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SAP INS IDER SPECIAL REPORT | BUSINESS ANALYTICS

Reproduced from the Apr nMay nJun 2011 issue of SAPinsiderwith permission from its publisher, WIS Publishing | sapinsider.wispubs.com

SAP HANA Demystified

An Overview of SAPs Game-Changing In-Memory Technology

Dan Kearnan

Director of Marketing

SAP Data Warehousing

SAP Americas

Amajor technology change is taking place at SAP,

and its rapidly capturing the attention of many

customers: in-memory computing. You may also know it

as SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance (SAP

HANA). There has been a flurry of discussion around

SAP HANA over the last year, yet, for many customers,

this new solution often provokes more questions than

provides answers.

To better understand SAP HANA, lets first review

certain forces underpinning todays business climate.

Over the last five years, the global market has under-

gone two significant shifts that have affected organiza-

tions of all sizes, regardless of industry or location:

Soaring data volumes.The exponential growth in

business data is becoming increasingly difficult and

expensive for organizations to control, manage, and

harness. Gartner predicts that enterprise data will

grow by 650% over the next five years.1IT costs and

the TCO to administer and maintain multiple ware-

houses and transactional systems are becoming more

challenging to keep low. Organizations are having to

take extraordinary measures to both manage the sig-

nificant growth in data and extract valuable insight

from that data to improve business performance.

Real-time decisions. The need for speed is top-of-

mind for organizations struggling to remain one step

ahead of the competition. Thanks to a consumer

population whose buying behavior has been super-

charged with instant access to information, organiza-

tions need to think fast and react quickly to changing

market conditions. Likewise, employees are becom-

ing increasingly impatient in their need for instant

access to data. They want to make business decisions

today, not several days or weeks from now.

Each of these forces poses a formidable challenge for

most organizations, but, when combined, they create an

uber-challenge that intensifies the struggle to acquire

1Source: Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management

Summit 2009, Orlando.

immediate insight from massive amounts of data. This is

where SAP HANA comes in. The appliance gives compa-

nies immediate insight into large volumes of operational

data leveraging a low-cost IT environment by plac-

ing real-time decision making into the hands of the busi-

ness user. Lets dive deeper into SAP HANA and examine

three commonly asked questions about the solution.

1. What Is SAP HANA?SAP HANA is a flexible, multipurpose, data-source-

agnostic, in-memory appliance. It combines SAP soft-

ware components that have been optimized on hardware

from SAP partners. The softwares core foundation is

based on SAPs in-memory technology, allowing it to

process massive quantities of real-time transactional

data in the main memory of the server. The solution

Leveraging the Power of SAP HANA at a CPG CompanyThe management team of a large consumer packaged goods (CPG) com-

pany required full visibility into the supply and demand of individual

products to detect early warnings for out-of-stock situations. The compa-

nys goal was to restock shelves for high-demand products within 48

hours. However, with a data set of 460 billion records (120 terabytes, or

TB), the team couldnt analyze the data quickly enough using the existing

database platform. The processing and analysis had to occur overnight,

making it too late for the business to avoid out-of-stock product issues.

After approaching SAP with this business challenge, the customerimplemented an SAP HANA solution consisting of 10 SAP HANA blades

with 500GB per blade and 2TB of solid-state drive (SSD) storage. The com-

pany chose SAP BusinessObjects Explorer as its front-end analysis tool.

The results were astounding 120TB of data within the traditional

database system compressed to 40TB of data in SAP HANA. This allowed

for analysis that was 20 times faster, and improved the performance price

value by 200 times. The customer was able to move from five days to two

days for shelf restocking turnaround time and completely eliminated out-

of-stock scenarios during product sale promotions.

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8/13/2019 Sap Hana Demystified

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BUSINESS ANALYTICS | SAP INS IDER SPECIAL REPORT

Reproduced from the Apr nMay nJun 2011 issue of SAPinsiderwith permission from its publisher, WIS Publishing | sapinsider.wispubs.com

also enables a host of application scenarios based on

real-time analysis of large data volumes at performance

levels that are not possible in traditional systems.

2. How Does SAP HANA Work?SAP HANA leverages built-in data services and data rep-

lication services to extract and replicate large volumes of

transactional data held in a companys operational sys-

tems, both SAP and non-SAP. Once the transactional

data is captured, SAP HANAs in-memory computing

engine processes it in the servers main memory.

Through a data access layer, the processed data is then

made available to SAP BusinessObjects business intelli-

gence (BI) solutions and other purpose-built applica-

tions for various analysis scenarios (see Figure 1).

Whats more, SAP HANA offers an easy-to-use mod-eling experience to further increase the autonomy of

business users. Using semantically enriched views that

turn raw operational data into understandable, relevant

information, business users can create new analytic

models in a web-based modeling environment, without

help from IT. Unlike other analytic applications, all data

models built in SAP HANA are purely virtual and calcu-

late results based on underlying operational data.

3. How Will SAP HANA Benefit

My Business?SAP HANA allows organizations to perform real-time

analysis on very large volumes of transactional data

with zero impact on source systems. By transitioning

from after-event analysis to real-time decision making,

business users are empowered to react immediately to

changing business conditions.SAP HANA offers benefits to organizations in almost

any industry or vertical. These benefits include:

Better demand forecasting based on huge data vol-

umes for the utilities industry

Real-time risk management for insurance-based busi-

nesses that are closing new policies, and quicker cal-

culation of cumulated risks in corresponding areas

Improved trade promotions and supply chain man-

agement processes for retail and consumer product

companies using advanced forecasting algorithms

based on point-of-sale data

The appliance also dramatically affects IT landscapes

by combining different procedures into one system. For

example, transaction processing, analytics, planning,

simulations, and data searching can all be performed

within a single system, eliminating the cost and admin-

istration of running separate data extraction and

replication systems. These simplifications can reduce

development efforts and TCO for IT departments.

SAP HANA Going ForwardTodays version of SAP HANA represents the next waveof SAP in-memory technology that will form the foun-

dation for future SAP applications.SAP is continually

evolving its in-memory technology and is committed to

placing the technology at the heart of all of its applica-

tions, including SAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver Business

Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW). Using applications

that leverage low-cost in-memory technology for

improved speed and performance, organizations can

enable an informed workforce to react quickly and

effectively to changing market conditions.n

Note:SAP HANA is a high-performance,

operational data foundation and is not designed

to function as or to replace an enterprise data

warehouse (EDW). SAP NetWeaver BW remains

essential to an SAP customers EDW strategy; SAP

continues to invest in this area, as evidenced by

the release of SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3.

In-memory computing engine

SAP HANA

Calculation andplanning engine

Modelingstudio

Real-timereplication services

Dataservices

SAP BusinessObjectssolutions

Other applications

SAP ERP SAP NetWeaver

BWThird-party

data sources

FIGURE 1uSAP HANA

architecture

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