketingcampaigns to customers by transforming the way it delivers, manages, and measures itswireless plan offers.

“T-Mobile needed faster and better customer insight from its varied data systems,”explained Paul Miller, vice president of Converged Systems at HP. “HP and SAP quicklydelivered a turnkey solution that provides simplicity, performance, and faster time-to-value.” “SAP, in cooperation with HP, worked to support the creation and delivery of aunique and differentiated customer-tracking solution for T-Mobile,” revealed Steve Lucas,executive vice president and general manager of Global Database and Technology, SAP.“With SAP HANA, T-Mobile can more effectively track its marketing campaigns’ success.”

Another illuminating example is Nongfu Spring, an established and expanding national

consumer brand in China with a vast scope of operations encompassing production, sales,planning, dispatching, logistics, and marketing. As the company expanded and constantlyadded new branches in different cities, it needed to implement a database solution thatcould keep pace with its impressive growth while providing the real-time, accurate dataits executives needed to make informed business decisions. To accomplish this task,Nongfu Spring chose HP AppSystems for SAP HANA due to the stable, powerfulperformance of its HP ProLiant DL980 server and the professional services provided bythe HP team.

With the new system in place, Nongfu Spring’s manufacturing environment now runsmore smoothly—and with more accurate data. For example, the increased computingspeeds enable the company to analyze data 200-300 times faster than with their previousdatabase platform. Another benefit: Financial reporting times have reduced from seven tothree days.

“The market today is changing constantly, and companies and the market environmenthave more new IT requirements,” asserts Nongfu Spring CIO Patrick Hoo. “By cooperatingwith HP on SAP HANA 1.0, we have proven that HANA is a high-speed in-memorycomputing column-storage database product that is mature and practical. Itfundamentally solved the problem of slow computing and presentation of data caused byhaving too much data, which had affected our business. It also built a solid foundation forour IT department to provide strong support for the company’s rapid future businessdevelopment.”

Contact information for inquiriesFor more information, visit http://www.hp.com/go/sap/hana or contact your HP salesrepresentative.

Huawei SAP HANA SolutionsThe SAP HANA is a data platform that can be deployed either as an appliance or in thecloud. It is a revolutionary platform that is ideally suited to run real-time analytics and todevelop and deploy real-time applications. It enables real-time processing of massiveamounts of data in the main memory of a server.

Huawei has partnered with SAP to create an appliance based on Huawei’s high-endTecal RH5885 V2 rack server. This appliance provides outstanding performance when it isused in combination with SAP HANA. It offers solutions ranging from entry-levelsupporting 128 GB of memory to large-scale supporting up to 100 TB of usable memorywith 100 nodes.

The RH5885 V2-based appliance for SAP HAHA is able to deliver the fastest writeperformance in the industry for SAP HANA write patterns. It has less than 15% latency aswell as 20% more bandwidth.

RH5885 V2 is a high-end 4-socket rack server that is expandable to 8 sockets. It

supports Intel® Xeon® E7-8800/4800 series CPUs, and it can accommodate up to 80cores with 4 TB of memory. RH5885 V2 offers enhanced system reliability thanks to its 35RAS features. These features combine with scalable I/O to make RH5885 V2 an idealchoice to deploy mission-critical applications such as large-scale databases, businessintelligence, and ERP.

Highlights

100-100,000x faster than disk-based DB; No.1 writing performance with 15% lesslatency and 20% more bandwidthPre-optimized and one-stop maintenancePowered by RH5885 with 35 RAS features; No. 1 in 12 SPEC tests

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

Figure 1: Tecal RH5885 V2 Front View

Figure 2: Tecal RH5885 V2 Rear View

Model Specifications

Table 1: Tecal RH5885 V2 for SAP HANA M-Size

Included Software and Driver

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

More informationhttp://enterprise.huawei.com/en/products/itapp/server/rh-series-rack-servers/hw-145982.htm

http://enterprise.huawei.com/en/products/itapp/server/high-performance-pcIe-card/hw-194918.htm

IBM Systems and Services Solutions for SAP HANASAP HANA deployed on IBM System x Workload Optimized Solutions with the IBM GeneralParallel File System (GPFS) offer simple, seamless scalability for your SAP HANAenvironment. In addition, IBM offers installation and managed services to help youmanage 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 innovationWith a unique combination of expertise, experience and proven methodologies — and ahistory of shared innovation — IBM can help strengthen and optimize your informationinfrastructure to support your SAP applications.

IBM and SAP have worked together for 40 years to deliver innovation to their sharedcustomers. Since 2006, IBM has been the market leader for implementing SAP’s originalin-memory appliance, the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA).Hundreds of BWA deployments have been successfully completed in multiple industriesand countries. These BWA appliances have been successfully deployed in many of SAP’slargest 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 organizationalchange by strengthening your business analytics information infrastructure for greateroperational 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 currentneeds while delivering the robust scalability and performance needed to accommodategrowth. SAP HANA running on powerful IBM eX5 enterprise servers with the Intel Xeonprocessor E7 family combines the speed and efficiency of in-memory processing with theability to analyze massive amounts of business data — enabling companies to eliminatebarriers 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 HANAcustomers to benefit from a shared vision that delivers simplicity and automationdesigned to help organizations accelerate business outcomes while lowering TCO.

IBM eX5 enterprise servers with Intel Xeon processors offer extreme memory andperformance scalability. With improved hardware economics and new technologyofferings, IBM is helping SAP realize a real-time enterprise with in-memory businessapplications. IBM eX5 enterprise servers deliver a long history of leading SAP benchmarkperformance.

These System x servers are equipped with processors from the Intel Xeon processor E7family, which combine exceptional raw compute power with increased memory bandwidthand support for significantly greater memory capacity to deliver superior performance toprevious-generation processors. With up to ten cores in each processor, the four-socketx3850 X5 can be scaled to 40 cores and 80 threads with the use of Intel Hyper-ThreadingTechnology. Organizations can achieve extreme scaling within each node for runningdemanding workloads on a compact system.

SAP HANA is a business-critical technology and requires a robust and reliable enterprisecomputing platform. Sophisticated eX5 features such as Predictive Failure Alerts warnahead of potential hardware failures, trigger preemptive action, and help maintainapplication availability. In addition, eX5 features such as eXFlash solid-state disktechnology can yield significant performance improvements in storage access, helpingdeliver an optimized system solution for SAP HANA. Standard features in the solution suchas the High IOPS MLC Duo Adapter for IBM System x can also provide fast access tostorage.

Workload Optimized SolutionsIBM 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 andcertified by SAP and can be ordered as a single appliance part number. They aredelivered preconfigured with key software components preinstalled to help speed deliveryand deployment of the solution.

The IBM System x3690 X5 is a 2U rack-optimized server. This machine brings the eX5features and performance to the mid tier. It is an ideal match for the smaller, two-CPUconfigurations for SAP HANA. The x3690 X5–based configurations offer 128 to 256 GB ofmemory and the choice of only solid-state disk or a combination of spinning disk andsolid-state disk. The x3950 X5–based configurations leverage the scalability of eX5 andoffer the capability to pay as you grow — starting with a 2-processor, 256 GBconfiguration 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 formaximum 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 eitherthe 320 GB High IOPS SD Class SSD PCIe adapter or the 640 GB High IOPS MLC DuoAdapter. 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-optimizedconfigurations and have also collaborated on performance testing. Performance testing ofSAP 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 trueof IBM’s DB2 database which is tightly aligned with SAP HANA for seamless replication ofdata when using the Sybase replication server.

Simple and Seamless ScalabilityUsing the workload-optimized solution models you can combine multiple models togetherto create multi-node scale-out configurations. These multi-node scale-out configurationsenable 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 startwith one 256GB node, upgrade to a 512GB node, and grow your environment to 16nodes. This modular approach enables you to invest in a Workload-Optimized solution forSAP HANA and grow your infrastructure as your SAP HANA environment grows. Inaddition, 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 containedwithin each node helping to simplify the infrastructure required for SAP HANA. Only IBMhas a High-Availability concept which allows customers to seamlessly extend theirinstallation to enable High Availability using GPFS replication and an additional stand-bynode.

GPFS™, with its high-performance enterprise file management, can help move beyondsimply adding storage to optimizing data management for SAP HANA. High-performanceenterprise file management using GPFS gives SAP HANA applications:

Performance to satisfy the most demanding SAP HANA applicationsSeamless capacity expansion to handle the explosive growth of data SAP HANAenvironmentsHigh reliability and availability to help eliminate production outages and providedisruption-free maintenance and capacity upgradesSeamless capacity and performance scaling — along with the proven reliabilityfeatures and flexible architecture of GPFS — help your company foster innovationby simplifying your environment and streamlining data workflows for increasedefficiency for SAP HANA applications.

IBM Intelligent Cluster integrated packaging and assembly can help speed installationand deployment of multi-node scale-out HA configurations as well as reduce

implementation risk if you require all of your HANA server nodes preassembled andpackaged in a rack.

By implementing SAP HANA on eX5 enterprise servers with GPFS, you can realize fasterperformance, less complexity and greater efficiency from a powerful and provenconverged infrastructure environment of integrated technologies. These workload-optimized solutions for SAP HANA can help simplify operations, consolidate resources anddynamically migrate functionality as business changes, while delivering the ability toquickly change the way users look at mass amounts of data without compromising dataintegrity or security.

For more information about the IBM Systems solution for SAP HANA and the IBMSystem x Workload Optimized Solutions for SAP HANA, please read the IBM Redpaper:SAP In-Memory Computing on IBM eX5 Systems

Services to speed deploymentTo 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 TechnologyServices 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 skillsand enablement services for administration and management of IBM eX5 enterpriseservers. IBM offers Quick Start implementation services to help you install and configureyour SAP HANA appliance and HealthCheck services to help you manage and maintainyour SAP HANA appliance. IBM also offers skills enablement services to provide technicaltraining to your teams that need to manage the HANA appliance. If you determine thatyou do not want to manage the SAP HANA appliance, then IBM offers a Managed Servicethat can provide 24x7 monitoring and management of the SAP HANA appliance.

A trusted service partnerMany clients require more than software and hardware products. They need a partner tohelp them assess their current capabilities, identify areas for improvement and develop astrategy for moving forward. This is where IBM Global Business Services (GBS) providesimmeasurable value with thousands of SAP consultants in 80 countries. GBS combines itsSAP implementation experience and skills with the broader IBM business intelligencecompetencies to create an unparalleled opportunity for our clients to not only implementSAP HANA solutions, but to then take that implementation to new heights and identifytransformational opportunities.

The GBS HANA team within IBM has leveraged the experiences gained to date on SAPHANA offerings and grouped efforts into two main opportunities for clients who wish todeploy 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 servicesProof of concept servicesExpress 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 forSAP HANA allows our customers to gain the maximum benefits of their investment in SAPHANA — and to bring those solutions to life to address immediate information needs andidentify the transformational opportunities that can bring the organization to the highestlevels of insight and action.

IBM can also offer financing options helping clients to acquire IT solutions thatare tailored to their individual goals and budget.

For more informationTo learn more about the IBM Systems and Services solutions for SAP HANA and IBM eX5Workload Optimized Systems, please contact your IBM marketing representative or IBMBusiness Partner, or visit: www.ibm-sap.com/hana.

NEC SAP HANA SolutionsNEC delivers SAP HANA as a key platform to realize a world where people can reach allthe information they need or want and to discover something new and worthwhile frommassive 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 ofNEC which has kept the No.1 market share in PC-servers in the Japan market for 16years.

Currently, NEC offers both of scale-up (XS, S and L-size; including OLTP special purposeconfiguration) and scale-out high-availability clustered configurations.

All the NEC SAP HANA appliances are constructed on the Express5800 ScalableEnterprise Server that offers upward scalability to 8 sockets and 2TB memory, fault-

management functionalities through EXPRESSSCOPE® Engine SP2, and ViridentTMFlashMax device for high-workload environments on scale-up configuration.

Speed of inter-node communication network is one of key factors at distributed clusterconfiguration. NEC’s certified configuration aggregates four 10Gb-ethernet channels witha bonding channel for load balancing and fault tolerant; that has 40Gb/sec theoreticalbandwidth.

Also, data and log volumes of clustered configuration is constructed on OCFS2filesystem that fully leverages open source technology, on top of NEC iStorage M500which is highly reliable, scalable and power-effective storage system.

Why Express5800 is ideal platform for SAP HANAHigh-performance Express5800 Scalable Enterprise Servers, which leverage NEC’s longheritage in the development of supercomputer and mainframe technologies to achievehighly fault tolerant and flexible system expandability, are leveraged as the platform forSAP HANA. The flagship NEC Express5800/A1080a model has capabilities to mount up to8CPUs and 2TB RAM within a single 7U chassis, and NEC Express5800/A1040a also hascapabilities to mount up to 4CPU and 1TB RAM.

One noteworthy hardware feature is its EXPRESSSCOPE® Engine SP2, a uniquelydeveloped device by NEC based on our experience in UNIX servers, enables to monitorand control Express5800/A1080a and A1040a with remote and centralized interfaceregardless of the power status of servers. It significantly increases maintainability andreduces downtime of SAP HANA.

SAP HANA T-Shirt sizes offered

Support InfrastructureVirident FlashMax — is a Storage Class Memory (SCM) solution that offers enterprisesunconditional performance combined with the industry’s highest storage capacity in thesmallest footprint. FlashMAX has been designed from the ground up to fully exploitmodern computer architectures, such as SAP HANA, which leverage many fast CPU coresand the PCI Express interconnect bus to deliver maximum application performance. Italso offers supreme performance without compromise over the entire lifetime of thedevice, 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 leverageVirident FlashMax to implement Log volume backup which is a key component toachieving smooth collaboration with existing database tools.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications — is a fine-tuned andsupported operating system based on fully open source technology towards the nature ofSAP application’s workload and its system lifecycle. Its priority support provides unlimited24hx7d technical support from SUSE, and its extended support offers additional 18months for package maintenance. It also maximizes system uptime with highly-selectedpackage-updates; only packages that affect SAP system shall be upgraded.

NEC High-Performance Appliance for SAP HANA uses SUSE Linux Enterprise Server forSAP Applications, including its priority support. NEC has a lot of experience providingmission-critical grade support on Linux systems, and has contributed various kind of opensource community including Linux kernel development. Through the long-standingpartnership with SUSE, NEC provides mission-critical class support for SAP HANA.

Additional software supportedNEC ESMPRO/ServerManager — is server management software that providesadministrators a centralized view to manage or monitor distributed multiple nodes.

It leverages EXPRESSSCOPE® Engine SP2 of Express5800 servers andESMPRO/ServerAgent installed on the system, to collect the run-time information of bothhardware and software; which enables administrators to identify issues quickly if andwhen something should happen.

Support and Additional ServicesThrough the longstanding partnership with SAP and SUSE, NEC will offer mission-criticalgrade 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 forSAP HANA, and NEC has experience supporting more than 500 installations with help ofour sales, support and consulting organizations.

In addition, NEC has established an evaluation team of SAP HANA to make the latesttechnology commercially available as soon as possible.

Support ServiceFor more information, please contact NEC sales representative in your region.

Chapter 11

SAP HANA Projects andImplementation“He who fails to plan is planning to fail.”— Winston Churchill

IntroductionSo, 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 toimplement it on their own. Fortunately, whatever your situation, expert project planning,implementation, and development services are available that can help ensure that youget the maximum business value from SAP HANA, as quickly as possible.

Selecting the Right SAP HANA Service PartnerIt’s important to choose a partner who can help you be successful with SAP HANA. Arecent IDC report found that four of the top six impediments to implementing in-memorytechnologies — lack of skills, risk, organizational barriers, and return-on-investmentconcerns — 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 bigdata, delivering real-time analytics and business processes, and managing a robustarchitecture complete with system landscapes and solutions. The right partner shouldalso provide you with access to experienced, certified experts in areas such asarchitecture, deployment, and development. Throughout the implementation process,you’ll need to think about how SAP HANA fits into your overall IT strategy now, and howit can serve as a basis for growth and innovation in the future.

Listen to how USHA International, a leading Indian consumer products company, with the help of SAPServices, utilized SAP Netweaver Business Warehouse, powered by SAP HANA, to improve supply chainproductivity and provide real-time insight to respond quickly to consumer demands. Usha International:http://youtu.be/B3TRsEpw-I0

It All Starts with Good Planning

The more attention you devote to planning your implementation, the more you willbenefit from your SAP HANA investment. First and foremost, a good implementationpartner should help you develop a comprehensive roadmap detailing how in-memorycomputing can help your company run at maximum speed and solve specific businessproblems. To accomplish these goals, that partner must ask the critical questions thatmean the difference between success and failure — and be able to answer thesequestions correctly.

Although the specific questions will vary by engagement, you should start by identifyingthe right business use case for SAP HANA in your company. At SAP, we often distinguishbetween business intelligence and technology intelligence. The best technology in theworld 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 mostvalue for the least investment in the shortest timeframe, with the least disruption forbusiness 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 solutionback 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 orapplication solutions that can help?What does the high-level project plan look like, and how well does it align with ourbusiness 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 identifythe expertise and skill sets you need, whether internal or external (or both). The goal: anefficient, low-cost implementation that mitigates risk to both business and IT.

Your solution partner should be able to offer a wide range of solution scenariosincluding end-to-end project implementation experience coupled with a holistic deliverymethodology. For many projects, prepackaged fixed-price offerings based on globallycompiled best practices, such as SAP Rapid Deployment solutions, can acceleratedeployment while limiting costs. Such solutions include preconfigured software,implementation services, content, and end user enablement that together can radicallyaccelerate 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 largeamounts of data, work with highly-customized systems, extend existing solutions, or buildnew solutions specific to your needs — you may want to consider specialized services. Ifyou choose this option, it’s especially important that you select a partner with deepknowledge and skilled resources, one who understands your unique issues and has atrack record for delivering custom solutions that successfully address their clients’ needs.

How Will We Ever Get up to Speed on This New Technology?It is imperative for you to learn as much as possible about SAP HANA in order to fullyreap the benefits of this new technology. In addition to educating your technical and ITstaff, you need to make certain that your business users know the full extent of what isnow possible and how to best adapt for your environment. To accomplish these tasks,you should select a service provider that offers skills-transfer opportunities.

Want to get the most from your SAP HANA platform? The SAP Education organization offers courses andcertifications to give technical consultants and internal IT staff the knowledge and skills they need to fullyleverage the power of SAP HANA. For more information visit the SAP Learning and Software Services forHANA website: https://training.sap.com/us/en/curriculum/hana-g-en

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

To learn more about ARI’s SAP HANA implementation project, click here: ARI:http://youtu.be/TE0ZDgckXYQ.

We’ve just discussed the importance of selecting a qualified solution implementationpartner. The next step is to determine how best to use SAP HANA within your currentenvironment to deliver maximum value in your organization.

SAP HANA Use CasesWe’ve reviewed many of the key factors that you need to consider when you select anSAP HANA implementation partner. Now we’ll turn our attention to how best to use thispowerful 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 businessscenarios, and it can be deployed in myriad ways to meet your project expectations andtechnical requirements. SAP HANA can also complement existing landscapes and replaceoutdated solutions.

With that versatility in mind, we’ll review four typical use cases for SAP HANAdeployments today, as well as some of the potential scenarios for the future. These usecases are:

Agile data martsSAP Business Suite acceleratorPrimary database for SAP NetWeaver Business WarehouseCustom application development

Learn how the experts from SAP can assist you with all aspects of your SAP HANA Project with their end-to-end services. They can help you to:

Design and plan your roadmap or solution

Implement and migrate SAP HANA into your environment

Innovate and develop new and exciting solutions to your unique business issues

Support the technical and business environment and educate your technical and end users

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

Agile Data MartOne way to quickly get the most value from in-memory technology is to use SAP HANA asa standalone data mart for a specific use case. In this scenario, SAP HANA acts as acentral hub, collecting source-system data from multiple sources via in-memorytechnology 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 reportingrequirements and formats.

This arrangement has the advantage of providing a focused solution to an immediatebusiness problem while minimizing disruption to the existing landscape. Such projects areusually completed quickly: The business problem is understood, and the required dataand source systems are easily identified. Such installations offer instant value — makingpreviously difficult and time-consuming tasks fast and easy.

SAP Business Suite AcceleratorSAP HANA is frequently used to accelerate transactions and reports inside the SAPBusiness Suite. As with the agile data mart scenario, SAP HANA is set up as a standalonesystem, side by side with the database under the SAP Business Suite applications. In thisscenario, however, SAP HANA is used to “offload” some transactions or reports thattypically 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-baseddatabase and the huge data requests required by these transactions or reports. To run itscalculations and present a result, a typical budgeting or planning transaction in SAP mustcollect 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 itinto a buffer table in the SAP application server, run the algorithm or calculation, andthen display the results to users.

To overcome system latency that slows down these common reports, SAP hasdeveloped “HANAfied” versions of several existing reports. These reports consist of threepreconfigured reporting dashboards and 23 reports from the following business areas:

Financial reportingSales reportingPurchasing reportingShipping reportingMaster 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 HANAsystem that sits beside the live SAP ERP system. All relevant tables for each dashboard orreport are physically copied from the SAP ERP system onto the SAP HANA system, whichis then used to generate the reports and display them to users in a variety of userinterfaces. 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 managersand sales representatives to check basic key figures for sales in real time. Whereas salesmanagers use sales analytics to access instant overview information regarding thevarious performance indicators for their sales teams, the sales representatives focus ondetailed information relating to the results of their sales activities.

Accelerated Financial Reporting

The SAP HANA Financials content package provides the prerequisites for building reportsthat provide the following analysis data:

Real-time analysis of the subledger for Accounts Payable (FI-AP) and AccountsReceivable (FI-AR)Flexible analysis of customer and vendor items based on the single line items fromthe back-end ERP systemCalculation 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 analyzekey procurement processes in real time. Procurement managers use spending key figuresalong different dimensions including Material Groups, Vendors, Plants, and PurchasingOrganizations to gain instant insight into inefficiencies that may point to savingspotentials or internal and external process improvements.

Accelerated Master Data Reporting

Master data are essential for nearly all business transactions, irrespective of the businessarea. The master data in this package concentrate on master data objects that areavailable in SAP ERP, such as material, customer, and vendor.

Accelerated Shipping Reporting

The SAP HANA content for Shipping enables shipping and warehouse managers to checkbasic shipping and stock key figures in real time. Managers use shipping analytics toobtain instant information for planning and monitoring outbound delivery-relatedactivities. In addition, the managers can get an up-to-date overview on materials stock atany time.

SAP HANA Accelerates Reports

Imagine a “long-running” ABAP report within a particular business function, one that’s been an ongoingproblem 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 runtime from several hours to minutes or even seconds, making the information much more current andvaluable.

Primary Database for SAP NetWeaver Business WarehouseIn our third use case example, SAP BW is powered by SAP HANA. In this scenario acompany replaces the previously underlying database for their SAP BW system with SAPHANA. The IT team can perform a standard DB migration over to SAP HANA and thenenable specific objects to be in-memory optimized as necessary depending on thecompany’s requirements.

SAP BW is the first SAP application that was optimized to run with SAP HANA as itsprimary underlying database. With SAP HANA, SAP BW can leverage in-memorycapabilities for improved performance, without the need for any sidecar accelerators orextensive modeling workarounds. The entire database physically sits under the SAP BWsystem, eliminating the need for in-memory aggregation. This arrangement simplifies thedata modeling and query design, which in turn greatly enhances system performancewhile lowering IT ownership costs.

Replacing an old database with SAP HANA generates speed and flexibility for two keyreasons. First, keeping the entire database in memory eliminates the need to send largeamounts of data between the application and DB servers, thereby reducing latency. Infact, running SAP BW on SAP HANA eliminates most of the problematic issues that slowdown the system, from both a user and an administrator perspective.

To watch a video of Home Trust’s BW migration project, click here: Home Trust:http://youtu.be/Q6057Cpr8V4

Custom Applications for SAP HANAAs stated earlier, SAP HANA is a full-blown, do-just-about-anything-you-want applicationplatform. It speaks pure SQL, and it includes all of the most common APIs, so you canliterally 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, thesky 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” particularlywell in a few unique situations. If you’re building an enterprise-scale application for abusiness scenario that has high data volumes, needs detailed/granular data analysis,needs to search or aggregate huge data volumes, requires complex algorithmic orstatistical calculations, or suffers from latency between transactional recording andreporting, SAP HANA is a great choice.

Future Use Case ScenariosAs SAP HANA matures and SAP updates its portfolio of solutions to take advantage of theextensive horsepower of SAP HANA, you can expect to see nearly every SAP productsupported natively on SAP HANA as a primary database — plus many more “native SAPHANA” applications.

By now you should have a good understanding of how typical use cases take advantageof SAP HANA. The next step is to ensure that you understand the best ways to deploy thisnew technology in your environment to drive maximum value.

SAP HANA Implementation ScenariosAs we’ve discussed, there are many different ways to use SAP HANA, and it stands toreason that there are also many different implementation scenarios. However, there isn’ta one-to-one correlation between a use case and an implementation scenario. Rather, foreach use case, you need to look at the business problem you are trying to solve, whichwill typically dictate the most appropriate implementation scenario. If, for example, youruse case is for a specific need not addressed by an SAP application, you’ll likely need acustom development project. In contrast, if your business issue is a more common ortypical one, then SAP may have already created a new SAP HANA application to meetyour needs. For many repeatable business issues, SAP has created packaged solutionssuch as SAP Rapid Deployment solutions or accelerators. These solutions containpreconfigured software, technical content, and implementation services, and they arepriced and scoped for rapid implementation.

Custom DevelopmentAlthough there are standard best practices that must be considered when developingcustom solutions, there are also many possibilities when it comes to imagining what tobuild with SAP HANA.

SAP HANA aligns well with several specific requirements and situations. Are youbuilding 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 datavolumes? Do you require complex algorithmic or statistical calculations, or suffer fromlatency between transactional recording and reporting? If you answered yes to any ofthese questions, then SAP HANA is a great choice.

SAP Application DeploymentSAP is delivering a new class of solutions on top of the SAP HANA platform — solutionsthat combine real-time insights into big data with state-of-the-art analysis. Theseinnovative real-time solutions can help organizations transform their business by makingsmarter and faster decisions, reacting more quickly to events, and unlocking newopportunities. Companies can utilize these solutions to take advantage of new, data-driven business models and processes — options that would be difficult or evenimpossible with disk-based databases. These solutions include:

SAP Sales Pipeline Analysis, powered by SAP HANASAP BusinessObjects Sales Analysis for Retail, powered by SAPHANA SAP Smart Meter Analytics, powered by SAP HANA

Packaged SolutionsDo you have to address an urgent business need? Do you prefer working with a fixedscope? SAP Rapid Deployment solutions can help you implement SAP HANA using a

package of preconfigured software, content, and end user enablement plusimplementation services. Clearly priced and scoped implementation services help youspeed up time to value and limit risk. Examples are:

SAP ERP Rapid Deployment solution for accelerated finance and controlling withSAP HANASAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for profitability analysis with SAP HANASAP Rapid Deployment solution for customer segmentation with SAP HANA

SAP is continuously adding more Rapid Deployment solutions. To see what’s availabletoday, visit: www.sap.com/solutions/rds.

Now that we’ve reviewed typical implementation scenarios, let’s review what asuccessful implementation requires.

Taking a Systematic Approach for Your ImplementationYou may be familiar with the traditional ASAP methodology used by SAP — and the factthat a complex ERP implementation can last for months, if not years. Because SAP HANAis a new technology, to stay on top of its learning curve you need to work with a solutionimplementation partner who has a deep understanding of the technology, thecapabilities, and best practices for implementation.

To successfully implement SAP HANA, you must follow a structured implementationmethodology. Your solution partner should approach the solution with a phased,deliverable-oriented implementation plan based in project and organizational changemanagement. The goals here: to streamline implementation, minimize risk, and reducethe total costs of implementation.

A robust methodology should include templates, tools, questionnaires, and checklists,including guidebooks and accelerators to support team members and increase projectpredictability.

There are six basic steps that need to be a part of any SAP HANA implementation. Theamount of emphasis you place on each step will be dictated by the type of SAP HANAproject 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. Thetechnology is also rapidly evolving, with new use cases being created almost daily.Both the project team and the executive sponsors must be educated so theyunderstand what SAP HANA can do and how it works. (Hint: Give them a copy ofthis book!)

2. Use case identification. Workshops can help determine where to apply thepower of SAP HANA within the organization. Ask yourself: What are the possiblescenarios for SAP HANA, and where might the company make improvements?Where could the technology have the biggest impact on corporate objectives orunlock deeper insights into the reported data? Once you have defined a use case,you should perform a comprehensive requirements gathering to ensure that theend solution addresses all of your company’s needs and maps back to your originaluse case expectations.

3. Solution approach. The SAP HANA solution must be designed and documentedso that if your personnel or solution partners change, the new resources willunderstand how to support the solution. Most likely, this will be an iterativeprocess, looking closely at use cases and their supporting infrastructure. As newinformation becomes available, the solution approach will evolve into acomprehensive deliverable.

4. Modeling / Development A key task to implement your SAP HANA solution iscreation of the data models and the different views to it. These models areadapted, modified, and enhanced to improve performance. For packagedapplications this content is delivered by SAP, but can be adapted to your specific

needs. Custom development projects will include both traditional applicationdevelopment and modeling aspects.

5. QA/testing. This is the final test of all front-end reporting, data quality, dataintegration, and performance. The production system is up and running, andbusiness processes begin to operate in the new SAP HANA environment. Qualityassurance 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 aresult of dependencies, even small changes to a report can have a large impact on underlying systems; forinstance, 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 reportmodifications. Reviewing the original form of a current report can be very helpful because you can see whatthe business user is accustomed to seeing, as well as how it might be improved. You should also perform aproper 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 HANAmodeler. Finally, map the sources from which the data are drawn, and how the data are imported into aformal 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 thekey timelines and activities for your SAP HANA implementation.

Timelines and Key Activity ConsiderationsJust 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 isSAP best practice to use a standard project methodology, such as the SAP ASAPimplementation methodology, to ensure that a project addresses all of the criticalactivities, phases, and deliverables that are necessary for success.

The SAP ASAP methodology has been updated to incorporate the SAP HANA activitiesrequired for a standard in-memory project. Accelerators, best practices, andimplementation tools have also been updated or developed to shorten the projecttimeline and reduce risk. Methodology, timelines, and key activities vary based on threeconsiderations:

Current technical landscape. Depending on the current landscape, thecustomer may have to consider prerequisites for delivering in-memory solutions.For example, data quality may need to be addressed, or the organization may firstneed to upgrade some applications that work in conjunction with SAP HANA.

Expectations for in-memory functionality. As customers learn more about thecapabilities of in-memory solutions, they may want to introduce additionalfunctionality. 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 keycomponent of the successful delivery of SAP HANA is ensuring that the finalsolution meets the company’s requirements and expectations, as identified in theoriginal use case scenario.

In addition to defining an implementation methodology, you’ll need to identify the keyskills required to ensure your implementation of SAP HANA is a success.

Critical SAP HANA Skills Needed for Successful ProjectsBecause SAP HANA is a new technology the success of any implementation will depend inlarge 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 toleverage 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 thephysical SAP HANA landscape, including CPU, memory, and disk usage. He or sheperforms maintenance and system monitoring, along with configuration andapplication of any necessary patches. The system architect also performs SAP sourcesystem configuration and replication, and manages the SAP LandscapeTransformation (SLT) replication server. Finally, he or she ensures that the SAP HANAdatabase is backed up regularly, and also monitors and processes backup log files.

Solution architect. As the name implies, the solution architect is responsible forsolution design. He or she gathers requirements for the use case(s) and creates thetechnical design documentation.

SAP HANA data modeler. The SAP HANA data modeler is responsible primarily formodeling solution design and development and unit testing of all SAP HANA models.He or she also performs SAP HANA model lifecycle management, which includes thevarious steps contained in the process of moving from development to production.

Data services/SLT developer. The data services developer is responsible primarilyfor design and development of jobs to extract, transform, and load data into SAPHANA 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 shethen implements these required technical tasks within the system.

Certified OS/DB migration consultant. This individual is responsible for technicalplanning 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 datamodeling 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 needdevelopment experts in the specific application domain and advanced technologies, suchas predictive analytics, scripting languages, etc. Implementing SAP HANA is a major stepin dramatically improving your ability to obtain optimal value from your big data. With theright 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 concludethis discussion by examining some truly stellar examples of successful SAP HANAimplementations.

Putting it All Together — Examples of Stellar ProjectsNow that we have discussed the SAP HANA technology and how to obtain the bestbusiness value from this technology, we will present some innovative ways thatcustomers have “put it all together.” The first example is a chemicals company that wasable to improve compliance reporting by accelerating its standard SAP system. Thesecond example involves a large university hospital that successfully implemented SAPHANA as the engine of a new custom application, enabling it to dramatically increase thespeed with which it analyzed medical records. Finally, a financial services company usedSAP 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 indeveloping new fragrances and flavors. Every one of its hundreds of new recipes — eachwith unique ingredients and compositions — must be checked for compliance with legalregulations. As the demand for these chemicals increased and their recipes became morecomplex, the company simply became unable to scale its compliance checking. To resolvethis problem, the company collaborated with SAP to build an application that enables it toquickly check new recipes while they are still in development to ensure that they complywith a vast array of local legal regulations. Using SAP HANA to augment support ofexisting processes, we have demonstrated how the new application can cut processing

time from 20 minutes to less than 4 seconds. This vastly improved performance enhancestheir scientists’ productivity while simultaneously driving down the costs of new productdevelopment.

Custom SAP HANA Application in Use at a University Hospital

With a mature analytics program in place, the biggest university hospital in Europeprovides 150,000 inpatient and 600,000 outpatient treatments every year. The hospitalinvested in SAP HANA to harness the big data associated with its vast inventory of patientdata, medical records, and study results and make a positive impact on patient care andhealthcare research. For example, the hospital now uses SAP HANA Oncolyzer to searchfor and examine information involving cancer patients, such as tumor types, gender, age,risk factors, treatments, and diagnoses. This information enables the hospital to quicklyidentify the best candidates for each clinical study. In the future, when DNA is added tothe data set, the Oncolyzer will analyze up to 500,000 data points per patient in realtime. SAP HANA analyzes both structured and unstructured data and greatly acceleratesthe 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 databaseand upgrading to SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, powered by SAP HANA. The resulthas been a dramatic improvement in reporting runtimes in the data warehouse andbusiness intelligence environments. Data query speeds have increased on average 8-12times, simple queries run up to 450 times faster, and data store object activation is 19times faster. Based on these impressive results, the customer is re-architecting its entirereporting environment to leverage the power of SAP HANA.

Final Words of Wisdom on SAP HANA ImplementationWe’ve reviewed the importance of selecting the right SAP HANA services partner — onewho can help you plan and implement your solution and provide the right set of skillresources to ensure your implementation delivers on the value of SAP HANA. We’ve alsoreviewed common use cases, including the agile data mart, SAP Business Suiteaccelerator, primary database for SAP Business Warehouse, and custom SAP HANAapplications. SAP HANA implementation scenarios can vary depending on your businessneed — from custom development to SAP application development to rapid deploymentsolutions. Next we reviewed the importance of taking a systematic approach to yourimplementation and the benefits of following a methodology built on education, use caseidentification, solution approach, modeling, QA and testing, and go-live best practices.Prior to implementation, you’ll also need to identify your timeline, key activities, andskilled resources needed to implement SAP HANA. The key is planning and ensuring youunderstand 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 theuse case complements the technical requirements. Remember, technologyintelligence doesn’t necessarily equal business intelligence!

2. Establish ROI metrics early in the scoping process. Build them into theproject/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 expandacross other functional areas of the business. Establishing a quick win helps withsponsorship and funding for additional in-memory projects.

5. Make sure that data quality is considered as part of overall SAP HANA solutionplanning. Acquiring data quickly can’t help the business if the data are notaccurate.

6. Define (or redefine) specific in-memory terminology with all users to make certainthat 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 misunderstandingsconcerning 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 onTwitter band review the details on the SAP HANA services website.

Top Advice from SAP Mentors for SAP HANA ProjectsSAP Mentors are the most influential community participants in the SAP ecosystem. Theycomprise 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 projectchampions. The majority of SAP Mentors work for customers or partners of SAP.

The following three SAP Mentors are experts in SAP HANA implementations. Theyprovide their best tips and tricks for a successful SAP HANA project. Pay attention, theseguys really know their stuff!

Vijay VijayasankarAssociate PartnerIBM Global Business ServicesTwitter: @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 worksfaster in a data mart. SAP or IBM can easily show you how quickly their systemscan report and load data.

3. Spend a lot of time refining your use case offline before you start the project. Animportant part of this step is to accurately define success up front. This helpsreduce wasteful scoping efforts during the project, and it will help the project teamfocus on specific targets.

4. Size the hardware correctly. If you do not, then you will not see the expectedresults. Even if you want to scale out and buy new boxes, you should be awarethat these boxes are not available off the shelf. Consequently, they will requiresome lead time to acquire.

5. Each HW vendor has some “secret sauce” on what makes them special for SAPHANA. Make sure you understand that before investing in HW.

6. Check SAP HANA performance under a variety of situations — reportingperformance while heavy loads happen, while multiple people are working onsystem, logging on from different parts of network, etc.

7. Engage closely with your SI (system integrator) and SAP while the project is goingon. SAP HANA is fairly new, and it will probably need a few workarounds. Your SIand SAP will probably have seen your issues before, and they can advise you andhelp 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 canspot challenges sooner. Definitely consider re-engineering the design of SAP BW totake advantage of SAP HANA and avoid doing only an en-masse migration andleaving it at that.

9. SAP HANA security/administration is a specialized skill, and a good design isneeded to make it work for all your use cases consistently. Plan to spend timerefining the model.

10. Last but not least — poor data quality is even more damaging when the data comeat 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 sendingthem to SAP HANA.

Harald ReiterSenior Manager — SAPDeloitte ConsultingTwitter: @hreiter1. Rethink what is possible

a. Revisit analytics that previously were not possible or were too difficult toperform.

b. Processes can now actually change, be simplified, or be minimized because youdon’t need as big a staff to conduct the analysis.

c. Eliminate the data volume and speed barriers from the equation, and focus onthe real business needs.

2. Develop a roadmapa. 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 heardto ensure timely delivery of new capabilities.

3. Pilot earlya. Get used to rapid development cycles and capabilities.b. Don’t get caught up in all the hype and excitement — be pragmatic, and don’tforget 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 findthe 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 askdifferent questions to uncover anomalies in your data.

b. Embed statistical models and predictive analysis into your daily operations todetect risk, negative trending, and anomalies.

c. Make sure there is a measureable ROI5. Establish priorities

a. Define what you really want, and make certain your objectives have a positiveimpact on your organization

b. Don’t forget to look at unstructured data in your organization; these data canprovide a new perspective. Incorporating unstructured data and rapid processingenables meaningful and timely analysis to minimize risk, losses, or negativeexposure.

c. Don’t underestimate the importance of data quality. Revisit your data qualityinitiatives using SAP HANA to quickly identify issues that result from processing

massive data sets in one pass. Correlation of results without complex partitioningand staging areas can uncover skewed results.

6. Begin cultivating talenta. Team composition is key for successful implementations.b. Don’t forget about change management. Focus on changes for end usersbecause they can be empowered to do agile reporting as well as on changes foradministrative 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 mobilitya. Continuous monitoring of key metrics is a reality using mobility and SAP HANA

8. Revisit your technology architecturea. Examine your overall landscape, and identify all areas that can benefit fromtechnology 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 righta. One size does not fit allb. Data composition and data source impact the compression rate and thus thesizing 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 berelied on.

e. The quality of the data model impacts the available size for data versusworkspace.

10. Establish metrics and plan for tuning and performance testinga. 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 RudnytskiyLead BI ArchitectHP Enterprise Information SolutionsTwitter: @Sygyzmundovych

1. Accept nothing less than excellence from your project team and partnersa. Technology makes things faster, better, and cheaper; but technology itself isstill just a tool. Make sure you assemble an excellent team: business, projectteam, partners, and SAP support.

2. Understand the technologya. 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 picturea. “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/projectexperience under the belt.” Old techniques do not necessarily work well or at allwith 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 toaccomodate new requirements, unexpected cases, and a surroundingenvironment that is in constant transition. Build for the long run.

Ranjeet PanickerPractice ManagerSAP Next Generation ServicesHANA/In-Memory Center of Excellence

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) & Return on Investment (ROI) AnalysisDo not limit analysis of TCO and ROI to technical, IT, or infrastructure savings. Too often,when customers generate a business case to justify the acquisition of SAP HANA, theyapply only those savings related to infrastructure items such as storage and hardware.Avoid this mistake! Be bold! Explore the holistic value of SAP HANA to your businessprocesses. For example, reducing the time it takes to run a BW analytic report from 4hours to 5 minutes means something to the business. Apply metrics to these savings.Engage SAP Value Engineering teams who can help translate the speed of SAP HANA intotrue business value.

The well-known adage “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is especially relevant to valuemanagement. If you don’t identify, track, and ensure the ongoing value of a project, you’re unlikely toachieve its financial and operational objectives. Learn more about how strategy management helps youtrack and realize the full value of your organizational objectives by reading this article:http://scn.sap.com/community/services/blog/2012/08/23/the-value-in-value-management

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

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

Executive SponsorshipBuy-in at the highest level brings the authority and credibility that can mean thedifference between success and failure for your SAP HANA project. Executive sponsorshiphelps drive the vision for SAP HANA in your organization, and it facilitates the changemanagement that is required when you adopt a new technology. To secure and maintainthis sponsorship, include the executives in project reviews at regular intervals to keep

them up to date on project status. Also, make certain they are involved in all follow-onendeavors.

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

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 2013

S

The rest of the story….

ince the SAP HANA Essentials book is being written in “real time”, it will becontinuously updated as new chapters are completed and content revisions are

added.Make sure to register for the mailing list on www.saphanabook.com to be informed

when new chapters are available and follow the book on twitter @EpistemyPress and@jeff_word.

Please share the website and voucher code with your colleagues so they can benefitfrom the information in this book as well.

J

About the Author

Jeffrey Word, Ph.D.

Follow Jeff on : @jeff_word

effrey is responsible for creating and communicating thought leadership on SAP’s In-Memory database strategy globally. His newest book book, Business Process

Integration with SAP ERP, was released in early 2013. He is also the co-author of thebestselling books, Integrated Business Processes with ERP Systems (2011),Essentials of Business Processes and Information Systems (2009), BusinessNetwork Transformation: Strategies to Reconfigure Your BusinessRelationships for Competitive Advantage (2009) a n d SAP NetWeaver forDummies (2004).

Jeffrey has more than 18 years experience in IT strategy and business consultingworking with Fortune 1000 companies. Over the last 13 years at SAP, he has worked ontechnology strategy with focus on corporate innovation initiatives and enterprisearchitecture design. Prior to joining SAP, he worked in the high tech industry for severalhardware and software vendors throughout the Americas and Europe in a variety ofleadership roles.

Dr. Word earned his PhD in Information Systems at Manchester Business School inEngland. His research focus was on event-driven business process design and next-generation enterprise architecture. He also earned an MBA in International Managementfrom the Thunderbird School of Global Management and a BA in EuropeanStudies/Spanish from the University of Oklahoma.