Welcome to today’s training on SAP HANA. In today’s training we will provide you with an introduction to the components that make up the SAP HANA appliance and an understanding of how our innovative software is optimized to work with today’s advanced hardware.

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At the end of this course, you will be able to:

Describe the core components and key capabilities of the SAP HANA appliance

Before we delve into our discussion on SAP HANA, take a moment to watch this video by Steve Lucas, Global GM & Senior Executive for SAP Business Analytics and Technology.

The video is approximately 5 minutes in length.

<Embed link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0eTL2K7lII>

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The video you just saw provided a high-level overview of SAP HANA. Now let’s take a closer look at the components that make up the SAP HANA appliance.

HANA is SAP’s in-memory appliance. It is designed to process high volumes of transactional data without affecting the performance of operational systems. Organizations can synchronize key transactional tables into memory in near real-time, making these tables easily accessible for analysis and lookup. Once data is available in-memory, departments can instantly look up individual line items from massive lists like booking documents, sales leads or service records.

SAP HANA provides a streamlined workflow from idea to analysis. The workflow covers the entire process, starting from the identification of relevant operational data (turning raw data into relevant information), to the generation of semantically grouped information in models, and finally the publishing of the completed models. The key differentiator that sets SAP HANA apart from traditional analytic models is the absence of any materialization – all models are purely virtual, and results are calculated based on the underlying detailed operational data. The absence of materializations makes model changes very easy.

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SAP HANA provides standard interfaces to existing applications, operational systems or other business applications. This means that SAP HANA will not disrupt existing landscapes by connecting to existing data sources, and easily leverages investments in existing BI clients.

SAP HANA can connect to real time transactional data coming direct from an organization’s SAP Business Suite, or data can be batch-loaded from sources such as the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse and/or non-SAP operational data can be loaded using the SAP BusinessObjects Data Services component. SAP HANA offers real-time replication services to replicate data from SAP and non-SAP systems into HANA, as well as data integration tools to allow batch replication of data from any SAP or non-SAP solution.

SAP HANA includes tools for data modeling, data and lifecycle management, and security. The SAP HANA Modeling Studio enables businesses to organize and manage data, leveraging compression and column store techniques to allow analysis on tens of terabytes of data in main memory. Data can even be partitioned to allow processing and calculation on-the-fly using multi-core processors.

And with SAP HANA you can establish connections with SAP BusinessObjectsBusiness Intelligence tools and directly leverage SAP HANA’s in-memory data, giving business users a complete range of insight and analysis capabilities for all high performance applications. However, if users prefer to employ Excel – or other tools and applications – for insight and analysis, they can connect to SAP HANA via standard interfaces such as MDX or SQL.

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But that previous slide didn’t really take us inside the box. What is inside HANA? This architecture diagram explains the main components and capabilities.

When we refer to SAP HANA we are always talking about an appliance… What does that mean? The SAP HANA appliance refers to the server box , purchased from a hardware provider such as HP, IBM , Cisco or Dell, with SAP software installed to enable real-time data replication, data modeling and calculation, and seamless integration with front end business intelligence tools.

The SAP HANA appliance contains a number of software components optimized to work within the hardware environment:

The SAP HANA database is a hybrid in-memory database that combines row-based, column-based, and object-based database technology. It is optimized to exploit the parallel processing capabilities of modern multi-core/CPU architectures. Currently, conventional databases store records in rows, but storing data in columns enables faster in-memory processing of operations such as aggregates.

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The SAP HANA studio provides an environment for SAP HANA administrators to manage and monitor the in-memory database engine and for BI architects to create powerful data models.

Real time data replication tools allow for data to be loaded directly from SAP Business Suite or a SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse data source. There are three methods for data replication from a source system to the SAP HANA database. Each method handles the required data replication differently, and consequently each method has different strengths. Each of these methods is discussed in more detail later in the SAP HANA curriculum in our lesson on Data Replication.

SAP BusinessObjects Data Services allows data to be batch loaded from almost any other data sources. The data integration processes of SAP BusinessObjects Data Services allow organizations to explore, extract, transform, and deliver any type of data across the enterprise, thereby allowing easy standardization and consolidation of data anywhere.

And SAP HANA uses industry standard interfaces to connect to front end analytic applications. SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise 4.0 is the first certified environment to work with SAP HANA. However, note that it is possible to create connections with other query tools, such as Business Intelligence Consumer Services (BICS), SQL, and Multidimensional Expression (MDX).

When a customer purchases the SAP HANA appliance they purchase a preconfigured server from a selected hardware vendor who has partnered with SAP and has the expertise to install SAP HANA software. The server will be delivered as a fully configured appliance. Out of the box, SAP HANA is ready to deliver on all of the capabilities that a customer expects from this innovative, industry leading appliance.

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In the previous slides you heard a lot about groundbreaking hardware and innovative in-memory software. What’s so groundbreaking about the SAP HANA appliance? What is so innovative about the software?

First, let’s consider the prevalent configuration of most computer’s today. Disk is king, cache is leveraged to increase transaction speed, and memory is an almost insignificant part of the equation. Hardware and software are not optimized to work together as efficiently as possible.

But that’s not really the computer of today. That’s already yesterday’s model. The computer of today – the computer that everyone wants today – has passed a tipping point and flipped the paradigm. Disk space is now much less important. Disk will only be used to store logs and backups. In-Memory becomes the key aspect of the system. Data resides in-memory. Software works in-memory. Computing happens in-memory.

This new computer model is made possible thanks to several significant developments in the hardware world. Today, we are able to leverage hardware with 8 to 10 cores per CPU, with anywhere from two to eight or even more CPUs on a machine. So we have a huge number of cores that can work in parallel. In addition, most systems have now moved to 64-bit architecture, allowing us to address a huge amount of memory. On average, current SAP HANA boxes have between 256 GB and 2 TB of memory. This provides massive performance improvements compared to fetching data from disk or cache.

And our software has been optimized to leverage the full capability of this powerful environment. The SAP HANA row and column store database results in anywhere from 5x compression up to 20x compression.

With the data now in this compressed state, and taking advantage of the massive memory available in the SAP HANA engine, we are able to realize tremendous improvements in processing speeds by eliminating aggregate tables so that all calculations no matter what dimension we are looking at are done in memory, on-the-fly. Compared to a traditional business warehouse this delivers tremendous improvements on processing speed. In fact, many calculations that could never be accomplished in a traditional BW environment without timing out can be performed in SAP HANA in a matter of seconds.

We also are using new partitioning aspects to move data in or out of the database, allowing real time replication and insert-only on data. Also, typically, we are not keeping aggregate tables, which dramatically changes performance levels.

Each component of this new computing system – hardware and software – is optimized to work with every other component. The result is increased speed, increased ease of use, and massively increased power.

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Now that you have a baseline understanding of SAP HANA and it’s core components,let’s take a step back and see how the capabilities of SAP HANA support the SAP portfolio of products.

The video walks you through the evolution of the SAP product portfolio and defines how the power of SAP HANA is propelling SAP products into a competitive marketplace.

The video is approximately 6 minutes in length.

<Embed link: http://videophl.phl.sap.corp:1080/v/pvod/vu/NewSAP>

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Correct!

The SAP HANA studio is delivered in the SAP HANA Appliance and provides an environment for SAP HANA administrators to manage and monitor the engine, BI architects for modeling data a single source for SAP HANA appliance updates via Lifecycle Management, as well as reference documentation to help set users up for success.

Sorry, that is incorrect. The correct answer is:

SAP HANA Studio

The SAP HANA studio is delivered in the SAP HANA Appliance and provides an environment for SAP HANA administrators to manage and monitor the engine, BI architects for modeling data a single source for SAP HANA appliance updates via Lifecycle Management, as well as reference documentation to help set users up for success.

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Correct!

The SAP HANA database is a hybrid in-memory database that combines row-based, column-based, and object-based database technology.

Sorry, that is incorrect. The correct answers are:

Row-based Storage

Column-based Storage

Object-based Database

The SAP HANA database is a hybrid in-memory database that combines row-based, column-based, and object-based database technology.

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You are now able to:

Describe the core components and key capabilities of the SAP HANA appliance

For more information on topics discussed in this course, see the references listed here.

Thank you for completing this course.

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