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This publication contains references to the products of SAP AG. SAP, the SAP Logo, R/3, SAP NetWeaver, SAP HANA and other
SAP products and services mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several
other countries all over the world. Business Objects and the Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects, Crystal Reports, Crystal
Decisions, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius and other Business Objects products and services mentioned herein are trademarks or
registered trademarks of Business Objects in the United States and/or other countries. All other products mentioned in this book
are registered or unregistered trademarks of their respective companies.
SAP AG is neither the author nor the publisher of this publication and is not responsible for its content, and SAP Group shall not
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omissions in this document.
ISBN: 978-0-9856008-0-8
 About the Cover Image

T he cover image is a European “No Speed Limit” sign. If you’ve ever driven on the Autobahn
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 can go (which ever
comes first). In terms of SAP HANA, we selected this image because SAP HANA allows your
company to run at top speed with no artificial limit to how fast it can go. If you ever go visit SAP
headquarters in Germany, you’ll see this sign about 2 miles south of the Frankfurt airport on the
A5 — and there’s no speed limit on your way to visit SAP.
 Note from the Author

S ince this book is about the shift to “real-time” business, it’s fitting that we’ve been writing this
book in “real-time” and will be delivering it in “real-time”. Basically, that means that we can’t
wait around for everything in the SAP HANA world to settle down and solidify before writing
each chapter and expect everyone to hold their breath until the entire book is finished and ready
to print. And trust me, SAP HANA is moving extremely fast right now and you could be holding
your breath for quite a while waiting for that day.
Just like SAP HANA is disrupting the status quo in the database world and breaking lots of
ossified rules of the game, we’ll be doing much the same with this book. Who says you have to
wait till the whole book is written to release it? Who says you have to charge $$ for an
extremely valuable book? Who says it has to be printed on paper with ink and sold in a
bookstore?
We’ve decided to break all those traditional publishing rules and release chapters as they 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 learn about the release of new
chapters and content updates. That’s pretty easy: Follow the book on twitter @EpistemyPress
and @jeff_word, sign up for the email updates from the saphanabook.com website when you
register to download the ebook and keep watching saphana.com.
 Table of Contents

1 SAP HANA Overview

Updated scale out and release date details
2 SAP HANA Architecture
3 SAP HANA Business Cases
New Chapter
4 SAP HANA Applications
5 SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on SAP
6 Data Provisioning with SAP HANA
7 Data Modeling with SAP HANA
8 Application Development with SAP HANA
9 SAP HANA Administration & Operations
10 SAP HANA Hardware
Updated PAM, Dell, Hitachi, HP sections
11 SAP HANA Projects & Implementation
Updated RDS section and new advice section
12 SAP HANA Resources
 Acknowledgments

A lthough we’re at the beginning of this journey, many people have already been phenomenally
helpful in the scoping, content preparation and reviewing of this book. Their support has
been invaluable and many more people will be involved as the book progresses.
Many thanks to all of you for your support and collaboration.
— Jeff

SAP Colleagues
Margaret Anderson, Puneet Suppal, Uddhav Gupta, Storm Archer, Scott Shepard, Balaji
Krishna, Daniel Rutschman, Ben Gruber, Bhuvan Wadhwa, Lothar Henkes, Adolf Brosig,
Thomas Zureck, Lucas Kiesow, Prasad Ilapani, Wolfram Kleis, Gunther Liebich, Ralf Czekalla,
Michael Erhardt, Roland Kramer, Arne Arnold, Markus Fath, Johannes Beigel, Ron Silberstein,
Kijoon Lee, Oliver Mainka, Si-Mohamed Said, Amit Sinha, Mike Eacrett, Andrea Neff, Jason
Lovinger, Michael Rey, Gigi Read, David Hull, Nadav Helfman, Lori Vanourek, Bill Lawler, Scott
Leatherman, Kathlynn Gallagher, David Jonker, Naren Chawla, David Porter, Steve Thibodeau

SAP Mentors
Thomas Jung (SAP), Harald Reiter (Deloitte), Vitaliy Rudnytskiy (HP), John Appleby (Bluefin),
Tammy Powlas (Fairfax Water), Vijay Vijayasankar (IBM), Craig Cmehil (SAP), Alvaro Tejada
(SAP)

SAP Partners
Lane Goode (HP), Tag Robertson (IBM), Rick Speyer (Cisco), Andrea Voigt (Fujitsu), Nathan
Saunders (Dell), KaiGai Kohei (NEC), Chris March (Hitachi)

Production
Robert Weiss (Development Editor)
Roland Schild, Holger Fischelmanns, Daniela Geyer, Markus May (Libreka/MVB)
Michelle DeFilippo (1106 Design)
 How to use this book
“May you live in interesting times”

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

T ime magazine picked “The Protester” as its person of the year for 2011, recognition of
individuals who spoke up around the world — from the Arab countries to Wall Street, from
India to Greece — individuals whose voices were amplified and aggregated by modern
technology and its unprecedented power to connect and empower us. Twitter and Facebook,
now approaching 800 million users (more than 10% of humanity), are often viewed as the
harbinger of social networking. But social networking is not new. A recent issue of the
Economist described Martin Luther’s use of social networking, especially the Gutenberg press,
to start the Protestant Reformation. During the American Revolution, Thomas Paine published
his Common Sense manifesto on a derivation of the Gutenberg press. Within a single year, it
reached almost a million of the 1.5 million residents of the 13 American colonies — about two-
thirds of the populace, and helped seed democracy and America’s birth.
I believe that information technologies, especially well-designed, purposeful ones, empower
and renew us and serve to amplify our reach and our abilities. The ensuing connectedness
dissolves away intermediary layers of inefficiency and indirection. Some of the most visible
recent examples of this dissolving of layers are the transformations we have seen in music,
movies and books. Physical books and the bookstores they inhabited have been rapidly
disappearing, as have physical compact discs, phonograph records, videotapes and the stores
that housed them. Yet there is more music than ever before, more books and more movies.
Their content got separated from their containers and got housed in more convenient, more
modular vessels, which better tie into our lives, in more consumable ways. In the process,
layers of inefficiency got dissolved. By putting 3000 songs in our pockets, the iPod liberated our
music from the housings that confined it. The iPhone has a high-definition camera within it, along
with a bunch of services for sharing, distributing and publishing pictures, even editing them —
services that used to be inside darkrooms and studios. 3D printing is an even more dramatic
example of this transformation. The capabilities and services provided by workshops and
factories are now embodied within a printer that can print things like tools and accessories,
food and musical instruments. A remarkable musical flute was printed recently at MIT, its sound
indistinguishable from that produced by factory-built flutes of yesterday.
I see layers of inefficiency dissolving all around us. An empowered populace gets more
connected, and uses this connectivity to bypass the intermediaries and get straight at the things
it seeks, connecting and acting in real-time — whether it is to stage uprisings or rent
apartments, plan travel or author books, edit pictures or consume apps by the millions.
And yet enterprises have been far too slow to benefit from such renewal and simplification
that is pervading other parts of our lives. The IT industry has focused on too much repackaging
and reassembly of existing layers into new bundles, ostensibly to lower the costs of integrated
systems. In reality, this re-bundling increases the clutter that already exists in enterprise
landscapes. It is time for a rethink.
At SAP, we have been engaged in such rethinking, or intellectual renewal, as our chairman
and co-founder Hasso Plattner challenged me, for the last several years, and our customers
are starting to see its results. This renewal of SAP’s architecture, and consequently that of our
customers, is driven by an in-memory product called SAP HANA which, together with mobility,
cloud computing, and our principle of delivering innovation without disruption, is helping to
radically simplify enterprise computing and dramatically improve the performance of businesses
without disruption.
SAP HANA achieves this simplification by taking advantage of tremendous advances in
hardware over the last two decades. Today’s machines can bring large amounts of main-
memory, and lots of multi-core CPUs to bear on massively parallel processing of information
very inexpensively. SAP HANA was designed from the ground-up to leverage this, and the
business consequences are radical. At Yodobashi, a large Japanese retailer, the calculation of
incentives for loyalty customers used to take 3 days of data processing, once a month. With
SAP HANA, this happens now in 2 seconds — a performance improvement of over 100,000
times. But even more important is the opportunity to rethink business processes. The incentive
for a customer can be calculated on the fly, while the customer is in a store, based on the
purchases she is about to make. The empowered store-manager can determine these at the
point of sale, as the transaction unfolds. With SAP HANA, batch processing is converting to real
time, and business processes are being rethought. Customers like Colgate-Palmolive, the
Essar Group, Provimi, Charmer Sunbelt, Nongfu Spring, our own SAP IT and many others,
have seen performance improvements of thousands to tens of thousands times. SAP HANA
brings these benefits non-disruptively, without forcing a modification of existing systems. And in
Fall 2011, we delivered SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA, a complete removal of the
traditional database underneath, delivering fundamental improvements in performance and
simplification, without disruption.
SAP HANA provides a single in-memory database foundation for managing transactional as
well as analytical data processing. Thus a complex question can be posed to real-time
operational data, instead of asking pre-fabricated questions on pre-aggregated or summarized
data. SAP HANA also integrates text processing with managing structured data, in a single
system. And it scales simply with addition of more processors or more blades. Thus various
types of applications, across a company’s lines of businesses, and across application types,
can all be run off a single, elastically-scalable hardware infrastructure: a grand dissolving of the
layers of complexity in enterprise landscapes. SAP HANA hardware is built by various leading
hardware vendors from industry standard commodity components, and can be delivered as
appliances, private or public clouds. While this architecture is vastly disruptive to a traditional
relational database architecture, to our customers it brings fundamental innovation without
disruption.
Looking ahead, I expect that we will see lots of amazing improvements similar to
Yodobashi’s. Even more exciting, are the unprecedented applications that are now within our
reach. By my estimate, a cloud of approximately 1000 servers of 80-cores and 2 terabytes of
memory each, can enable more than 1 billion people on the planet to interactively explore their
energy consumption based on real-time information from their energy meters and appliances,
and take control of their energy management. The management and optimization of their
finances, healthcare, insurance, communications, entertainment and other activities, can
similarly be made truly dynamic. Banks can manage risks in real-time, oil companies can better
explore energy sources, mining vast amounts of data as needed. Airlines and heavy machinery
makers can do predictive maintenance on their machines, and healthcare companies can
analyze vast amounts of genome data in real time. One of our customers in Japan is working
on using SAP HANA to analyze genome data for hundreds of patients each day, something that
was impossible before SAP HANA. Another customer is using SAP HANA to determine optimal
routes for taxicabs. The possibilities are endless.
Just as the iPod put our entire music libraries in our pockets, SAP HANA, combined with
mobility and cloud-based delivery, enables us to take our entire business with us in our pocket.
Empowering us to take actions in real time, based on our instincts as well as our analysis. To
re-think our solutions to solving existing problems — and to help businesses imagine and deliver
solutions for previously unsolved problems. And it is this empowerment and renewal, driven by
purposeful technologies, that continually brings us all forward.
Dr. Vishal Sikka is a member of the Executive Board of SAP AG and heads the technology
and innovation areas.
 Chapter 1
SAP HANA Overview
“Significant shifts in market share and fortunes occur not because companies try to
play the game better than the competition but because they change the rules of the
game”
— Constantinos Markides 1

E very industry has a certain set of “rules” that govern the way the companies in that industry
operate. The rules might be adjusted from time to time as the industry matures, but the
general rules stay basically the same — unless some massive disruption occurs that changes
the rules or even the entire game. SAP HANA is one of those massively disruptive innovations
for the enterprise IT industry.
To understand this point, consider that you’re probably reading this book on an e-reader,
which is a massively disruptive innovation for the positively ancient publishing industry. The book
industry has operated under the same basic rules since Gutenberg mechanized the production
of books in 1440. There were a few subsequent innovations within the industry, primarily in the
distribution chain, but the basic processes of writing a book, printing it, and reading it remained
largely unchanged for several hundred years. That is — until Amazon and Apple came along
and digitized the production, distribution, and consumption of books. These companies are also
starting to revolutionize the writing of books by providing new authoring tools that make the
entire process digital and paper-free. This technology represents an overwhelming assault of
disruptive innovation on a 500+ year-old industry in less than 5 years.
Today, SAP HANA is disrupting the technology industry in much the same way that Amazon
and Apple have disrupted the publishing industry. Before we discuss how this happens, we
need to consider a few fundamental rules of that industry.

The IT Industry: A History of Technology Constraints

Throughout the history of the IT industry, the capabilities of applications have always been
constrained to a great degree by the capabilities of the hardware that they were designed to
run on. This explains the “leapfrogging” behavior of software and hardware products, where a
more capable version of an application is released shortly after a newer, more capable
generation of hardware — processors, storage, memory, and so on — is released. For
example, each version of Adobe Photoshop was designed to maximize the most current
hardware resources available to achieve the optimal performance. Rendering a large image in
Photoshop 10 years ago could take several hours on the most powerful PC. In contrast, the
latest version, when run on current hardware, can perform the same task in just a couple of
seconds, even on a low-end PC.
Enterprise software has operated on a very similar model. In the early days of mainframe
systems, all of the software — specifically, the applications, operating system, and database
— was designed to maximize the hardware resources located inside the mainframe as a
contained system. The transactional data from the application and the data used for reporting
were physically stored in the same system. Consequently, you could either process
transactions or process reports, but you couldn’t do both at the same time or you’d kill the
system. Basically, the application could use whatever processing power was in the mainframe,
and that was it. If you wanted more power, you had to buy a bigger mainframe.

The Database Problem: Bottlenecks

When SAP R/3 came out in 1992, it was designed to take advantage of a new hardware
architecture — client-server — where the application could be run on multiple, relatively cheap
application servers connected to a larger central database server. The major advantage of this
architecture was that, as more users performed more activities on the system, you could just
add a few additional application servers to scale out application performance. Unfortunately,
the system still had a single database server, so transmitting data from that server to all the
application servers and back again created a huge performance bottleneck.
Eventually, the ever-increasing requests for data from so many application servers began to
crush even the largest database servers. The problem wasn’t that the servers lacked sufficient
processing power. Rather, the requests from the application servers got stuck in the same
input/output (IO) bottleneck trying to get data in and out of the database. To address this
problem, SAP engineered quite a few “innovative techniques” in their applications to minimize
the number of times applications needed to access the database. Despite these innovations,
however, each additional database operation continued to slow down the entire system.
This bottleneck was even more pronounced when it came to reporting data. The transactional
data — known as online transaction processing, or OLTP — from documents such as purchase
orders and production orders were stored in multiple locations within the database. The
application would read a small quantity of data when the purchasing screen was started up, the
user would input more data, the app would read a bit more data from the database, and so on,
until the transaction was completed and the record was updated for the last time. Each
transactional record by itself doesn’t contain very much data. When you have to run a report
across every transaction in a process for several months, however, you start dealing with huge
amounts of data that have to be pulled through a very slow “pipe” from the database to the
application.
To create reports, the system must read multiple tables in the database all at once and then
sort the data into reports. This process requires the system to pull a massive amount of data
from the database, which essentially prevents users from doing anything else in the system
while it’s generating the report. To resolve this problem, companies began to build separate
OLAP systems such as SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse to copy the transaction data
over to a separate server and offload all that reporting activity onto a dedicated “reporting”
system. This arrangement would free up resources for the transactional system to focus on
processing transactions.
Unfortunately, even though servers were getting faster and more powerful (and cheaper), the
bottleneck associated with obtaining data from the disk wasn’t getting better; in fact, it was
actually getting worse. As more processes in the company were being automated in the
transactional system, it was producing more and more data, which would then get dumped into
the reporting system. Because the reporting system contained more, broader data about the
company’s operations, more people wanted to use the data, which in turn generated more
requests for reports from the database under the reporting system. Of course, as the number
of requests increased, the quantities of data that had to be pulled correspondingly increased.
You can see how this vicious (or virtuous) cycle can spin out of control quickly.

The Solution: In-Memory Architecture

This is the reality that SAP was seeing at their customers at the beginning of the 2000’s. SAP
R/3 had been hugely successful, and customers were generating dramatically increasing
quantities of data. SAP had also just released SAP NetWeaver2, which added extensive
internet and integration capabilities to its applications. SAP NetWeaver added many new users
and disparate systems that talked to the applications in the SAP landscape. Again, the greater
the number of users, the greater the number of application servers that flooded the database
with requests. Similarly, as the amount of operational data in the SAP NetWeaver Business
Warehouse database increased exponentially, so did the number of requests for reports.
Looking forward, SAP could see this trend becoming even more widespread and the bottleneck
of the database slowing things down more and more. SAP was concerned that customers who
had invested massive amounts of time and money into acquiring and implementing these
systems to make their businesses more productive and profitable would be unable to get
maximum value from them.
Fast forward a few years, and now the acquisitions of Business Objects and Sybase were
generating another exponential increase in demands for data from both the transactional and
analytic databases from increasing numbers of analytics users and mobile users. Both the
volume of data and the volume of users requesting data were now growing thousands of times
faster than the improvements in database I/O.
Having become aware of this issue, in 2004 SAP initiated several projects to innovate the
core architecture of their applications to eliminate this performance bottleneck. The objective
was to enable their customers to leverage the full capabilities of their investment in SAP while
avoiding the data latency issues. The timing couldn’t have been better. It was around this time
that two other key factors were becoming more significant: (1) internet use and the proliferation
of data from outside the enterprise, and (2) the regulatory pressures on corporations,
generated by laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley, to be answerable for all of their financial
transactions. These requirements increased the pressure on already stressed systems to
analyze more data more quickly. The SAP projects resulted in the delivery of SAP HANA in
2011, the first step in the transition to a new in-memory architecture for enterprise applications
and databases. SAP HANA flips the old model on its head and converts the database from the
“boat anchor” that slows everything down into a “jet engine” that speeds up every aspect of the
company’s operations.

SAP’s Early In-Memory Projects

SAP has a surprisingly long history of developing in-memory technologies to accelerate its
applications. Because disk I/O has been a performance bottleneck since the beginning of three-
tier architecture, SAP has constantly searched for ways to avoid or minimize the performance
penalty that customers pay when they pull large data sets from disk. So, SAP’s initial in-
memory technologies were used for very specific applications that contained complex
algorithms that needed a great deal of readily accessible data.

The Beginnings: LiveCache and SAP BWA

When SAP introduced Advanced Planning Optimizer (APO) as part of its supply chain
management application in the late 1990s, the logistics planning algorithms required a
significant speed boost to overcome the disk I/O bottleneck. These algorithms — some of the
most complex that SAP has ever written — needed to crunch massive amounts of product,
production, and logistics data to produce an optimal supply chain plan. SAP solved this problem
in 1999 by taking some of the capabilities of its open-source database, SAP MaxDB (called
SAP DB at the time), and built them into a memory-resident cache system called SAP
LiveCache. Basically, LiveCache keeps a persistent copy of all of the relevant application logic
and master data needed in memory, thus eliminating the need to make multiple trips back and
forth to the disk. LiveCache worked extremely well; in fact, it processed data 600 times faster
than disk-based I/O. Within its narrow focus, it clearly demonstrated that in-memory caching
could solve a major latency issue for SAP customers.
In 2003, a team in SAP’s headquarters in Waldorf, Germany, began to productize a
specialized search engine for SAP systems called TREX (Text Retrieval and information
EXtraction). TREX approached enterprise data in much the same way that Google approaches
internet data. That is, TREX scans the tables in a database and then creates an index of the
information contained in the table. Because the index is a tiny fraction of the size of the actual
data, the TREX team came up with the idea of putting the entire index in the RAM memory of
the server to speed up searches of the index. When this technology became operational, their
bosses asked them to apply the same technique to a much more imposing problem: the data
from a SAP BW cube. Thus, Project Euclid was born.
At that time, many of the larger SAP BW customers were having significant performance
issues with reports that were running on large data cubes. Cubes are the basic mechanism by
which SAP BW stores data in multidimensional structures. Running reports on very large cubes
(>100GB) was taking several hours, sometimes even days. The SAP BW team had done just
about everything possible in the SAP BW application to increase performance, but had run out
of options in the application layer. The only remaining solution was to eliminate the bottleneck
itself. In the best spirit of disruptive innovators, the TREX team devised a strategy to eliminate
the database from the equation entirely by indexing the cubes and storing the indexes in high-
speed RAM.
Initial results for Euclid were mind-blowing: The new technology could execute query
responses for the same reports on the same data thousands of times faster than the old
system. Eventually, the team discovered how to package Euclid into a stand-alone server that
would sit next to the existing SAP BW system and act as a non-disruptive “turbocharger” for a
customer’s slow SAP BW reports. At the same time, SAP held some senior-level meetings with
Intel to formulate a joint-engineering project to optimize Intel’s new dual-core chips to natively
process the SAP operations in parallel, thereby increasing performance exponentially. Intel
immediately sent a team to SAP headquarters to begin the optimization work. Since that time
the two companies have continuously worked together to optimize every successive generation
of chips.
In 2005, SAP launched the product SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence Accelerator, or
BIA. (The company subsequently changed the name to SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse
Accelerator, or BWA) BWA has since evolved into one of SAP’s best-selling products, with one
of the highest customer satisfaction ratings. BWA solved a huge pain point for SAP customers.
Even more importantly, however, it represented another successful use of in-memory. Along
with LiveCache, the success of BWA proved to SAP and its customers that in-memory data
processing just might be an architectural solution to database bottlenecks.

The Next Step: The Tracker Project

Once the results for BWA and LiveCache began to attract attention, SAP decided to take the
next big step and determine whether it could run an entire database for an SAP system in
memory. As we’ll see later, this undertaking is a lot more complicated than it sounds. Using
memory as a cache to temporarily store data or storing indexes of data in memory were key
innovations, but eliminating the disk completely from the architecture takes the concept to an
entirely different level of complexity and introduces a great deal of unknown technical issues
into the landscape.
Therefore, in 2005, SAP decided to build a skunkworks project to validate and test the idea.
The result was the Tracker Project. Because the new SAP database was in an early
experimental stage and the final product could seriously disrupt the market, the Tracker Project
was strictly “Top Secret,” even to SAP employees.
The Tracker team was composed of the TREX/BWA engineers, a few of the key architects
from the SAP MaxDB open-source database team, the key engineers who built LiveCache, the
SAP ERP performance optimization and benchmarking gurus, and several database experts
from outside the company. Basically, the team was an all-star lineup of everyone inside and
outside SAP who could contribute to this “big hairy audacious goal” of building the first in-
memory database prototype for SAP (the direct ancestor of SAP HANA).
In the mid-1990s, several researchers at Stanford University had performed the first
experiments to build an in-memory database for a project at HP Labs. Two of the Stanford
researchers went on to found companies to commercialize their research. One product was a
database query optimization tool known as Callixa, and the other was a native in-memory
database called P*Time. In late 2005, SAP quietly acquired Callixa and P*time (as well as a
couple of other specialist database companies), hired several of the most distinguished
database geniuses on the planet, and put them to work with the Tracker team. The team
completed the porting and verification of the in-memory database on a server with 64gb of
RAM, which was the maximum supported memory at the time.
In early 2006, less than four months after the start of the project, the Tracker team passed
its primary performance and “reality check” goal: the SAP Standard Application Benchmark for
1000 user SD two-tier benchmark with more than 6000 SAPs, which essentially matched the
performance of the two leading certified databases at the time. To put that in perspective, it
took Microsoft several years of engineering to port Microsoft SQL to SAP and pass the
benchmark the first time. Passing the benchmark in such a short time with a small team — in
total secrecy — was a truly amazing feat. Suddenly, an entirely new world of possibilities had
opened up for SAP to fundamentally change the rules of the game for database technology.
Shortly after achieving this milestone, SAP began an academic research project to
experiment with the inner workings of in-memory databases with faculty and students at the
Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam in Germany. The researchers examined
the prototypes from the Tracker team — now called NewDB — and added some valuable
external perspectives on how to mature the technology for enterprise applications.
 However, passing a benchmark and running tests in the labs are far removed from the level
of scalability and reliability needed for a database to become the mission-critical heart of a
Fortune 50 company. So, for the next four years, SAP embarked on a “bullet-proofing” effort to
evolve the “project” into a “product”.
In May 2010, Hasso Plattner, SAP’s supervisory board chairman and chief software advisor,
announced SAP’s vision for delivering an entirely in-memory database layer for its application
portfolio. If you haven’t seen his keynote speech, it’s worth watching. If you saw it when he
delivered it, it’s probably worth watching again. It’s Professor Plattner at his best.

Different Game, Different Rules: SAP HANA

One year later, SAP announced the first live customers on SAP HANA and that SAP HANA was
now generally available. SAP also introduced the first SAP applications that were being built
natively on top of SAP HANA as an application platform. Not only did these revelations shock
the technology world into the “new reality” of in-memory databases, but they initiated a massive
shift for both SAP and its partners and customers into the world of “real-time business”.
In November 2011, SAP achieved another milestone when it released SAP Business
Warehouse 7.3. SAP had renovated this software so that it could run natively on top of SAP
HANA. This development sent shockwaves throughout the data warehousing world because
almost every SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse customer could immediately 3 replace their
old, disk-based database with SAP HANA. What made this new architecture especially
attractive was the fact that SAP customers did not have to modify their current systems to
accommodate it. To make the transition as painless as possible for its customers, SAP
designed Business Warehouse 7.3 to be a non-disruptive innovation.

Innovation without Disruption

Clay Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma was very popular reading among the Tracker
team during the early days. In addition to all the technical challenges of building a completely
new enterprise-scale database from scratch on a completely new hardware architecture, SAP
also had to be very thoughtful about how its customers would eventually adopt such a
fundamentally different core technology underneath the SAP Business Suite.
To accomplish this difficult balancing act, SAP’s senior executives made the team’s primary
objective the development of a disruptive technology innovation that could be introduced into
SAP’s customers’ landscapes in a non-disruptive way. They realized that even the most
incredible database would be essentially useless if SAP’s customers couldn’t make the
business case to adopt it because it was too disruptive to their existing systems. The team
spoke, under NDA, with the senior IT leadership of several of SAP’s largest customers to
obtain insights concerning the types of concerns they would have about such a monumental
technology shift at the bottom of their “stacks.” The customers provided some valuable
guidelines for how SAP should engineer and introduce such a disruptive innovation into their
mission-critical landscapes. Making that business case involved much more than just the eye-
catching “speeds and feeds” from the raw technology. SAP’s customers would switch
databases only if the new database was minimally disruptive to implement and extremely low
risk to operate. In essence, SAP would have to build a hugely disruptive innovation to the
database layer that could be adopted and implemented by its customers in a non-disruptive
way at the business application layer.

The Business Impact of a New Architecture

When viewed from a holistic perspective, the entire “stack” needed to run a Fortune 50
company is maddeningly complex. So, to engineer a new technology architecture for a
company, you first have to focus on WHAT the entire system has to do for the business. At its
core, the new SAP database architecture was created to help users run their business
processes more effectively4. It had to enabled them to track their inventory more accurately,
sell their products more effectively, manufacture their products more efficiently, and purchase
materials economically. At the same time, however, it also had to reduce the complexity and
costs of managing the landscape for the IT department.
Today, every business process in a company has some amount of “latency” associated with
it. For example, one public company might require 10 days to complete its quarterly closing
process, while its primary competitor accomplishes this task in 5 days — even though both
companies are using the same SAP software to manage the process. Why does it take one
company twice as long as its competitor to complete the same process? What factors
contribute to that additional “process latency”?
 The answers lie in the reality that the software is simply the enabler for the execution of the
business process. The people who have to work together to complete the process, both inside
and outside the company, often have to do a lot of “waiting” both during and between the
various process steps. Some of that waiting is due to human activities, such as lunch breaks or
meetings. Much of it, however, occurs because people have to wait while their information
systems process the relevant data. The old saying that “time is money” is still completely true,
and “latency” is just a nice way of saying “money wasted while waiting.”
As we discussed earlier, having to wait several minutes or several hours or even several days
to obtain an answer from your SAP system is a primary contributor to process latency. It also
discourages people from using the software frequently or as it was intended. Slow-performing
systems force people to take more time to complete their jobs, and they result in less effective
use of all the system’s capabilities. Both of these factors introduce latency into process
execution.
Clearly, latency is a bad thing. Unfortunately, however, there’s an even darker side to slow
systems. When businesspeople can’t use a system to get a quick response to their questions
or get their job done when they need to, they invent workarounds to avoid the constraint. The
effort and costs spent on “inventing” workarounds to the performance limitations of the system
waste a substantial amount of institutional energy and creativeness that ideally should be
channeled into business innovation. In addition, workarounds can seriously compromise data
quality and integrity.
As we have discussed, the major benefits of in-memory storage are that users no longer
have to wait for the system, and the information they need to make more intelligent decisions is
instantly available at their fingertips. Thus, companies that employ in-memory systems are
operating in “real time.” Significantly, once you remove all of the latency from the systems,
users can focus on eliminating the latency in the other areas of the process. It’s like shining a
spotlight on all the problem areas of the process now that the system latency is no longer
clouding up business transparency.

The Need for Business Flexibility

In addition to speeding up database I/O throughput and simplifying the enterprise system
architecture, SAP also had to innovate in a third direction: business flexibility. Over the years,
SAP had become adept at automating “standard” business processes for 24 different industries
globally. Despite this progress, however, new processes were springing up too fast to count.
Mobile devices, cloud applications, and big data scenarios were creating a whole new set of
business possibilities for customers. SAP’s customers needed a huge amount of flexibility to
modify, extend, and adapt their core business processes to reflect their rapidly changing
business needs. In 2003, SAP released their service-oriented architecture, SAP NetWeaver,
and began to renovate the entire portfolio of SAP apps to become extremely flexible and much
easier to modify. However, none of that flexibility was going to benefit their customers if the
applications and platform that managed those dynamic business processes were chained to a
slow, inflexible, and expensive database.
The only way out of this dilemma was for SAP to innovate around the database problem
entirely. None of the existing database vendors had any incentive to change the status quo (see
The Innovator’s Dilemma for all the reasons why), and SAP couldn’t afford to sit by and watch
these problems continue to get worse for their customers. SAP needed to engineer a
breakthrough innovation in in-memory databases to build the foundations for a future
architecture that was faster, simpler, more flexible, and much cheaper to acquire and operate.
It was one of those impossible challenges that engineers and business people secretly love to
tackle, and it couldn’t have been more critical to SAP’s future success.

Faster, Better, Cheaper

There’s another fundamental law of the technology industry: Faster, Better, Cheaper. That is,
each new generation of product or technology has to be faster, better, and cheaper than the
generation it is replacing, or customers won’t purchase it. Geoffrey Moore has some great
thoughts on how game-changing technologies “cross the chasm.” He maintains, among other
things, that faster, better, and cheaper are fundamental characteristics that must be present for
a successful product introduction.
In-memory computing fits the faster, better, cheaper model perfectly. I/O is hundreds to
thousands of times faster on RAM than on disks. There’s really no comparison in how rapidly
you can get memory off a database in RAM than off a database on disk. In-memory databases
are a better architecture due to their simplicity, tighter integration with the apps, hybrid
row/column store, and ease of operations. Finally, when you compare the cost of an in-memory
database to that of a disk-based database on the appropriate metric — cost per gigabyte per
second — in-memory is actually cheaper. Also, when you compare the total cost of ownership
(TCO) of in-memory databases, they’re even more economical to operate than traditional
databases due to the reduction of superfluous layers and unnecessary tasks.
But faster, better, cheaper is even more important than just the raw technology. If you really
look at what the switch from an “old” platform to a “new” platform can do for overall usability of
the solutions on top of the platform, there are some amazing possibilities.
Take the ubiquitous iPod for example. When Apple introduced the iPod in 2001, it
revolutionized the way that people listened to music, even though it wasn’t the first MP3 player
on the market. The key innovation was that Apple was able to fit a tiny 1.8-inch hard drive into
its small case so you could carry 5gb of music in your pocket, at a time when most other MP3
players could hold only ~64mb of music in flash memory. (This is a classic illustration of
“changing the rules of the game.”) I/O speed wasn’t a significant concern for playing MP3s, so
the cost per megabyte per second calculation wasn’t terribly relevant. By that measure, 5gb of
disk for roughly the same price as 64mb of RAM was a huge difference. It wasn’t significantly
faster than its competitors, but it was so phenomenally better and cheaper per megabyte (even
at $399) that it became a category killer.
In hindsight, Apple had to make several architectural compromises to squeeze that hard drive
into the iPod. First, the hard drive took up most of the case, leaving very little room for anything
else. There was a tiny monochrome display, a clunky mechanical “click wheel” user interface, a
fairly weak processor, and, most importantly, a disappointingly short battery life. The physics
needed to spin a hard disk drained the battery very quickly. Despite these limitations, however,
the iPod was still so much better than anything else out there it soon took over the market.
Fast-forward six years, and Apple was selling millions of units of its most current version of
the “classic” iPod, which contained 160gb of storage, 32 times more than the original 5gb
model. Significantly, the new model sold at the same price as the original. In addition to the
vastly expanded storage capacity, Apple had added a color screen and a pressure-sensitive
“click wheel.” Otherwise, the newer model was similar to the original in most ways.
By this time, however, the storage capacity of the hard drive was no longer such a big deal.
Hard drives had become so enormous that nobody had enough music to fill them. In fact, in
2001 people had been thrilled with 5gb of storage, because they could download their entire
CD collection onto the iPod. Meanwhile, Moore’s law had been in effect for four full cycles and
16gb of memory cost about the same as a 160gb hard drive. In 2007, Apple could build an
iPod with 16gb of solid-state RAM storage — which was only one-tenth of the capacity of the
current hard drive model — for the same price as the 2001 model.
It was the shift to solid-state memory as the storage medium for iPods that really changed
the game for Apple. Removing the hard drive and its spinning disks had a huge impact on
Apple’s design parameters, for several reasons. First, it enabled the company to shrink the
thickness and reduce the weight of the iPod, making it easier to carry and store. In addition, it
created more room for a bigger motherboard and a larger display. In fact, Apple could now turn
the entire front of the device into a display, which it redesigned as a touch-screen interface
(hence the name iPod Touch). Inserting a bigger motherboard in turn allowed Apple to insert a
larger, more powerful processor in the device. Most importantly, however, eliminating the
physical hard drive more than doubled the battery life since there were no more mechanical
disks to spin.
These innovations essentially transformed a simple music player into a miniature computer
that you could carry in your pocket. It had an operating system, long battery life, audio and
video capabilities, and a sufficient amount of storage. Going even further, Apple could also build
another model with nearly all of the same parts that could also make phone calls.
Comparison of Apple iPod Models
Source: Apple Inc.

Once a large number of people began to carry a computer around in their pocket, it only
made sense that developers would build new applications to exploit the capabilities of the new
platform. Although Apple couldn’t have predicted the success of games like “Angry Birds,” they
realized that innovation couldn’t be unleashed on their new platform until they removed the
single biggest piece of the architecture that was imposing all the constraints. Ironically, it was
the same piece of technology that made the original iPod so successful. Think about that for a
second: Apple had to eliminate the key technology in the iPod that had made them so
successful in order to move to the next level of success with the iPod Touch and the iPhone.
Although this might seem like an obvious choice in retrospect, at the time it required a huge
leap of faith to take.
In essence, getting rid of the hard drive in the iPods was the most critical technology decision
Apple made to deliver the iPod Touch, iPhone, and, eventually, the iPad. Most of the other
pieces of technology in the architecture improved as expected over the years. But the real
game changer was the switch from disk to memory. That single decision freed Apple to
innovate without constraints and allowed them to change the rules of the game again, back to
the memory-as-storage paradigm that the portable music player market had started with.
SAP is convinced that SAP HANA represents a similar architectural shift for its application
platform. Eliminating the disk-based database will provide future customers with a faster,
better, and cheaper architecture. SAP also believes that this new architecture, like the solid-
state memory in the iPod, will encourage the development of a new breed of business
applications that are built natively to exploit this new platform.
Note: as of early 2012, Apple still makes and sells the “classic” iPod (160gb/$249), but it is a tiny fraction of their overall iPod
sales. So, somebody must be buying the “old” iPods and Apple must be making some money off of them, but do you know
anyone who’s bought a hard-drive based iPod in the last five years? You’d have to really need all that storage to give up all the
features of the iPod touch.

SAP thinks that there will also be a small category of its customers who will continue to want the “old” architecture — so they’ll
continue to support that option, but they’re predicting a similar adoption trend once the SAP Business Suite is supported on SAP
HANA. At that point, you’ll need an overwhelmingly compelling business reason to forego all the goodness of the new architecture
and renovated SAP apps on top of SAP HANA.

In-Memory Basics
Thus far, we’ve focused on the transition to in-memory computing and its implications for IT.
With this information as background, we next “dive into the deep end” of SAP HANA. Before we
do so, however, here are a few basic concepts about in-memory computing that you’ll need to
understand. Some of these concepts might be similar to what you already know about
databases and server technology. There are also some cutting-edge concepts, however, that
merit discussion.
Storing data in memory isn’t a new concept. What is new is that now you can store your
whole operational or analytic database entirely in RAM as the primary persistence layer5.
Historically database systems were designed to perform well on computer systems with limited
RAM. As we have seen, in these systems slow disk I/O was the main bottleneck in data
throughput. Today, multi-core CPUs — multiple CPUs located on one chip or in one package —
are standard, with fast communication between processor cores enabling parallel processing.
Currently server processors have up to 64 cores, and 128 cores will soon be available. With
the increasing number of cores, CPUs are able to process increased data volumes in parallel.
Main memory is no longer a limited resource. In fact, modern servers can have 2TB of system
memory, which allows them to hold complete databases in RAM. Significantly, this arrangement
shifts the performance bottleneck from disk I/O to the data transfer between CPU cache and
main memory (which is already blazing fast and getting faster).
In a disk-based database architecture, there are several levels of caching and temporary
storage to keep data closer to the application and avoid excessive numbers of round-trips to
the database (which slows things down). The key difference with SAP HANA is that all of those
caches and layers are eliminated because the entire physical database is literally sitting on the
motherboard and is therefore in memory all the time. This arrangement dramatically simplifies
the architecture.
It is important to note that there are quite a few technical differences between a database
that was designed to be stored on a disk versus one that was built to be entirely resident in
memory. There’s a techie book6 on all those conceptual differences if you really want to get
down into the details. What follows here is a brief summary of some of the key advantages of
SAP HANA over its aging disk-based cousins.

Pure In-Memory Database

With SAP HANA, all relevant data are available in main memory, which avoids the performance
penalty of disk I/O completely. Either disk or solid-state drives are still required for permanent
persistency in the event of a power failure or some other catastrophe. This doesn’t slow down
performance, however, because the required backup operations to disk can take place
asynchronously as a background task.

Parallel Processing
Multiple CPUs can now process parallel requests in order to fully utilize the available computing
resources. So, not only is there a bigger “pipe” between the processor and database, but this
pipe can send a flood of data to hundreds of processors at the same time so that they can
crunch more data without waiting for anything.

Columnar and Row-Based Data Storage

Conceptually, a database table is a two-dimensional data structure with cells organized in rows
and columns, just like a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Computer memory, in contrast, is
organized as a linear structure. To store a table in linear memory, two options exist: row-based
storage and column storage. A row-oriented storage system stores a table as a sequence of
records, each of which contains the fields of one row. Conversely, in column storage the entries
of a column are stored in contiguous memory locations. SAP HANA is a “hybrid” database that
uses both methods simultaneously to provide an optimal balance between them.
The SAP HANA database allows the application developer to specify whether a table is to be
stored column-wise or row-wise. It also enables the developer to alter an existing table from
columnar to row-based and vice versa. The decision to use columnar or row-based tables is
typically a determined by how the data will be used and which method is the most efficient for
that type of usage.

Column-based tables have advantages in the following circumstances:

Calculations are typically executed on a single column or a few columns only.

The table is searched based on values of a few columns.
The table has a large number of columns.
The table has a large number of rows, so that columnar operations are required
(aggregate, scan, etc.).
High compression rates can be achieved because the majority of the columns contain
only few distinct values (compared to the number of rows).

Row-based tables have advantages in the following circumstances:

 The application needs to only process a single record at one time. (This applies to many
selects and/or updates of single records.)
The application typically needs to access a complete record (or row).
The columns contain primarily distinct values so that the compression rate would be low.
Neither aggregations nor fast searching is required.
The table has a small number of rows (e. g., configuration tables).

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

Persistence Layer
The SAP HANA database persistence layer stores data in persistent disk volumes (either hard
disk or solid-state drives). The persistence layer ensures that changes are durable and that the
database can be restored to the most recent committed state after a restart. SAP HANA uses
an advanced delta-insert approach for rapid backup and logging. If power is lost, the data in
RAM is lost. However, because the persistence layer manages restore points and backup at
such high speeds (from RAM to SSD) and recovery from disk to RAM is so much faster than
from regular disk, you actually “lose” less data and recover much faster than in a traditional
disk-based architecture.

SAP HANA Architectural Overview

Now that we’ve discussed the key concepts underlying in-memory storage, we can focus more
specifically on the SAP HANA architecture. As we noted earlier, conceptually SAP HANA is very
similar to most databases you’re familiar with. Applications have to put data in and take data
out of the database, data sources have to interface with it, and it has to store and manage data
reliably. Despite these surface similarities, however, SAP HANA is quite different “under the
hood” than any database in the market. In fact, SAP HANA is much more than just a database.
It includes many tools and capabilities “in the box” that make it much more valuable and
versatile than a regular database. In reality, it’s a full-featured database platform.
In what ways is SAP HANA unique? First, it is delivered as a pre-configured, pre-installed
appliance on certified hardware. This eliminates many of the typical activities and problems you
find in regular databases. Second, it includes all of the standard application interfaces and
libraries so that developers can immediately get to work using it, without re-learning any
proprietary APIs.

SAP HANA in-memory appliance

 Finally, SAP HANA comes with several ways to connect easily to nearly any source system in
either real-time or near real-time.
These features are designed to make SAP HANA as close to “plug-and-play” as it can be and
to make it a non-disruptive addition to your existing landscape. We’ll spend a few moments
here explaining these capabilities at a basic level. We’ll discuss them in much more technical
detail in the SAP HANA Architecture chapter.

Programming Interfaces for SAP HANA

SQL
SQL is the main interface for client applications. The SQL implementation of the SAP HANA
database is based on SQL 92 entry-level features and core features of SQL 99. However, it
offers several SQL extensions on top of this standard. These extensions are available for
creating tables as both row-based and column-based tables and for conversion between the
two formats. For most SQL statements it is irrelevant whether the table is column-based or
row-based. However, there are some features — for example, time-based queries and column-
store specific parameters — that are supported only for columnar tables.
SQLScript
The SAP HANA database has its own scripting language, named SQLScript, that offers
scripting capabilities that allow application-specific calculations to run inside the database.
SQLScript is similar conceptually to “stored procedures,” but it contains several modern
innovations that make it much more powerful and flexible.

MDX Interface
The SAP HANA database also supports MDX (MultiDimensional eXpressions), the de facto
standard for multidimensional queries. MDX can be used to connect a variety of analytics
applications like SAP Business Objects products and clients such as Microsoft Excel.

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

Planning Engine
The SAP HANA database contains a component called the planning engine that allows financial
planning applications to execute basic planning operations in the database layer.

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

Libraries
The technical details of communicating with the SAP HANA database are contained in a set of
included client libraries for standard platforms and clients. The following client libraries are
provided for accessing the SAP HANA database via SQL or MDX:

JDBC driver for Java clients

ODBC driver for Windows/Unix/Linux clients, especially for MS Office integration
DBSL (Database Shared Library) for ABAP

Business Function Library

SAP has leveraged its deep application knowledge from the ABAP stack to port specific
functionality as infrastructure components within SAP HANA to be consumed by any application
logic extension. Examples of common business functions are “currency conversion” and
“calendar functionality.”

SAP HANA Studio

The SAP HANA Studio is the primary interface for developers, administrators, and data
modelers. It is based on the open-source Eclipse framework, and it consists of three
perspectives: the administration console, the information modeler, and lifecycle management.
The administration console of the studio allows system administrators to administer and
monitor the database. It includes database status information as well as functions to start/stop
the database, create backups, perform a recovery, change the configuration, and so on.
The information modeler is used for modeling data. It enables users to create new data
models or modify existing ones.
The lifecycle management perspective provides an automated SAP HANA service pack
(SP) for updates using the SAP Software Update Manager for SAP HANA (SUM for SAP
HANA).

Data Modeling in SAP HANA

Business and IT users can either create on-the-fly non-materialized data views or build reusable
ones on top of standard SQL tables via a very intuitive user interface, which utilizes SQLScript
and stored procedures to perform business logic on the data models. Information models
created in SAP HANA can be consumed directly by Business Objects BI clients or indirectly by
using the Universe/Semantic Layer built on top of SAP HANA views.
Information models in SAP HANA are a combination of attributes/dimensions and measures.
SAP HANA provides three types of modeling views:

1. Attribute views are built on dimensions or subject areas used for business analysis.
2. Analytical views are multidimensional views or OLAP cubes, which enable users to
analyze values from single-fact tables related to the dimensions in the attribute views.
3. Calculation views are used to create custom data sets to address complex business
requirement using database tables, attribute views, and analytical views in on-the-fly
calculations.

In traditional databases, users experience bottlenecks when changing business requirements

requires modifications to the existing data model, which required users to delete and re-load
data into materialized views. In contrast, in SAP HANA, dynamic data modeling on the lowest
granular level is loaded into the system. These raw data are constantly available in memory for
analytical purposes, and they are not pre-loaded in cache, physical aggregate tables, index
tables, or any other redundant data storage.

Data Provisioning for SAP HANA

SAP HANA offers both real-time replication and near real-time/batch replication to move data
from source systems to the SAP HANA database. Replication-based data provisioning like
Sybase Replication Server or SAP SLT (System Landscape Transformation) provide near real-
time synchronization of data sets between the source system and SAP HANA. After the initial
replication of historical records, the changed data are pushed from the source to SAP HANA
based on triggers such as table updates. SAP SLT can also be used to “direct write” data back
to the source system in scenarios where “write back” or “round trip” synchronization to the SAP
source system is needed.
ETL-based data provisioning is primarily accomplished with SAP BusinessObjects Data
Services (DS). DS loads snapshots of data periodically as a batch and is triggered from the
target system. The type of data provisioning tool used is primarily determined by the business
needs of the use case and the characteristics of the source system.
Real-Time Replication Using SLT
SLT replicator provides near-real-time and scheduled data replication from SAP source
systems to SAP HANA. It is based on SAP’s proven System Landscape Optimization (SLO)
technology that has been used for many years for Near Zero Down Time upgrade and
migration projects. Trigger-Based Data Replication using SLT is based on capturing database
changes at a high level of abstraction in the source SAP system. It benefits from being
database and OS agnostic, and it can parallelize database changes on multiple tables or by
segmenting large table changes. SLT can be installed on an existing SAP source system or as
an additional lightweight SAP system side-by-side with the source system.
Real-Time Replication with Direct Write/Write-back
SAP HANA also supports real-time replication with direct write using database shared library
(DBSL) connection. Using DBSL, the SAP HANA database can be connected as a secondary
database to an SAP ECC system and provide accelerated data processing for existing SAP
applications. Applications can use the DBSL on the application server layer to simultaneously
write to traditional databases and the SAP HANA database.
Extraction (ETL) / Periodic Load
The ETL-based data load scenario uses SAP BusinessObjects DataServices to load the
relevant business data from virtually any source system (SAP and non-SAP) to the SAP HANA
database. SAP BusinessObjects Data Services is a proven ETL tool that supports broad
connectivity to databases, applications, legacy, file formats, and unstructured data. It provides
the modeling environment to model data flows from one or more source systems along with
transformations and data cleansing.

SAP HANA Database Administration

The SAP HANA Studio Administration Console provides an all-in-one environment for System
Monitoring, Back-up & Recovery, and User provisioning.
System Monitoring
The Administration console provides tools to monitor the system’s status, its services, and the
consumption of its resources. Administrators are notified by an alert mechanism when critical
situations arise. Analytics and statistics on historical monitoring data are also provided to
enable efficient data center operations and for planning future resource allocations.
Backup & Recovery
The Administration console in the SAP HANA Studio supports the following scenarios:

Recovery to the last data backup

Recovery to both the last and previous data backups
Recovery to last state before the crash
 Point-in-time recovery

In the event of disaster scenarios such as fires, power outages, earthquakes or hardware
failures, SAP HANA supports Hot Standby using synchronous mirroring with the redundant data
center concept — including a redundant SAP HANA system — in addition to Cold Standby using
a standby system within one SAP HANA landscape, where the failover is triggered
automatically.
User Provisioning
SAP HANA supports user provisioning with authentication, role-based security and analysis
authorization using analytic privileges. Analytical privileges provide security to the analytical
objects based on a set of attribute values. These values can be applied to a set of users by
assigning them to user/role.

SAP HANA Hardware

SAP HANA is delivered as a flexible, multipurpose appliance that combines SAP software
components optimized on hardware provided by SAP’s leading hardware partners such as
Cisco, Dell, IBM, HP, Hitachi, NEC, and Fujitsu, using the latest Intel Xeon E7 processors. SAP
HANA servers are sold in “t-shirt” sizes ranging from Extra-Small (128GB RAM) all the way up
to Extra Large (>2TB RAM). Because RAM is the key technology for SAP HANA, SAP uses the
amount of RAM to determine the server’s t-shirt size as well as its price. SAP’s underlying
philosophy is “the more processors (cores), the better,” so it does not impose a per-processor
charge for SAP HANA.
With the current certified Scale-Out options from SAP HANA hardware providers, companies
can deploy up to 16 Extra Large server nodes into on logical database instance, which equates
to a maximum of 32TB of RAM and 128 CPUs with 1280 total cores. SAP is currently testing a
60 node SAP HANA instance in the labs.
The hardware vendor provides factory pre-installation for the hardware, the OS, and the SAP
software. It may also add specific best-practices and configuration. The vendor finalizes the
installation with on-site setup and configuration of the SAP HANA components, including
deployment in the customer data center, connectivity to the network, Solution Manager setup,
SAP router connectivity, and SSL support. The customer then establishes connectivity to the
source systems and clients, including the deployment of additional replication components on
the source system(s) and, potentially, the installation and configuration of SAP BusinessObjects
business analytics client components.
Although the term “appliance” suggests a “black box” that plugs into an outlet, in reality
installing SAP HANA requires on-site activities and coordination on a high technical level. The
appliance approach for SAP HANA systems reduces the implementation and maintenance effort
significantly, but it does not eliminate it completely.

SAP HANA Use Cases

Because SAP HANA is both a database (in the traditional sense) and a database platform (in
the modern sense), it can be used in multiple scenarios and deployed in several ways. SAP
HANA performs equally well for analytic and transactional applications. Due to its hybrid table
structure, however, it really shines in scenarios that involve both types of data. It’s important to
remember that SAP has developed SAP HANA to be a non-disruptive addition to existing
landscapes. With this point in mind, we’ll discuss the key use cases that are most typical for
SAP HANA deployments today, and we’ll consider some potential future scenarios.
In its current form, SAP HANA can be used for four basic types of use case: agile data
mart, SAP Business Suite accelerator, a primary database for SAP NetWeaver Business
Warehouse, and a development platform for new applications. As SAP HANA matures and
SAP renovates its entire portfolio of solutions to take advantage of all the horsepower in SAP
HANA, you can expect to see nearly every product that SAP provides supported natively on
SAP HANA as a primary database, as well as many more new “native-HANA” applications.
For a listing of hundreds of permutations of these core use cases and details on current SAP
HANA live customers by industry and function, please visit the SAP HANA Use Case
Repository.

Agile Data Mart

The earliest scenarios where SAP HANA has been deployed in production are as a stand-alone
data mart for a specific use case. In this scenario, SAP HANA acts as the central hub to collect
data from a few SAP and non-SAP source systems and then display some fairly simple and
focused analytics in a single-purpose dashboard for users.
This use case has the advantages of (1) being completely non-disruptive to the existing
landscape and (2) providing an immediate, focused solution to an urgent business analytics
problem. These projects are also typically completed very quickly, sometimes in just a few
weeks, because the business problem is well known and the relevant data and source systems
are easily identified. SAP HANA is set up as a stand-alone system in the landscape, which is
then connected to the source systems and displayed to a small number of users in a simple
Web-based or mobile user interface. This process involves zero disruption to the existing
landscape, and companies get instant value because they can now do things that were
impossible before they acquired SAP HANA.
Additionally, the development cycles for these use cases are typically very short, because
most of these scenarios use a standard SAP BusinessObjects front end with self-service
analytics or Microsoft Excel. We label these systems “agile data marts” because they perform
a few of the same functions as a traditional data mart — ETL, data modeling, analytic front end
— but they are very fast to set up and flexible to use.
The key advantage of SAP HANA for the agile data mart scenarios is that these scenarios
were either completely impossible to build in a traditional database architecture or they were so
cost prohibitive that companies could not justify building them. The scenarios might be
straightforward, but the deficiencies of the “old” database world made them “unfixable.”
You can access the videos listed below to listen to a few highly satisfied customers talking
enthusiastically about their agile data mart scenarios with SAP HANA.
Nongfu Spring
Medtronic

SAP provides a special licensing bundle to build an agile data mart use case with SAP HANA
that includes the extractors and connectors needed to obtain data from source systems and the
front-end tools needed to build analytical applications on top of the data.

SAP Business Suite Accelerator

The second major scenario where SAP HANA is being used is to accelerate transactions and
reports inside the SAP Business Suite. Again, SAP HANA is being set up as a stand-alone
system in the landscape, side-by-side with the database under the SAP Business Suite
applications. In this scenario, however, SAP HANA is being used to “off load” some of the
transactions or reports that typically take a long time (hours or days) to run, but it is not being
used as the primary database under the application.
We explained earlier that certain transactions or reports inside the SAP Business Suite can
be very slow, due primarily to the slow I/O of the disk-based database underneath the system
and the huge requests for data generated by these transactions and reports. Budgeting and
planning transactions in SAP require the system to call data from many different tables in order
to run its calculations and present a result. Reports are also very data-intensive, involving vast
amounts of data contained in multiple tables. For both transactions and reports, then, the
application must request the data from the database, load it into a buffer table in the SAP
application server, run the algorithm or calculation, and then display the results. Sometimes,
that completes the process. Other times, however, the user needs to make some adjustments
to the results and then save the changes back to the database. Quite often, this process is
iterative, meaning that the user must run the report or transaction, review the results, make
some changes, and then run the report or transaction again to reflect the changes. Imagine a
scenario where every time the transaction or report runs, it takes one hour to finish (from when
you press “Enter” until the results are displayed on the screen). What if it took several hours or
even a day or two to run that transaction or report? Clearly, system latency can seriously slow
down the entire company.
Eliminating System Latency: The Case of Hilti
To illustrate severe system latency, let’s consider the case of Hilti, the global construction tools
manufacturer. Hilti used to generate a list of 9 million customers from 53 million database
records in its SAP ERP system in about three hours. A salesperson used to hit “Enter” and
then return three hours later to obtain the results. Significantly, 99% of the time the system took
to generate that list came from simply retrieving the records off the disk-based database. Once
the data were conveyed to the SAP application, the algorithm only took a few fractions of a
second to calculate. This major — and unnecessary — delay was the epitome of “latency.”
To eliminate this latency problem, Hilti set up an SAP HANA system next to their production
SAP ERP system and then copied the relevant tables into SAP HANA. The results? Hilti can
now run the exact same report in about three seconds. In addition, installing SAP HANA was
totally non-disruptive. It required no changes to the algorithm, no changes to the production
database, and no changes to the user interface. In fact, the users didn’t even realize there had
been any change to the system until they ran the report for the first time. They expected the
process to take several hours — as always — so they got up from their desks to do something
else. To their complete surprise, the completed report appeared on their screen before they
could get out of their chairs. Watch Hilti’s SAP HANA story here.
Technically, there is very little that needs to be done to accelerate a few problematic
transactions or reports in an SAP Business Suite application. We’ll discuss this topic that in
detail in the chapter on the Accelerated SAP Business Suite. In summary, SAP has already
delivered the content for most of the truly problematic transactions and reports as part of the
latest service packs for the SAP Business Suite — for free. Once the relevant tables have been
replicated to the SAP HANA system, there is a quick change in the configuration screen to
redirect the transaction to read from the SAP HANA database instead of the primary database
— and that’s about it. Users log in as they normally do, execute the transaction or report, and
the results come back incredibly fast. SAP has also set up special fixed-price, fixed-scope SAP
rapid deployment solutions (RDS) to assist customers in the rapid implementation of these
“accelerated” transactions and reports.

Accelerated SAP ERP Transactions and Reports

You can expect to see many more “problem” transactions and reports generated at previously
unimaginable speeds as SAP introduces enhancement pack updates to SAP HANA. Here’s a
short listing of some of the SAP ERP transactions and reports that are currently available:
Sales Reporting
Quickly identify top customers and products by channel — with real-time sales reporting.
Improve order fulfillment rates and accelerate key sales processes at the same time, with
instant analysis of your credit memo and billing list.
Financial Reporting
Obtain immediate insights across your business — into revenue, customers, accounts
payable and receivable, open and overdue items, top general ledger transaction, and days
sales outstanding (DSO). Make the right financial decisions, armed with real-time
information.
Shipping Reporting
Rely on real-time shipping reporting for complete stock overview analysis. You can better
plan and monitor outbound delivery — and assess and optimize stock levels — with
accurate information at your fingertips.
Purchasing Reporting
Gain timely insights into purchase orders, vendors, and the movement of goods — with
real-time purchasing reporting. Make better purchasing decisions, based on a complete
analysis of your order history.
Master Data Reporting
Obtain real-time reporting on your main master data — including customer, vendor, and
material lists — for improved productivity and accuracy.
SAP Solutions for Accelerated Applications
SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 10.0 Powered by SAP HANA
The power of SAP HANA dramatically enhances unified planning, budgeting, forecasting
and consolidation processes. Powered by SAP HANA, SAP BusinessObjects Planning and
Consolidation 10.0, version for SAP NetWeaver aims to increase agility by helping
enterprises harness big data to plan better and act faster with better insight into all relevant
information and rapid write-back. The application is planned to be the first enterprise
performance management (EPM) application to support the SAP NetWeaver Business
Warehouse component, powered by SAP HANA announced last year. SAP intends to allow
customers running the application that have invested in SAP HANA to leverage the power of
in-memory computing technology to boost performance by accelerating planning and
consolidation processing.
SAP CO-PA Accelerator
SAP CO-PA Accelerator dramatically improves the speed and depth of working with
massive volumes of financial data in ERP for faster and more efficient profitability cycles.
The solution helps finance departments to perform real-time profitability reporting on large
scale data volumes and to conduct instant, on-the-fly analysis at any level of granularity,
aggregation, and dimension. Furthermore, finance teams can run cost allocations at
significantly faster processing time and be empowered with easy, self-service access to
trusted profitability information.
This solution can also be implemented alongside the wider SAP BusinessObjects
Enterprise Performance Management solutions portfolio to help organizations create a
complete picture of their cost and profit drivers.
You can try the solution on your own with the SAP CO-PA Accelerator TestDrive and
visit the website to discover how organizations are generating significant business value
with the solution.
SAP Finance and Controlling Accelerator
SAP Finance and Controlling Accelerator supports finance departments with instant access
to vast amounts of ledger, cost and material ledger data in ERP as well as easy
exploration of trusted and detailed data. The solution offers four implementation scenarios
— Financial Accounting — Controlling — Material Ledger — and Production Cost Analysis,
which can be implemented individually or in any combination.
The power of SAP HANA combined with SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
empowers financial professionals to perform faster reporting and analyses, accelerate
period-end closing, and make smarter decisions.
SAP Sales Pipeline Analysis
With SAP Sales Pipeline Analysis powered by SAP HANA, sales departments can get real-
time insight into massive volumes of pipeline data in CRM while performing on the fly
calculations and in-depth analysis on any business dimension. Sales managers can now
leverage the power of SAP HANA combined with SAP Customer Relationship Management
(CRM) for complete and instant visibility of accurate and consolidated pipeline data. They
can react more quickly to changing sales conditions with real-time information, and
accelerate deals through the pipeline with powerful and user-driven analytics. As a result,
best-run businesses can unlock hidden revenue opportunities as well as significantly
increase profits and sales effectiveness.
SAP Customer Segmentation Accelerator
The SAP Customer Segmentation Accelerator helps marketing departments build highly
specific segmentations on high volumes of customer data and at unparalleled speed.
Marketers can now work with large amounts of granular data to better understand
customer demands, behaviors and preferences — targeting the precise audience with the
right offers across every customer segments, tactics and channels. The power of SAP
HANA combined with SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) empowers
marketers to maximize profits with highly tailored campaigns, dramatically reduce the cost
of marketing by targeting more easily high margin customers, and react quicker to optimize
campaigns and tactics.
You can view a demonstration of the solution and discover how organizations like yours
are generating significant business value by visiting this website.
SAP HANA Rapid Deployment Solutions
A great majority of these solutions powered by SAP HANA can be deployed as rapid-
deployment solutions in order to ensure a quick time to value. The rapid deployment solutions
streamline the implementation process bringing together software, best practices, and services
ensuring maximum predictability with fixed cost and scope editions.
SAP Rapid Deployment solutions leverage an innovative delivery model to accelerate the
implementation times and lower risk. Implementation is supported by a standardized
methodology, accelerators developed uniquely for each offering, and predefined best practices,
meeting typical business requirements to address the customer’s immediate needs. Even as
customers benefit from prebuilt functionality, these solutions provide a platform designed to
evolve and extend as the customer’s business grows.
SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions are available through SAP as well as SAP partners by
traditional licensing or subscription pricing, transparency of price and scope eliminate project
risks for companies. A good example is the SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for operational
reporting with SAP HANA that can help you quickly generate insightful reports — from sales to
financials to shipping — on high volumes of ERP data.
A second example is SAP rapid-deployment solution for sales pipeline analysis with SAP
HANA that helps you to analyze massive amounts of pipeline data in CRM.
You can view a demonstration of the solution here.
Here are a few of the SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions that are available to enable the
accelerated SAP applications:
SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for accelerated finance and controlling with SAP HANA
 Gain access to large volumes of secure and detailed data from cost and material ledgers
— quickly and easily. By running SAP HANA, you can improve decision making through
accelerated reporting, analyses, and period-end closings.

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

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

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

SAP rapid-deployment solution for sales pipeline analysis with SAP HANA Gain instant
insight into massive volumes of sales pipeline data while performing on-the-fly calculations
and in-depth analysis on any business dimension.

You can also try out a few of the current accelerated applications running LIVE:
http://hanauseast.testdrivesap.com/copa. We’ll go into much more detail on the applications
and RDS packages in the Accelerated SAP Business Suite chapter.
SAP offers a specific licensing bundle to utilize SAP HANA for this use case that includes
additional replication tools needed for the connections to the SAP source system.

SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Powered by SAP HANA

Possibly the “killer” use case for SAP HANA in 2012 is SAP BW 7.3 on SAP HANA. In this
scenario, companies replace the entire database under their SAP BW 7.3 system with SAP
HANA. They simply swap out whatever disk-based database their system is currently running
on with SAP HANA — in just a few weeks.7
Recall from our earlier discussion of early SAP in-memory projects that SAP BW was the first
SAP application that was renovated and updated to natively run on SAP HANA as its primary
run-time database. Most of these renovations were necessary to more closely tie the SAP BW
application to the SAP HANA database. In a disk-based architecture, SAP BW is separated
from the database by an abstraction layer, essentially making it impossible for the application
to “see” anything in the database other than bare tables. Once the abstraction layer is
removed, the SAP BW application cannot only “see” everything in the database, but the entire
database is designed around the needs of that specific application. This opens up a whole new
world of possibilities for SAP customers.
 With SAP HANA, SAP BW now generates turbo-charged query responses natively, without
the need for any side-car accelerators or crazy multi-layered third-party architectures. Because
the entire database under the SAP BW system physically sits in memory, every activity — not
just queries — is executed orders of magnitude faster.
SAP released the 7.3 version of SAP BW in general availability in early 2011 and then
released the SAP HANA-enabled version into general availability in April 2012. SAP NW BW on
SAP HANA is now Generally Available to all customers globally. All of the SAP HANA-specific
enhancements were bundled into the SPS05 update, and customers who had already upgraded
to 7.3 could install the service pack and migrate to SAP HANA in a matter of days (seriously).
Red Bull was the first live customer of SAP BW on SAP HANA. They told the world about
their amazing 10-DAY project to get up and running at the Sapphire Now 2011 conference in
Madrid, Spain. The whole effort was incredibly non-disruptive. SAP is seeing similar results with
the other customers in the ramp-up project. All of the changes on the SAP BW side are
delivered “under the hood” in the service pack, and the database migration can be performed
without any changes to the SAP BW application. All of the customer’s content and configuration
are completely unchanged. Have a look at the end-to-end migration guide for a great overview
of the SAP BW database migration process. You should also read a great blog post by John
Appleby, a consultant who performed one of the first SAP BW on SAP HANA migrations.
The speed and flexibility acquired by replacing the old database with SAP HANA reflect two
fundamental benefits of keeping the entire database in memory: (1) This architecture eliminates
the need to send huge amounts of data between application and DB servers, and (2) it allows
users to execute performance-critical operations directly on the data in the database itself.
Basically, running SAP BW on SAP HANA completely eliminates nearly every one of the nasty
things that historically slowed down the system, from both a user perspective and an
administration perspective. We’ll explore all of the technical enhancements in the SAP BW on
SAP HANA chapter.
SAP has also released a new benchmark for SAP NW BW on SAP HANA called BW EML
(Enhanced Mix Load) benchmark which considers:

Near real-time reporting

Ad-hoc reporting capabilities
Reduction of TCO.

Please see these links for more details and results:

http://www.sap.com/campaigns/benchmark/appbm_bweml.epx
http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/bweml-results.htm
http://www.experiencesaphana.com/servlet/JiveServlet/downloadBody/1769-102-6-
2737/EMA_SAP-BW-Benchmark_0512_WP.PDF

SAP offers a specific “run-time only” license option to utilize SAP HANA as the primary
persistence layer for SAP BW. If you are already an SAP BW customer, the company offers
several options for license credits based on previous SAP BW and BWA licensing. Consult your
SAP account executive for the details. SAP has also set up a special migration fund to provide
professional services credits to migrate to SAP BW on SAP HANA.

SAP HANA as an Application Development Platform

Probably the most wide-open innovation opportunity for SAP HANA is as an application
platform. If the speed and simplification that were achieved by porting SAP BW are any
indication, users can realize an unbelievable amount of value not only by renovating existing
applications (SAP and non-SAP) to run natively on SAP HANA, but by also building entirely new
applications that are designed from scratch to maximize SAP HANA’s powerful capabilities. The
performance limitations of traditional databases and processing power have often led
organizations to compromise on how to deploy business processes on their enterprise
platforms. Now, these organizations can choose to liberate themselves from these constraints
and optimize business processes in ways that are more natural to the way their employees
actually perform their work. This is where SAP sees a clear parallel to the Apple App Store
evolution. When Apple first released the App Store, most of the first apps available were
“mobile-ized” versions of desktop or Web apps (email, browser, etc.). However, once
developers considered the possibilities of combining the new capabilities of the device and
writing native applications for the iPhone/iPod Touch (Angry Birds, Foursquare), innovation
exploded.
There are three basic types of applications being built on SAP HANA today:

New apps built by SAP,

New and renovated apps built by partners such as independent software vendors (ISVs)
and systems integrators (SIs),
Custom apps built by companies for internal use.

SAP brands applications that leverage SAP HANA as a database as “Powered by SAP
HANA.” Partners whose applications have been certified by SAP can also add the “Powered by
SAP HANA” brand to their solution name.

SAP-built Applications for SAP HANA

SAP is delivering a new class of solutions on top of the SAP HANA platform that provide real-
time insights on big data and state-of-the-art analysis capabilities. These innovative solutions
can empower organizations to transform the way they run their businesses by making smarter
and faster decisions, responding more quickly to events, unlocking new opportunities, and even
inventing new data-driven business models and processes that were simply not possible with
disk-based databases. Below are a few examples of native-SAP HANA applications. We’ll
consider them in greater detail in the SAP HANA Applications chapter.
SAP BusinessObjects Sales Analysis for Retail powered by SAP HANA
This solution provides retailers with real-time access to critical information and allows
nearly real-time interactive analysis, which is not possible with traditional database
technology. It offers prebuilt data models, key performance indicators (KPIs), role-specific
dashboards and customized reports to provide retailers with a deeper understanding of all
factors influencing the merchandising life cycle. SAP BusinessObjects Sales Analysis for
Retail aims at providing the integration needed for improved scalability and performance for
retailers operating in separate sales, inventory and promotions systems. The new service
provides Point-of-Sale (POS) analysis allow retailers to assess performance and generate
quick responses through the use of prebuilt dashboards, interactive reports and more than
70 KPIs and inventory management to provide retailers with the ability to identify critical
stock and margin issues through close inventory alignment.
SAP Smart Meter Analytics
SAP Smart Meter Analytics is a “native-HANA” application that was designed for utility
companies facing an exponential increase in data volume driven by their deployment of
smart meters. This new application enables utility companies to turn massive volumes of
smart meter data into powerful insights and transform how they engage customers and run
their businesses. With SAP Smart Meter Analytics, utility companies can:

Instantly aggregate time of use blocks and total consumption profiles to analyze their
customers’ energy usage by what neighborhood they are in, the size of their homes or
businesses, building type, and by any other dimension and at any level of granularity
Segment customers with precision based on energy consumption patterns that are
automatically generated by identifying customers that have similar energy usage
behavior
Provide energy efficiency benchmarking based on statistical analysis so that utility
companies can help their customers understand where they stand compared to their
peers and how they can improve their energy efficiency
Empower customers with direct access to energy usage insights via web portals and
mobile devices connected to SAP Smart Meter Analytics via web services

These capabilities delivered by SAP Smart Meter Analytics enable utility companies to
increase adoption of service options such as demand response programs, launch targeted
energy efficiency programs, improve fraud detection capabilities, and develop new tariffs
and more accurate load forecasts.
SAP Sales & Operations Planning
SAP Sales & Operations Planning is a next generation planning application that is powered
by SAP HANA and delivered in the cloud. The solution enables:

Planning and real-time analysis with a unified model of demand, supply chain, and
financial data at any level of granularity and dimension
Rapid, interactive simulation and scenario analysis, using the full S&OP data model to
support demand-supply balancing decisions
Embedded, context-aware social collaboration enables rapid planning and decision-
making across the organization

These capabilities enable companies to align demand and supply profitably, reduce
supply chain costs, and drive revenue growth.
SAP Supplier InfoNet
SAP Supplier InfoNet is a cloud-based solution, powered by SAP HANA, that enables
companies to:

Minimize supply chain disruption by proactively monitoring and predicting real-time

supply risks across a multi-tier supplier network
Drive stronger supplier performance by benchmarking supplier performance for your
company against others in the business network and identifying significant shifts and
trends in supplier performance using leading-edge machine learning and statistical
analysis
Manage your supply base by aggregating and transforming supplier data to deliver
instant insights into the operational health of the supply base.

Recalls Plus
Recalls Plus is SAP’s first consumer mobile app that enables parents to proactively monitor
recalls of their kids’ strollers, cribs, toys, and other items for greater safety and peace of
mind. Features of the app include:
 Search recall history by brand or category
Create a personal watch list of items like car seats, cribs, strollers and so on
Track allergen related recalls
Share relevant recalls with others
Read and monitor recalls from all relevant US government agencies: CPSC, NHTSA,
FDA and USDA

Recalls Plus is available for free and can be accessed via an iPhone app or a Facebook
app:

iPhone app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/recalls-plus/id499200328

Facebook app: https://apps.facebook.com/recallsplus

Partner-built Applications for SAP HANA

The SAP partner ecosystem provides thousands of SAP-certified software solutions that plug
into SAP’s applications to provide a variety of value-added extensions and process
enhancements. From that perspective, anything that speeds up an SAP system will also have a
positive impact on any partner solutions that are integrated with that system. There are also
numerous SAP partner solutions that need to “turbocharge” themselves to increase their own
performance — and to keep up with the turbocharged SAP systems coming on top of SAP
HANA in the future.
Regardless of the programming language these partner apps are written in, they all can be
ported over to SAP HANA in a fairly straightforward way. However, just as SAP is renovating
its existing applications, partners too can approach re-platforming as an opportunity to rethink
some of the design parameters that they employed in the original solution design and to rebuild
their apps to take advantage of SAP HANA’s many benefits natively.
Oversight Systems is one of the first ISVs to renovate their SAP-certified solution along these
lines. Oversight Systems provides solutions that continuously monitor user activities — in real-
time — inside SAP systems to detect policy violations and potentially fraudulent transactions,
such as travel and expenses, accounting and reporting, and HR and payroll. Their solution
conducts complex, on-the-fly calculations that demand a great deal of I/O performance from
databases. Therefore, the addition of SAP HANA underneath their solution makes perfect
sense.

Custom Applications for SAP HANA

As stated earlier, SAP HANA is a full-blown, do-just-about-anything-you-want application
platform. It speaks pure SQL and it includes all of the most common APIs, so you can literally
write any type of application you want on top of it. There are a few rules and “guide rails” that
are designed to keep things from going wrong, but the sky truly is the limit when it comes to
imagining what to build with SAP HANA.
Although SAP HANA is valuable for all types of activities, it “shines” particularly well in a few
unique situations. For example, if you’re building an enterprise-scale application for a business
scenario that (1) needs to search or aggregate huge volumes of data, (2) requires
detailed/granular data analysis and/or complex algorithmic or statistical calculations, or (3)
suffers from latency between transactional recording and reporting, then SAP HANA is a great
choice.
That’s not to say that SAP HANA can’t run your “standard” applications — it certainly can do
that (really fast). Nevertheless, the most exciting use cases SAP is seeing for SAP HANA as
the foundation of custom apps are situations where a company has an urgent business need
that is literally impossible to automate today due to the limitations of traditional databases or
the lack of a supercomputer. If you’re a business owner who has a killer idea that fits the above
description, then SAP HANA could be the solution that makes the impossible, possible.
This is where the “Angry Birds” analogy really starts to make sense. Once the SAP
ecosystem of ISVs, SAP partners, and SAP customers starts to unleash their innovation on top
of SAP HANA, there literally is no limit to the amazing and game-changing applications they can
build. It is incredibly important for SAP to renovate its portfolio and build amazing new
applications to exploit the vast potential of SAP HANA. It is even more important, however, for
the SAP ecosystem to do this, because there are millions of unrealized business ideas in their
companies that SAP HANA can bring to life.

SAP HANA Roadmap

The future roadmap for SAP HANA is actually very simple: Continue to make SAP HANA faster,
better, cheaper — plus BIGGER and BROADER.
Moore’s law doesn’t look as though it’s going to be slowing down anytime soon. It is likely,
then, that we’re only a few years away from having more than 1000 cores and 10TB of RAM
on a single “medium” SAP HANA server. With that much processing power and high-speed
RAM available, there really are no limits to how fast SAP can speed up its own apps and
literally any other app on the planet. SAP will continue co-innovating with Intel and other
hardware partners to ensure that SAP HANA is continuously updated and optimized to take
advantage of the latest and greatest technology advances to become even faster than it is
today.
Although the speed boost generated by the hardware is exciting, it is only half of the
equation. Renovating applications to take advantage of the ever-increasing horsepower is also
critical. There’s a great deal of value that can be achieved by doing things “better” in the
applications. Renovating and re-imagining how applications work and how they deal with data in
the “no constraints” paradigm represents a fundamental philosophical shift for application
developers. There are enormous opportunities to streamline, optimize, and simplify application
architectures by adding SAP HANA as the database engine underneath them. SAP will invest
an enormous amount of resources to extend SAP HANA’s capabilities as an application
platform for both its own applications and non-SAP applications. This investment will result in an
increasingly rich and robust set of developer tools to renovate and re-imagine any application
and to build amazing new applications.
This opportunity for optimization and simplification not only makes things even faster than just
the hardware speed boost, it also results in significantly lower TCO for companies. SAP HANA
can have a massive impact on reducing TCO and improving business value. “Cheaper” isn’t
achieved only through industry-standard processors, RAM, and servers. Cheaper is a holistic
mindset that starts from application design and then progresses through user efficiency all the
way to administration and operations. SAP will continue to invest heavily in many areas to make
SAP HANA the cheapest and most efficient database to operate in production environments.
These efforts include innovating in new landscape configurations such as native cloud
deployments of SAP HANA.
Significantly, however, SAP isn’t satisfied to “only” be the fastest, best, and cheapest
database on the planet. SAP’s goals also include enabling the BIGGEST data scenarios by
offering integrated solutions with Sybase “Big Data” products and open-source projects like
Hadoop.
In May of 2012, SAP showed the extreme scalability of SAP HANA by showcasing a 100TB
RAM SAP HANA system with 100 nodes. Click here to watch Hasso Plattner show off the
largest SAP HANA system in the world.
 In addition, with a robust ecosystem of ISVs, system integrators, and SAP customers
building their innovative applications on SAP HANA, SAP intends to become the BROADEST
database platform for new applications. In just the first year since SAP HANA became
available, over 100 startups have been founded to harness this power to drive their innovation.
Just as Apple provided the platform for App Store developers, SAP will provide SAP HANA as
a platform for thousands of amazing new enterprise applications for the ecosystem.
SAP customers need to understand that SAP HANA not only is the engine that powers the
current generation of SAP applications, but it will be the growth engine for all kinds of amazing
NEW SAP apps. Over the next few years, SAP HANA will become the primary database for
EVERY enterprise application in the SAP portfolio. That’s true for standard, on-premise
applications like the SAP Business Suite; SME solutions like SAP Business One, SAP Business
ByDesign, and SAP All-in-One; and the emerging portfolio of cloud/on-demand solutions. In
poker terms, SAP is going “all in” with SAP HANA. SAP has made a passionate commitment to
innovate for the future of its ecosystem, and the benefits of this shift for SAP’s customers and
partners are too overwhelming for the company to do anything less.
SAP HANA will be the heart and soul of SAP’s “real-time data platform” design philosophy to
renovate all existing applications and build amazing new applications. The renovation work is
moving very quickly inside SAP, so much so that it has surpassed even the most optimistic
timelines. The SAP BW renovation and porting to SAP HANA was the first major step towards
a completely renovated SAP Business Suite. The next major step will be for SAP to complete
the renovation and porting of its flagship application, SAP ERP, to run natively on SAP HANA.
The remaining applications in the SAP Business Suite — SAP CRM, SAP SCM, SAP PLM, and
SAP SRM — should follow shortly after that. In parallel, SAP is adding SAP HANA to all of the
other applications in the portfolio, and it will release them as they come on line.
Renovating these applications involves much more than simply replacing the database. Over
the years, SAP has had to make many adjustments in its application layer to avoid the I/O
bottleneck associated with the database. Unfortunately, these “database avoidance techniques”
have resulted in extensive “plaque” buildup inside the applications, in the forms of redundant
code, tedious data aggregations and transformations, replication of data, and so on. These
problems were “necessary evils” to work around the constraints of the disk-based architecture.
In an SAP HANA world, however, they’re completely unnecessary and therefore need to be
removed from the system.
Obviously, SAP’s renovation efforts will involve a great deal of streamlining and cleanup. At
the same time, however, this renovation also represents a golden opportunity for SAP’s
engineers to reimagine all of the things that these applications do from the perspective of living
in a world with no constraints. These experts can question their original assumptions, invent
better ways of doing things, remove latency from the processes, and program their applications
to perform calculations more efficiently deep inside the database. All of these developments will
lead to lower TCO and more flexibility for customers, which in turn will make their investment in
SAP much more valuable.
This exercise is also having an amazing effect on the SAP culture. Going back into the code
of all of their apps with a fresh eye and ambitious dreams free from constraints has rekindled a
firestorm of innovation within the SAP development group. The coffee corners in SAP labs
around the world are literally buzzing with new ideas and passionate discussions. In fact, you
can often see code samples from these discussions written on the windows because the
participants ran out of whiteboard space (as in the movie “A Beautiful Mind”). This is the
“intellectual renewal” that SAP executives have been talking about, and it is having a
monumental impact on the speed and volume of innovation coming from SAP. SAP HANA has
literally awakened a sleeping giant of innovation inside SAP. Moreover, this enthusiasm appears
to be contagious: People are witnessing the same type of awakening throughout the SAP
ecosystem.

In the long run, once the entire SAP portfolio has been “HANA-fied,”8 SAP will be able to
deliver a vastly simplified landscape for its customers. By merging OLAP and OLTP into a
single SAP HANA instance, SAP can provide a massive reduction in layers and TCO in the
landscape while at the same time providing much more flexibility and business value through
real-time access to all of the relevant data. It will take SAP several years to engineer and
deliver this vision to its customers. If the past five years of in-memory (r)evolution at SAP are
an indication, however, the next five years of this journey will be extraordinarily fast and
exciting.

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

2 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, with
Unicode, 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 about that in
more detail later, but basically, SAP HANA has some very sophisticated backup tools to prevent data loss from disasters.

6 Plattner, H & Zeier, A. (2011). In-memory data management: an inflection point for enterprise applications. Springer.

7 The SAP HANA RDS for database migration takes ~7 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 MAY 2013

 Chapter 3
Developing A Business Case for SAP
HANA
I. 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 fast database. In
fact, SAP HANA is sometimes more than 100,000 times faster than traditional 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-fast database can
help you run your business better, then how can you justify the expense and effort required to
buy and implement it?
The approach to building a business case presented in this chapter avoids the “speeds and
feeds” argument that has long plagued the software industry. Instead, it examines how SAP
HANA can enable organizations to execute their business processes more quickly and
efficiently. It also focuses on the value of the real-time information that SAP HANA makes
available, as well as the resulting level(s) of business value it delivers. The primary goal of this
chapter is to help you address and answer the “So what?” question and 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 relative importance
of each reason will vary from organization to organization. Some of the most fundamental
reasons are:
 To demonstrate overall business value for the project
To provide an initial financial justification for purchase and implementation
To ensure that the project is aligned with the organization’s business goals and/or
initiatives
To establish the base-line expectations for subsequent assessment of the project’s
success
To provide internal documentation explaining the expected business benefits to users
(and possibly to other departments in the organization)

A well-developed business case is not just a collection of data. Rather, it is also a collection
of opinions and views from relevant stakeholders — both supporters and detractors — 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 that case will likely
provide an incomplete and potentially unreliable forecast of the quality of that investment. An
effective business case must quantify not only the tangible value proposition of the project but
also the intangible value, because both metrics are components 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 of business. 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 that establish success early and
then continue to build business momentum with later projects.
Going further, some uses cases should reflect “stretch” goals — ambitious projects that may
span several years. At the same time, they should include projects that not only can be
implemented quickly, but also demonstrate measurable business value. The final collection of
use cases can then be used to build a roadmap for current and future deployments of SAP
HANA. The roadmap will balance each project›s business value against the corresponding
difficulty of implementation and/or risk involved. This approach will enable your organization to
prioritize its various projects in a thoughtful and comprehensive manner, thus maximizing the
likelihood that the entire initiative will be approved.

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

1. CREATE the storyline

2. ADD the financial dimension
3. 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 cases in the
storyline should map to goals and processes that distinguish your organization from the
competition.
 After you have created a viable storyline, the next step is to add the financial dimension. No
matter how impressive the story, by itself it isn’t sufficient to obtain funding for the project.
Adding the financial dimension extends the storyline to the expected business value and
provides some quantitative measures that can be used in the evaluation process.
After these two steps have been completed, the final step is to package up the business
case in a format that is appropriate for the individuals who will evaluate the project.
We will discuss each of these steps in greater detail throughout this chapter. Before we
proceed, however, we need to consider the fundamental concept of business value.

Levels of Value
We’ve mentioned business value a couple of times already in this chapter. Exactly what do we
mean by this term?
“Business value” actually covers a relatively wide range of benefits, both quantitative and
qualitative. Moreover, there are different levels, or degrees, of business value. The chart below
illustrates a useful model for categorizing these levels. This model identifies three levels:
Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Transformation. Let’s take a closer look at each one.

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 the way you do things
(but not what you do). Of all the levels of business value, the gains from efficiency are the
easiest to quantify. There are two basic subcategories of Efficiency: IT Efficiency and Business
Efficiency.
IT Efficiency
Organizations are likely to focus heavily on IT Efficiency when (1) the software investment
under consideration is part of a broader effort such as creating an analytics center of
excellence or shared analytical services and (2) the main rationale for doing so is to reduce IT
costs. At this level of business value, IT is viewed as a cost center within the organization — an
expense or overhead item that needs to be managed and contained. The following list identifies
some common examples of IT Efficiency.

Reducing the annual maintenance costs of older applications and databases

Reducing the internal costs of enhancing or upgrading software
Reducing the IT FTE resources required to manage older applications and databases
Reducing the hardware infrastructure to simplify administration and minimize floor
space/carbon footprint

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

Line of Business Examples:

To better identify the most promising sales opportunities

To gain an enhanced perspective on cost drivers
To increase the productivity of knowledge workers

2. Effectiveness
The second level of value — Effectiveness — redirects the focus from “doing things the right
way” to “doing the right things at the right time.” To properly assess this level, we need to
discard many of the prevailing assumptions that underlie current business processes.
Although efficiency can deliver a fair amount of business value, effectiveness offers the
promise of much more. In fact, SAP HANA provides organizations with the opportunity to
fundamentally rethink their basic business processes (i. e., what they do and when and how
they do it).
For example, organizations rarely, if ever, depend exclusively upon a total cost of ownership
(TCO) analysis (i.e., Efficiency) to justify a business analytics initiative. Although cost is a
concern, the top-performing companies in each industry incorporate analytics into their
infrastructure in order to create and maintain competitive advantage.
At the Efficiency level of business value, business performance is improved first through
visibility and then through insight. Visibility provides the ability to access relevant information
quickly and in context. Then, insight provides a deeper understanding of the underlying causes
of a situation or the likely outcome of a course of action under consideration.
Recall from previous chapters that SAP HANA a disruptive technology. Consequently, the
business benefits it delivers extend far beyond improvements in IT operations. The examination
of effectiveness gains makes the assumption that IT is a strategic enabler and 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, effectiveness gains can be
expressed as ranges of financial value, as illustrated by the following list.

Higher customer value

Improved product mix (margins)
Better sales pipeline conversion ratio
Enhanced customer retention
More accurate demand forecasts
More successful segmentation
Enhanced understanding of real costs
Greater production yields
More efficient order fulfillment
Faster collections
Lower production costs
Reduced risk/impact of risks
More timely anticipation of market changes
More efficient asset utilization

3. Transformation
Business Transformation is the highest level of business value, but also the most difficult to
achieve. Transformation goes well beyond Effectiveness by enabling new business models and
processes. Sometimes called “innovation” or “The Art of the Possible,” business transformation
can generate extraordinary financial gains. However, the potential 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 new
business models and processes by leveraging innovative solutions and technologies, such as
SAP HANA.
Examples:

Identifying and serving new market segments before your peers can
Providing personalized customer pricing and services
Enabling new products or pricing models
Creating new business models
Improving time to market
Reducing inventory
Increasing market share
Improving P/E ratio
 Hopefully you now have a more nuanced understanding of business value. Having covered
this topic, we return to our discussion of the three-step process for building effective business
use cases. We begin with the first step — creating the storyline.

II. Creating the Storyline

It’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 the process.
SAP HANA is a disruptive technology, so the typical approach to building a technical business
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 be
exploited)?
What mega-trends in the industry represent opportunities for new value?

A. Categorization/Business Attributes
Sometimes it’s easier to create use cases when you can place each one into a convenient
category, or container. Below we list samples of potentially useful categories. Note that these
categories may not be mutually exclusive. Some of your use cases can cross boundaries,
especially in the case of innovations. Please refer to the SAP HANA Use Case Repository 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 Warranty and Defect
Analysis )
Financial: (Fraud Detection, Risk Analysis, Credit Scoring, Program Trading, Customer
Profitability)
Manufacturing: (Supply Chain Optimization, Production Planning, Operational
Performance Mgt., Real-Time Asset Utilization)
Retail: (POS/Fraud Detection, Business Planning, Price and Merchandising Optimization)
Telecom: (Investment Planning, Network Equipment Planning & Optimization)
Utilities: (Smart Metering, Demand Side Management, Balance and Demand
Forecasting, Churn Management, Outage Management, Investment Planning, Grid
 Management)

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, Trade Promotion
Management)
Supply Chain: (Transportation Planning, Inventory Mgt., Demand and Supply Planning,
Supply Network Planning)

B. Self-Discovery
After reading about the methodology and techniques discussed in this chapter, some customers
may feel comfortable building business cases on their own. The SAP HANA Use Case
Repository and SAP HANA Value Calculator (described below) can provide invaluable
assistance with this task.

C. Assisted Discovery
Many other customers, however, will prefer to leverage the expertise of SAP’s Value
Engineering (VE) group in constructing a convincing business case for SAP HANA. One of the
ways in which the VE organization can help you construct an SAP HANA business case is
through a Value Discovery Workshop. Over the course of this workshop, you will have the
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 how your 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 IT staff
should all participate. The workshop will provide you with detailed information on data,
processes, roles, modeling, consumption, clients, and security requirements for your
applications. 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 a
workshop for a customer in the chemical industry.
 The next illustration is an example of one of the process analysis outputs created at a later
stage in another workshop.
 Finally, after you have completed the workshop, VE resources may be available to assist you
in building a formal business case. Please check with your SAP Account Executive for further
information on this service.

D. SAP HANA Use Case Repository

SAP maintains a centralized SAP HANA website (http://www.saphana.com) that contains an
ever-growing number of example use cases for SAP HANA. In the Resources section of the
site, you’ll find sample use cases of SAP HANA that have either been implemented by a
customer or discussed with a prospect.
Perhaps the most obvious way to use this site is to check the category for your industry to
determine which of the existing use cases reflect your organization’s needs or strategic
direction. You may not find an exact match, but it’s extremely likely that you’ll find one or more
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 a
brainstorming tool. It can be quite enlightening to study use cases from industries that are
seemingly unrelated to yours. In many instances, you will recognize a common thread that will
encourage you to adopt a broader perspective than if you limited your exploration to use cases
in your industry.
Whichever approach you adopt, a guiding principle is to focus on things that you can’t do
today. In addition, always keep in mind that SAP HANA’s strengths are in applications that have
never been built before. If you’re looking to SAP HANA for competitive advantage, 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 and
selected process areas:

Aerospace & Defense

Automotive
Banking
Chemical
Consumer Products
Cross-Industry
Customer Service
Finance
Healthcare
High Tech
Industrial Machinery & Components
Insurance
Life Sciences
Manufacturing
Marketing
Media
 Mill Products
Mining
Oil & Gas
Professional Services
Public Sector
Retail
Sales
Supply Chain
Telecommunications
Transportation
Utilities
Wholesale Distribution

III. Adding the Financial Dimension

Now that you’ve developed a good storyline, it’s time to map it to the expected business value
for each and every use case. No matter how captivating your storyline, it must be backed up
with hard numbers. Although it is important to have quantitative results, some quantitative
measures are more defficult to obtain and monitor than others.

A. Importance of Benefits Quantification

It is critical to acknowledge the value of IT investments through benefits measurement and post
go-live monitoring. An SAP Value Management study determined that organizations that
develop business cases and measure post-go live success are 1.9 times more likely to deliver
projects on time. They are also 1.5 times more likely to deliver on budget and to realize up-front
benefits.
In most current use cases, the business value for SAP HANA is measured in a similar manner
to other business analytics investments. The capabilities of SAP HANA are seen across many
areas of an organization with an increasing number of benefit scenarios. The one fundamental
difference is that analytical use cases for SAP HANA consider how the availability of real-time
data impacts the organization’s ability to realize value. The SAP HANA benefits quantification
evaluates what the organization can accomplish now that it can better manage data and
interpret the resulting insights at lightning-fast speeds. Data volume 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 is continually expanding with the usage of Facebook and
Twitter. Therefore, the traditional processes that organizations have used to consolidate and
analyze data are no longer sufficient 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 that concluded that
business intelligence investments delivered the following return on investment:

112 % median ROI

54% 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 that
organizations wanted more accurate operational information. A case study concluded that
manufacturing organizations yielded a 2% increase in production efficiencies, returning tens of
millions of dollars in savings. The independant study demonstrates that quantitative benefits are
being realized with real-time information. Production yield is an excellent example of benefits
quantification. Increased yield reduces the cost of operations. This section will help you identify
these business areas and quantify the benefits.
SAP has come to realize that organizations can struggle with analytics benefits quantification.
Organizations utilize various approaches to business case benefit development; however, they
may not have the experience to transfer that approach to business analytics and SAP HANA
business cases. To address this problem, SAP’s Value Engineering organization has taken the
methodology that has been used for the past eight years and applied it applied it to SAP HANA
benefits quantification. We discuss the value engineering and the value management approach
later in the chapter.

B. Types of Quantification
SAP Value Management has created a framework for analyzing benefits that also applies to
SAP HANA. This framework, which is illustrated below, places benefits in one of four
categories:

Strategy Enablement
Measurable Benefits
Risk and Compliance
Innovation

Financial measurement, known as “hard” benefits, typically falls within the measurable benefit
category. However, risk mitigation and compliance can deliver millions of dollars in savings.
Strategy enablement and innovation are usually treated as “soft” benefits.
 It is important to understand that an SAP HANA business case, like an analytics business
case, impacts numerous process areas within an organization. SAP realized that the underlying
transactional systems by themselves release only a percentage of the overall benefits.
Unlocking the remaining benefits requires information insight.
For example, Procuremnt leaders rely on information to understand how an organization
spends money in various categories such as materials, services and IT equipment. The
procurement process controls the flow of money going out of the company for materials and
services. This critical function ensures that an organization manages its spending strategically.
The primary metrics that measure success in this area are overall spending managed centrally
and year-over-year annual savings achieved by the procurement team. Spend that is not
managed centrally does not leverage contracts negotiated with preferred vendors that include
already secured discount levels. Without real-time business insight on spend, organizations are
not fully optimizing savings with consolidated spend. The following SAP HANA case study
illustrates a procurement business 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 organization was not visible at a
national level. Supplier relationships at a regional level ran the risk of not capturing increased 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 regional
 procurement systems
Four regional warehouses housing ERP structured system data
No infrastructure in place to automate the data consolidation for a national view of supplier spend levels

Approach:

Evaluate the SAP HANA solution as the database and analytics technology to enable a single view of
consolidated 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 certain regions
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 spend
managed strategically with retail peers
The grocer determined that additional savings would be possible if the organization better understood the
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 by a
national supplier
Significant supplier data compression with transfer of spend and supplier data from four regional systems
to one single instance of SAP HANA
Real-time and automated data transfer that was previously not possible with four different regional systems
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-profit
organizations and reduces cost in all organizations. In addition, hard benefits can increase the
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 gains can result in
tangible benefits if resulting costs are removed from the gain. An example of a hard benefit
efficiency gain is the reduction of people completing a manual reporting task.
As we discussed, quantifying SAP HANA benefits follows a similar approach to other
traditional benefits quantification. The areas of improvement are derived by identifying areas of
value within major business process areas. Common benefit KPIs are broken down within the
process areas. A few of the key business benefit KPIs and key metrics are outlined below.
SAP’s Value Engineering organization has a full repository of all business benefits.

Demand Generation
Marketing
Benefit: Optimized marketing spend through improved campaign effectiveness

Metrics:

Average cost of a marketing campaign launch

Current time to measure campaign effectiveness
Campaign conversion rate measured in sales or pipeline generated

Outcome:

Reduced marketing spend by minimizing the cost of ineffective campaigns

Increased annual revenue through campaign execution

Sales Execution
Benefit: Increased sales conversion rate, thereby increasing annual revenue

Metrics:

Current pipeline conversion percentage

Current revenue per sales employee
Current sales team efficiency measured by time with customer and administrative time

Outcome:

Increased pipeline conversion rate and sales

Increased total revenue per salesperson
Reduced 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 services

Year-over-year annual savings
Evaluation of vendors utilized and product categories
Effort spent currently managing vendor relationships

Outcome:

Reduced annual spend by category

Reduced efforts by buyers to manage and track vendor relationships
Manufacturing Process
Benefit: Reduced inventory levels and enhanced visibility of the short horizon of stock
levels

Metrics:

Current inventory levels of finished goods

Current inventory carrying costs
Percentage of inventory obsolescence

Outcome:

Reduced inventory levels of finished goods

Reduced annual inventory carrying costs
Greater annual cash flow
Reduced 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 storage

Cost and effort of transferring data from source systems to a centralized data
repository
Effort to prepare data for reporting
Effort to build standard reports

Outcome:

Reduced cost of information management

Improved 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 segment

Effort required to deliver profitability analysis
Current pricing processes
 Outcome:

Increased profit by product, region, and segment

Elimination of unprofitable items
Less effort required to monitor profitability

Workforce Management
Benefit: Improved worker utilization levels and reduce level of overtime

Metrics:

Worker utilization levels

Overtime percentage and cost

Outcome:

Reduced labor costs

Improved worker output measured

Fraud Management
Benefit: Improved fraud detection, thus reducing the costs associated with additional
insurance claims

Metrics:

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

Outcome:

Reduced cost of fraud investigations

Reduced 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 diverse data
sources and to deliver real-time insights for decision making. In each case the results 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 the tangible
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 organization utilizes
appropriate metrics to deliver greater throughput with the same staff. The labour budget 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 organizations find it difficult to drive accountability
with poor information. Department leads can’t drive improvements if there is no trust in the data
comprising the actual results.. In creating and evaluating a business case, you need carefully
consider both tangible and strategic benefits.
3. New KPIs and Breakthrough Innovations
SAP HANA is an innovative technology that offers a fresh approach to information management.
The ability to deliver innovations by managing complex analysis in real time reduces time to
market and generates new revenue streams. These innovations are the 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 the impact.
We have multiple forums to share the benefits of SAP HANA; the external website mentioned
earlier in the chapter capturing use cases and the business transformation studies captured by
Value Engineering. A business transformation study is a brief document published jointly with
our customers to capture benefits realized along with the story 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 to simultaneously explore innovative SAP HANA
scenarios while developing existing process-improvement scenarios. A simple business case
can be developed based on existing processes and then leveraged to fund breakthrough
innovations.
SAP recommends multiple scenarios by which SAP HANA delivers maximum value to the
organization. These scenarios can be incorporated into an analytics roadmap that prioritizes
value and time to value. This strategy will enable IT to jointly manage the implementation with
the relevant business functions.

C. Best Practice Business Case Approach

Before calculating a benefit, an organization must identify a baseline metric derived from the
current state process. After it creates this baseline, it can establish a target benefit range.
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 reporting
Effort taken in hours taken to build monthly package
Associated IT effort to maintain profitability reporting
Current state profitability level of the associated item tracked on the report

As stated above, an organization needs to establish baseline metrics before it can calculate
the value of a benefit. However, baseline metrics in isolation do not allow the owner of the
business case to comfortably develop a target improvement range. These metrics are simply
utilized as a measuring stick of success. The baseline metric allows organizations to know how
much they have improved after the technology has been implemented. In order to truly define a
benefit beyond the current state baseline, SAP Value Engineering performs this function by
providing a triangulated approach to benefits quantification. Specifically, VE provides SAP
Benchmarking data that indicate average and best-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. (We discuss the SAP Benchmarking database in greater detail
in Section E.)
After the analysis has been completed, the next step is to identify the associated value driver
outcome(s). The benefit as described in the process areas is typically related to its impact on
revenue and expenses. We strongly recommend that when you calculate a benefit you apply a
benefit range with a conservative and likely metric based on the SAP Value Engineering
approach described above.
One final point: It is commonplace to link benefits to an overall initiative involving process
improvements through technology enablement. Benefits are more widely accepted when linked
to key business initiatives such as improving spend management or improving pricing within a
certain product category. As part of the initial business case development, discussions with the
business unit sponsors ensure linkage to strategy and acceptance of the SAP HANA
investment.

D. SAP HANA Calculator

To make it easier for people to build a value-based business case, SAP Value Engineering and
SAP HANA Solution Management released a web-based SAP HANA benefits calculator to our
customers. The tool covers the most common benefit areas that most organizations would
consider. The calculator provides two or three example benefits for each of five mega-process
areas:

Customer Focus
Procure to Pay
Plan to Produce
Record to Report
Quote to Cash

The benefits calculator enables you to customize the revenue include the number of
employees, and key baseline information for your particular organization. The benefit ranges
are based on the SAP Value Engineering triangulated methodology we just described. A
summary report aggregates all the benefits to determine the overall financial impact.
SAP designed this tool to be a great launching point for calculating benefits. It generates
ideas on how SAP HANA can impact your business, and it demonstrates how you can calculate
these benefits. Your organization can then continue to develop benefits either in partnership
with SAP VE or on your own.
E. SAP Benchmarking
One of the most valuable resources available to you when building an SAP HANA business
case is the SAP Benchmarking database. SAP Benchmarking is a global program launched in
2004 to deliver empirical metrics, best practices, and high-impact strategies to organizations
that choose to leverage the program.
SAP Benchmarking is managed through a customer portal, SAP Value Management Center
(https://valuemanagement.sap.com). The link takes you right to the portal to sign in and utlize
the surveys to capture baseline information and determine how you are performing against best
in clauss organizations. This is a significant investment by SAP to allow organizations to
measure performance and build benefit cases.

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

SAP Benchmarking program Facts:

Established at the end of 2004

Complimentary service
Available to SAP and non-SAP customers
More than 12,000 participants from more than 3,000 companies
Global — in 2010 more than 60% participants of participants were from outside North
 America
Partnerships with ASUG and other user groups
Studies available in 12 languages
More than 20 business process assessments including finance, procurement, supply
chain, and sales.
More than 700 KPIs
More than 1,000 best practices
More 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 Performance Analytics
survey to track the importance of complexity and speed in the data management environment.
As discussed previously, SAP HANA can impact many business process areas spanning the
entire organization. The SAP Benchmarking program allows you to help choose a few key
process areas to determine where SAP HANA best fits as a starting point. The program
provides the flexibility to create a customized survey to capture the key metrics and best
practices identified through the SAP HANA business scenario development. This process will
provide the critical peer comparison that establishes the appropriate range of improvement. An
organization can build a realistic benefit range improvement by leveraging peer benchmarking
data.

IV. Tying It All Together

We 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 be funded. To
accomplish this objective, the storyline and financial impact have to be communicated effectively
to the stakeholders and decision makers. In addition, the presentation needs to be easily
consumable by senior business executives, because senior management buy-in and
commitment and are critical.

A. Internal Deliverables
As 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 successful business cases for SAP
HANA, and it can assist with your final presentation.
Although there is no set format for final deliverables, successful presentations generally
contain certain critical components, which we list below.

Use case and business process scenarios

Financial and non-financial benefits
Strategic alignment discussion
Risk assessment
Use case prioritization
B. Ongoing Value Management
Most companies realize that the successful utilization of information technologies is critical to
success in the modern business environment. Despite this realization, however, few companies
actually realize the maximum value of their IT investment. SAP addressed this problem by
introducing Value Engineering, a practice that focuses on driving the customer value that IT is
providing to the business. Over the years, SAP has learned a great deal about how the best-in-
class companies continuously select, execute, and measure successful business-driven IT
projects. Utilizing an ongoing processes called Value Management, SAP Value Engineering has
standardized and packaged these best practices to help organizations deliver value by aligning
IT with business goals and processes, and through maximizing return on IT investment.
1. Value Management
Value Management is a permanent management process that ensures that investments in
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 from IT
investments and initiatives. The Value Management methodology is intended to keep companies
focused on choosing the right projects, to clearly define ownership and accountability for
business results, and to deliver on these agreed-upon commitments. The SAP Value
Engineering team helps identify the appropriate strategic areas to enable companies 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 business objectives;
over time, however, they lose this focus. As a result, they never fully realize their expected
results. Research conducted by SAP indicates that 98% of companies can extract 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 proper planning, execution, and ongoing
value analysis is critical to building a strategic IT function in successful companies. Failure to
realize maximum benefit from IT is a common problem that can understandably discourage
executives from making the strategic IT investments needed to compete in today’s unforgiving
business environment.
SAP’s approach to value management focuses on helping you discover the right projects,
measure progress during implementation, and optimize investments across your IT portfolio.
This end-to-end process helps to ensure the business value of your IT investments.
3. Why Do Customers Like SAP’s Value Engineering Process?

Quick turnaround process that delivers a strategic value proposition to customers in

weeks
Minimal disruption to customers’ ongoing operations using our collaborative approach
Fact-based, structured problem-solving approach that leverages past engagement
experiences
Hands-on participation from SAP experts — solution specialists, industry practitioners,
consultants, and centers of excellence professionals
Mature value management methodology based on experience with 25,000+ customers;
leveraging comprehensive knowledge about best practices across industries and
business processes
Scalable, disciplined approach to business value assessments that establishes a
common 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 for SAP
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 can help
you create a financial justification for the initiative. However, if you’re willing to invest the time in
a more immersive process, VE offers a SAP HANA Value Discovery Workshop, which we
describe in greater detail later in this chapter.
5. Continuous Value Management
At this point, you have completed the Discovery portion of the Value Management Cycle
described earlier in this chapter. The remaining stages in the cycle are Realization and
Optimization. The Discovery phase resulted in the all-important business case, but the other
two phases are no less critical to the process. One strategy to ensure continued success
throughout the implementation of the SAP HANA initiative is to maintain (or establish) a “culture
of measurement” within the organization.

6. Establish a “Culture of Measurement”

How serious is your organization about performance measurement? It’s nearly impossible to
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 mostly subjective opinions that
are not easily validated.
In contrast, objective assessments minimize the element of personal bias and enable
historical comparisons of assessments for different projects. This kind of measurement
philosophy needs to be deeply ingrained in the culture of an organization, ideally as a formal
methodology.
Among other things, here are some of the questions that you should consider when
measuring 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 KPIs and
metrics?
Are there any “new” KPIs that would be relevant to your organization but have not been
adopted by your industry peers?

V. Recommendations
The 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 intend this
chapter to be used as a “cookbook” for building business cases for SAP HANA. Different
organizations may follow widely varying approaches when building their internal justifications for
SAP HANA.
Whatever your situation, however, we strongly recommend that you keep the following points
in mind during your journey:

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

What you can’t do today

What 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 internally

The resulting support may be necessary later when you plan and undertake more
ambitious projects

3) Don’t view technology or IT as merely an expense or overhead. When leveraged properly,

technology and IT act as a:

Strategic enabler
Value creator

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

Hard benefits are easier to calculate precisely

Soft 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

Chapter 4
SAP HANA Applications

COMING MAY 2013

Chapter 5
SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on
SAP

COMING MAY 2013

Chapter 6
Data Provisioning with SAP HANA

COMING MAY 2013

Chapter 7
Data Modeling with SAP HANA

COMING MAY 2013

Chapter 8
Application Development with SAP HANA

COMING MAY 2013

Chapter 9
SAP HANA Administration & Operations

COMING MAY 2013

 Chapter 10
SAP HANA Hardware Overview

S AP HANA is the first SAP solution that has been built to be specifically run as an appliance
and optimized for a very specific combination of processor, memory, and operating system.
This approach represents a departure from SAP’s long history of broad platform support. SAP
implemented this new policy to still provide customers with multiple choices in hardware
platforms while avoiding the TCO implications of multiple OS and processor support
combinations. In order to understand why, we need to look back historically at some of the
hardware platform changes that led SAP to adopt this policy this strategy and explore why this
path offers SAP customers the best balance of broad hardware partner options and focused
innovation around a stable set of key components.
When SAP shifted from mainframe to client-server architecture with SAP R/3, two of the
critical benefits were the lower costs and the more standardized options associated with the
UNIX-based servers that had just become available. When the mass-adoption of SAP R/3 took
off, customers began asking SAP to certify more and more new combinations of operating
system and database on various hardware platforms. This made sense because many
companies were employing existing landscapes from a preferred hardware vendor and had
developed expertise in certain versions of operating system and database that they wanted to
leverage for their SAP environment.
SAP happily obliged, building out a robust certification laboratory in its headquarters to
constantly test and validate new hardware and software combinations that were being released
by its partners for customer use. At the time, SAP believed that providing customers with such
a broad choice would help them achieve lower TCO of their SAP solutions by reusing
technology and resources that were already in place. SAP also felt that being hardware and
OS/DB “agnostic” would be the best strategy to set itself apart from the other enterprise app
vendors. This “technology-neutral” strategy worked very well for SAP for more than 30 years.
At a certain point in the mid-2000s, however, the small number of combinations that SAP began
with had exploded into a truly dizzying collection. Customers no longer benefited significantly
from such a broad list of hardware and technology choices, and the costs for SAP and its
customers of this broad coverage were becoming unsustainable.
After SAP R/3 was released, the UNIX platform began to splinter into multiple dialects, with
each hardware vendor putting its efforts behind its preferred variant (HPUX, AIX, Solaris, etc).
In addition, x86 platforms from Intel and AMD began to displace the RISC-based platforms of
the early UNIX hardware vendors due to their lower costs and their support for industry
standards. Later, Linux began to displace the original UNIX operating systems due to its lower
costs and the advantages of open-source code. Soon, the Product Availability Matrix (PAM) for
SAP ERP exceeded 200 combinations of OS and database, with a vast number of hardware
platforms for those combinations. At a certain point, choice became a liability for SAP and its
customers rather than the benefit that it was originally intended to be.
So, when SAP began development on the precursors of SAP HANA, the company made a
strategic decision to avoid all of the costs and complexity of supporting so many variations of
hardware and technology platforms. SAP was primarily concerned with the three pieces of
technology that had the greatest impact on performance and would be the largest drivers of
TCO reduction: operating system (OS), RAM, and processors. SAP decided to bet on open-
source and industry standards as the core platform for SAP HANA. By supporting only ONE
combination of OS and processors, SAP could invest all its development and testing resources
into a single platform while still allowing customers to choose which hardware vendor would
deliver and support the appliance.
SAP had been working with Novell/SUSE for many years to support Novell SLES Linux as a
certified operating system for SAP applications. Because Linux is so technically similar to UNIX,
almost any UNIX engineer could transition his or her skills easily. Moreover, because Linux was
open-source and easily supported by third parties, it was clearly the lowest TCO option for
running an SAP system.
In addition to selecting a single OS, SAP had to settle on a single processor family for the
new solution. Although there were many chips on the market that could handle SAP’s traditional
application-processing requirements, there weren’t any processors that had been designed to
handle in-memory processing tasks (because enterprise-scale in-memory computing didn’t exist
yet). The initial SAP HANA conversations that SAP’s executives held with anyone outside the
company were with Intel because SAP realized that shifting to in-memory computing would
require a new breed of processors that were optimized for the new architecture, and Intel has
a long history of innovating for the future needs of the enterprise.
SAP laid out its strategy for the shift to in-memory computing to Intel’s executives, and the
two parties discussed the level of co-innovation that would be needed to jointly engineer both
an in-memory database and optimized processors that could handle the unique needs of this
new architecture. The top executives from each company agreed that the they would have to
establish a new level of co-innovation partnership and starting in 2005, Intel sent a team of their
best software and chip engineers to SAP HQ to begin the work of jointly optimizing each
successive version of the industry-standard Intel Xeon chips for the needs of SAP’s evolving in-
memory database. Since that time, SAP has benefitted from early access to each new
generation of Xeon processor from Intel, and Intel has incorporated SAP’s unique in-memory
processing requirements into its chip capabilities.
Intel and SAP: A History of Co-Innovation
For more than 10 years, Intel and SAP have worked together to deliver industry-leading performance of SAP
solutions on Intel® architecture, and a large proportion of new SAP implementations are now deployed on Intel ®
platforms. The latest success from that tradition of co-innovation is available to customers of all sizes in SAP
HANA, which is delivered on the Intel® Xeon® processor.
The relationship between Intel and SAP has become even stronger over the years, growing to include a broad set
of collaborations and initiatives. Some of the most visible:

Joint roadmap enablement. Early in the design process, Intel and SAP decision makers identify
complementary features and capabilities in their upcoming products, and those insights help to direct the
development cycle for maximum value.
Collaborative product optimization. Intel engineers located on-site at SAP work with their SAP counterparts
to provide tuning expertise that enables SAP HANA and other software solutions to take advantage of the
latest hardware features.
Combined research efforts. Together, researchers from Intel and SAP continually explore and drive the
future of business computing

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

Having created an optimized “core” (operating system, RAM, and processors) for SAP
HANA, SAP needed to reach out to the server manufacturers to package the software and
hardware into industry-standard appliances in a way that would remove as much configuration
and integration work from the customers as possible (again, lowering TCO). SAP realized that
even though the core components of the SAP HANA servers would be nearly identical (OS,
RAM, and processors), the hardware vendors provide a great deal of additional value in the
implementation, management and operations of the hardware. Plus, customers typically have a
preferred hardware vendor for their enterprise landscapes. This is really where SAP felt that
customer choice would have the most value. So, they engaged seven of their primary hardware
vendors (see the next paragraph) to build certified SAP HANA appliances and create packaged
services to implement SAP HANA quickly and easily at customer sites.
In early 2011, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, IBM, and HP all jumped on the SAP HANA bandwagon and
had their flagship Intel-based servers certified and in production. Hitachi joined the list later that
year, and NEC was certified in early 2012. This broad support from industry-leading hardware
vendors provides customers with a choice of seven hardware partners to deploy their SAP
HANA solution, each with unique service and support offerings to fit their customers’ needs.
SAP’s strategy of “solid core,” multivendor hardware support for SAP HANA has been received
extremely well by customers because it eliminates the confusing number of hardware
combinations and focuses on the value-added solutions that each vendor can offer on top of the
“solid core.”
General SAP HANA Hardware Specifications
SAP HANA is sold as a pre-configured, pre-installed appliance that is delivered directly from the
hardware partner. SUSE Linux SLES 11 is the only supported operating system, and Intel E7
processors are the only supported chips. Samsung RAM is currently the primary memory used
by all of the hardware partners.
Most partner systems use on-board 15k RPM hard disks (4x ratio for main memory) for
data-volume backup and Fusion I/O SSD cards (1:1 ratio for main memory) for log-volume
backup.
SAP ensures the quality, availability, and performance of the certified systems through a
rigorous process of end-to-end quality testing, performance testing, and continuous early
access to next-generation technologies from all of its partners.

SAP HANA Product Availability Matrix (PAM)

The latest and most accurate PAM can always be downloaded from the SAP Service
Marketplace. Here is the August 2012 SAP HANA PAM.
Single-Node Configuration
Multi-Node Scale Out Configuration
Additional Infrastructure
SAP recommends that customers deploy 10 gb network data connections. SAP has no
preference on external storage/SAN; rather, it is determined by the server vendor.

Multi-Node and Scale-Out Options

SAP HANA is a linearly scalable database, meaning, you can string together multiple physical
servers into a single logical database instance and achieve linear performance results for every
additional server added to the landscape.
Currently, SAP HANA has certified a 16-node scale-out for production environments and is
currently testing a 60 node scale-out landscape. Literally, you just add another node/server to
the landscape, and you immediately enjoy an exponential increase in performance, in addition to
the additional memory. Refer to the SAP HANA hardware partner section of this chapter for
more information on the various scale-out offerings from the individual partners.
SAP recently (April 2012) completed its first internal benchmark for the 16 node scale out
solution. The data set consisted of five years of Sales and Distribution Records (100 Billion
records) and was run on a single logical server consisting of 16 nodes. Each node was a
certified IBM X5 machine with eight Intel E7-8870 processors with 10 cores, running at 2.40
GHz. The total cost of the 16 node system was roughly USD$640K.
SAP HANA was able to scan 100 Billion rows/Sec on the 100 TB dataset and was able to
load 16 million records/min. SAP HANA’s compression algorithms were able to achieve 20x
compression on the raw data when loading into memory, going from 100TB on disk to 3.8TB in
memory.

Typical query results were:

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

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

High Availability
SAP HANA supports cold standby hosts, meaning a standby host is kept ready in the event that
a failover situation occurs during production operation. In a distributed system, some of the
servers are designated as worker hosts, and others as standby hosts. Significantly, you can
assign multiple standby hosts to each group. Alternatively, you can group together multiple
servers to create a dedicated standby host for each group.
A standby host is not used for database processing. All of the database processes run on the
standby host, but they are idle and do not enable SQL connections.
Disaster Recovery
The SAP HANA database holds the bulk of its data in memory to ensure optimal performance,
but it still uses persistent storage to provide a fallback in case of failure.
During normal database operations, data are automatically saved from memory to disk at
regular save-points. Additionally, all data changes are recorded in the log. The log is saved
from memory to SSD after each committed database transaction. After a power failure, the
database can be restarted in the same way as a disk-based database, and it returns to its last
consistent state by replaying the log since the last save-point.
Although save-points and log writing protect your data against power failures, they do not
help if the persistent storage itself is damaged. Protecting against data loss due to disk failures
requires backups. Backups save the contents of the data and log areas to different locations.
These backups are performed while the database is running, so users can continue to work
normally. The impact of the backups on system performance is negligible.
 If the SAP HANA system detects a failover situation, the work of the services on the failed
server is reassigned to the services running on the standby host. The failed volume and all the
included tables are reassigned and loaded into memory in accordance with the failover strategy
defined for the system. This reassignment can be performed without moving any data, because
all the persistency of the servers is stored on a shared disk. Data and logs are stored on
shared storage, where every server has access to the same disks.
Before a failover is performed, the system waits for a few seconds to determine whether the
service can be restarted. During this time, the status is displayed as ”Waiting.” This procedure
can take up to a minute. The entire process of failover detection and loading may take several
minutes to complete.

SAP Hardware Partner Details

In the remaining section of this chapter, each Certified SAP HANA hardware partner was given
the opportunity to briefly describe their SAP HANA offering and discuss their value-added
services for SAP HANA implementation, support, and operations.
We encourage you to speak directly to the hardware partners for more details about their
products and services for SAP HANA.

Links:
Intel
Cisco
Dell
Fujitsu
Hitachi
HP
IBM
NEC
Intel & SAP: Co-innovation for Real-Time Computing
For more than 10 years, Intel and SAP have worked together to deliver industry-leading
performance of SAP solutions on Intel architecture, and a large proportion of new SAP
implementations are now deployed on Intel platforms. The latest success from that tradition of
co-innovation is available to customers of all sizes in the SAP HANA, which is fully supported
only on the Intel Xeon® processor E7 family.
The relationship between Intel and SAP has become even stronger over the years, growing
to include a broad set of collaborations and initiatives. Some of the most visible include the
following:

Joint roadmap enablement. Early in the design process, Intel and SAP decision-
makers identify complementary features and capabilities in their upcoming products, and
those insights help to direct the development cycle for maximum value.
Collaborative product optimization. Intel engineers located on-site at SAP work with
their SAP counterparts to provide tuning expertise that enables SAP HANA and other
software solutions to take advantage of the latest hardware features.
Combined research efforts. Together, researchers from Intel and SAP continually
explore and drive the future of business computing. As a result of these efforts, customer
solutions achieve performance, scalability, reliability, and energy efficiency that translate
into favorable ROI and TCO, for increased business value.

Operational Success and Management of Real-Time Events

In-memory computing based on SAP solutions on the Intel Xeon® processor E7 family enables
greater business agility and innovative usage models that let companies respond to changing
conditions in real time.
Scenarios such as monitoring customer and supplier activity can generate petabytes of data,
the value of which depends on the ability to distill it into actionable intelligence.
SAP HANA and the Intel Xeon® processor E7 family deliver rapid data analysis that discerns
patterns and trends so you can adjust your just-in-time supply chain rapidly. You can also
model “what if” scenarios to structure sales and promotions for optimal outcomes based on the
latest sales and pipeline information.
Features of the Intel Xeon processor E7 family such as 30MB of L3 cache, Intel® QuickPath
Interconnects, and quad-channel integrated memory controllers deliver extraordinary
capabilities for businesses of all sizes that implement SAP HANA for functionality such as
business intelligence and data analytics.
Performance Optimizations of SAP HANA with the Intel Xeon® Processor E7 Family
SAP HANA benefits dramatically from high-speed Intel ® QuickPath processor-to-memory
interconnects and the latest processor instructions, Streaming SIMD Extensions. Those
features eliminate many I/O bottlenecks, so processor headroom is available to generate
excellent throughput and responsiveness. SAP HANA is also engineered to take particular
advantage of RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability) features of the Intel Xeon
processor E7family, especially error correction through Machine Check Architecture Recovery,
for mission-critical implementations.
As a result of the high level of performance optimization for servers based on the Intel Xeon
processor E7 family, SAP HANA can provide businesses of all sizes superior results for data
warehousing implementations such as business intelligence and data analytics.

Assured Performance with Mission-Critical Advanced Reliability of the Intel Xeon

Processor E7 Family
Machine Check Architecture Recovery, a reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) feature
built into the Intel Xeon® processor E7 family, enables the hardware platform to generate
Machine Check Exceptions. In many cases, these notifications enable the system to take
corrective action that allows SAP HANA to keep running where an outage would otherwise
occur.
Hardware based on the Intel Xeon® processor E7 family enables SAP HANA to fail over from
one processor socket to another in the event of a processor failure and to handle memory
errors with as little impact to workloads as possible.
Copyright© 2012 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.
Cisco Systems SAP HANA Solutions
As part of the “Unified Appliance Environment”, Cisco has developed a full portfolio of SAP
HANA appliances based on Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS™) spanning from
the smallest T-shirt sizing, supporting as low as 64 GB memory, up to large scale-out solutions
which can support up to 8 TB of usable memory. Depending on the compression factors, the
Cisco appliances can support databases up to 56 TB, the largest currently supported by SAP.
However the Cisco technology can support up to 20 TB of usable memory, which corresponds
to uncompressed databases up to 100 TB or more.

Cisco UCS: A Unique SAP HANA Solution

Cisco UCS is a single unified system entirely programmable through unified, model-based
management to simplify and speed deployment of enterprise-class applications and services.
All Cisco UCS SAP HANA appliances are intelligent infrastructure that can be managed through
the embedded, single management plane across multiple Cisco UCS rack and blade servers
(Figure 1). This radically simplifies operations and lowers costs. The model-based management
applies personality and configures server, network, and storage connectivity resources. Using
Cisco service profiles, which define the model, it is simple to provision servers by applying a
desired configuration to physical infrastructure. The configuration is applied quickly, accurately,
and automatically, improving business agility, staff productivity, and eliminating a major source
of errors that can cause downtime.
T he Cisco Fabric Extender Architecture reduces the number of system components to
purchase, configure, manage, and maintain by condensing three network layers into one. It
eliminates both blade server and hypervisor-based switches by connecting fabric interconnect
ports directly to individual blade servers and virtual machines. Virtual networks are now
managed exactly as physical networks are, but with massive scalability. This represents a
radical simplification over traditional systems, reducing capital and operating costs while
increasing business agility, simplifying and speeding deployment, and improving performance.
Cisco UCS helps organizations go beyond efficiency: it helps them become more effective
through technologies that breed simplicity rather than complexity. The result is flexible, agile,
high-performance, self-integrating information technology that reduces staff costs and
increases uptime through automation, providing a more rapid return on investment.
The excellent performance combined with the broad range of usable memory make the Cisco
UCS SAP Appliances an excellent, easy-to-manage choice for analyzing massive amounts of
business data.
 Cisco UCS SAP HANA Architecture

SAP HANA T-Shirt Sizes Offered

The Extra Small (XS) and Small (S)-size appliances are based on the Cisco C260 M2 rack
mount server with 2 Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-4870 (2.4 GHz) and up to 256 GB of usable
memory. This configuration is primarily used for development, test, and small production SAP
HANA systems with uncompressed datasets up to 1.75 TB. The Cisco UCS appliance
incorporates a persistency layer, based on internal SSD drives that require no additional drivers
tainting the Linux kernel.
The Medium (M)-size appliance is based on the Cisco C460 M2 rack mount server with 4
Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-4870 (2.4 GHz) and up to 512 GB of usable memory. This
configuration is ideal for use in mid-sized and larger production environments such as the one
used by Medtronic, a large, worldwide manufacturer of medical devices (see customer
example). The persistency layer is provided by two Fusion IO cards to avoid possible
bottlenecks in duo card configurations sharing the same PCI slot.

SAP HANA Scale-out offering

The Cisco UCS solution that has been certified for large SAP HANA implementations is a
uniquely scalable appliance. It allows customers to easily adapt to the growing demands of
their individual environment by incrementally adding Cisco B440 M2 blade servers with 4 Intel®
Xeon® Processors E7-4870 (2.4 GHz) and up to 512 GB usable memory each, as needed. For
every four Cisco UCS blade servers, the persistency layer is provided by an EMC VNX 5300 or
a NetApp FAS 3240, depending on customer preference.
 The “basic configuration” of the Cisco scale-out offering is made up of redundant fabric
interconnects with embedded infrastructure management, a Cisco UCS C200 server for SAP
HANA studio, a Cisco 2911 for secure remote management, and one enclosure with support for
up to 4 Cisco B440 blades. The basic configuration can easily scale by adding up to 3
extension bundles each providing an additional blade enclosure for up to 4 more Cisco B440 M2
blade servers each and the correspondent storage from EMC or NetApp.

High Availability SAP HANA Solution

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

SAP HANA Support infrastructure

All Cisco UCS servers are interconnected with a low-latency, high-bandwidth 10-Gbps unified
Ethernet fabric. The unified fabric supports both IP and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
connections through redundant, high performance, low-latency Cisco Fabric Interconnects. The
Cisco Fabric Interconnect, with embedded management, is the core of the Cisco UCS and
reduces both the number of network “hops” and network latency, critical to SAP HANA
performance. The unified fabric radically reduces the number of cables, inter-chassis switches,
and network adapters required by legacy platforms. This reduces energy consumption and
operational costs resulting in much lower total cost of ownership.

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

Monitoring the CPU and memory workload, and the average index read time at blade
level
Automating quarterly maintenance, including firmware updates and file system validation
Ensuring configuration management assurance for all appliance components
Monitoring data services availability
Proactively monitoring SAP HANA subsystem components status
Monitoring query execution response times using the SAP HANA index for the query
execution SAP HANA Query Response Time
Executing sample queries and recording total execution time and query component
performance breakdown
Proactively monitoring the SAP TREX services statistics based on thresholds
 Alerting CPU, memory, or throughput thresholds for SAP TREX services
Automating Cisco UCS blade and rack server provisioning for use in the appliance in
minutes, instead of days

SAP HANA Installation and Support Services

Cisco SAP HANA installation services includes the assembly of all necessary hardware and
software required for a SAP HANA appliance. Cisco’s SAP HANA engineers will install the
appliance into the customer’s network and connect it to source system(s).
Also included are the necessary SuSe Linux Licenses, Smartnet 24x7x4 day 2 support for the
Cisco hardware, as well as licenses, and first-year maintenance for EMC or NetApp storage as
required.
Implementation of solutions based on Cisco SAP HANA appliances are provided through
Cisco Advanced Services and Cisco’s ecosystem of systems integrators and partners. These
solutions include data modeling, data load, replication, and SAP HANA application configuration.

Customer Success Story

Medtronic dramatically improved reporting performance, increasing the value of its customer
information, with the SAP HANA™ platform and Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco
UCS™) server platform.
Challenge:
Medtronic needed to increase its ability to analyze large amounts of data, such as customer
feedback. BI reporting on its fast-growing data warehouse was straining the capabilities of the
company’s computer infrastructure. Because employees couldn’t generate some types of
reports (particularly using unstructured data), their ability to draw conclusions from existing data
was limited.
Solution:
The company deployed the SAP HANA platform on the Cisco UCS server platform based on
the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family. In preliminary testing, users of an “un-tuned” system
observed query times just one-third as long as those with existing production systems. With the
fully scaled and optimized implementation now in place, Medtronic hopes to cut response times
even further.
Customer Benefit:
BI operations at Medtronic will use the SAP HANA platform to report on structured and
unstructured data, wherever it resides, whether on SAP or non-SAP systems. The added
performance, scalability, and flexibility of this new architecture will increase the value of
company data as it continues to proliferate, increasing employee efficiency and enabling
smarter decision making.

For More Information

For more information on Cisco UCS, please visit http://www.cisco.com/go/ucs
For more information on Cisco UCS SAP HANA Appliances, please visit
http://www.cisco.com/go/sap
To learn more about Cisco Solutions, please visit
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns340/ns394/ns224/solutions.html
To contact Cisco for addition information on SAP on Cisco UCS please email
saponcisco@cisco.com
Dell SAP HANA Solutions
For more than a decade, Dell has collaborated with SAP to deliver hundreds of solutions to
customers across many industries. Dell helps organizations achieve rapid and sustainable
business results with standards-based solutions that are high-performing and end-to-end.
In addition to innovative, leading-edge hardware platforms, Dell offers access to thousands of
enterprise computing solutions consultants. Our knowledge experts incorporate their vast
experience and the knowledge they have acquired over the course of many years into an
enterprise solution delivery model that spans hardware, consulting, implementation, hosting,
and application management services designed to enhance value for customer investments in
SAP solutions.
Dell offers customers a portfolio of end-to-end solutions and services in support of SAP
HANA applications. Our complement of assessment, implementation, management, data
modeling, and use case assistance services helps to reduce IT costs while helping
organizations transform their business. Dell’s innovative platforms can dramatically increase the
availability and speed of business to insightful decision making using SAP HANA.

Dell’s Unique SAP HANA Value Proposition

Dell and SAP have teamed up to offer an optimally configured SAP HANA solution that includes
a hardware appliance, preloaded software, and a full range of services. This solution is both
reliable and scalable, and it is offered in multiple configurations to address your specific
business needs. Dell’s end-to-end solutions give your organization full 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 SAP HANA
solution. This all-in-one solution includes powerful system-management features that
provide for seamless implementation and management.
Energy-efficient system design — Built with Energy Smart technologies, Dell
PowerEdge servers include power management features that enable power capping,
power inventory, and power budgeting within your SAP HANA environment. The carefully
engineered layout of the internal components aids with airflow direction. This design
feature helps to keep the server cool, thus offering potential savings in cooling costs in
your company’s data center.
Large-scale enterprise-consulting expertise — Dell leverages its experience in
delivering enterprise IT and solving “big data” issues for global companies to provide
actionable and real-world technology, strategies, and solutions. Dell’s Center of
Excellence (CoE) is well-established for SAP HANA, SAP Business Warehouse
Accelerator (BWA), and mobile solution complements.
Established methodology — Dell’s In-Memory Computing and Analytic Methodology
(DIMCAM) incorporates best practices and guides customers through a streamlined and
 successful implementation process.
Comprehensive services — Dell’s portfolio of SAP full lifecycle services leverage
industry best practices to provide better business outcomes for SAP clients.
World-class support — Dell’s ProSupport™ and Mission Critical Services help keep
your SAP HANA solution running smoothly.

The combination of Dell’s PowerEdge R910 platform and SAP HANA software enables users
to conduct analytics, performance management, and operations in a single system. Together,
these solutions enable a business to respond more rapidly to events that are impacting their
operations.
By implementing Dell’s SAP HANA solution, an organization can position itself to identify and
analyze trends and patterns in order to improve planning, forecasting, and price optimization.
Enterprise customers taking advantage of Dell’s SAP HANA platform get a cost-effective,
optimized in-memory computing solution that can increase availability and reduce risk.

Dell’s SAP HANA Product

The Dell PowerEdge Server R910 platform has been certified by SAP to run SAP HANA
software, thus offering customers a powerful and flexible way to query and analyze large
volumes of data with great speed. Dell customers running SAP HANA on PowerEdge R910
servers can gain real-time access to information and analytics, enabling them to best address
rapidly evolving market environments.

Dell’s SAP HANA appliance provides:

Performance and reliability in a scalable 4U, four-socket server allowing large

workload consolidation 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 512GB of
DDR3 memory, and 2 x 10Gb Optional LOM with 10 PCIe slots.
Energy-efficient system design built with Energy Smart technologies that enable
power capping, power inventory, and power budgeting within your environment. The
logical component layout of the internal components aids with airflow 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 technology from Dell
offers high IOPs and low latency performance for the in-memory SAP HANA database. While
solid state drives are used to maintain the system’s logs, a RAID group made up of internally
held 15K RPM disks is used to maintain a copy of the data image.
T-Shirt sizes offered
Dell offers several different sizes of HANA appliances to meet your needs, all of which are
based on the Dell PowerEdge R910 server platform.

Larger Scale-Out Configurations

The linear scalability of the SAP HANA software platform makes scaling to meet larger
workload demands a very straightforward process. Dell has tested and certified larger-capacity
solutions that support 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB of compressed data processing, with expandability to
support up to 8TB of memory capacity, SAP HANA’s rated maximum. Using the same
PowerEdge R910 servers, Dell combines the superior scalability and RAS features of this
platform into a multi-node configuration, utilizing 10GbE networking, and sharing data across
Dell Compellent SAN Storage.
To supplement the power, performance, and manageability of the Dell PowerEdge servers,
Dell Compellent SAN Storage offers the additional benefit of the Fluid Data storage system, a
virtualized environment that provides tremendous flexibility in storage management. Automated
tiering of data - standard with Dell Compellent storage software - manages persistent storage
to provide the quickest access to the data sets that are most necessary for analysis. In
addition, it offers high-availability features that simplify backups, expansion, and data migration
provide tangible enhancements to the SAP HANA analytics engine infrastructure.
As always, Dell engineers its components to provide a completely integrated and fully
supported ecosystem for high-performance data analytics.

High Availability
The Dell™ PowerEdge™ R910 is a high-performance 4-socket 4U rack server designed for
reliability and scalability for mission-critical applications. Its high-availability features include:

Built-in reliability features at the CPU, memory, hardware, and hypervisor levels
Intel advanced reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) capabilities
Redundant power supplies
Remote iDRAC6 connectivity
Integrated systems management, Lifecycle Controller, and embedded diagnostics to
help maximize uptime
Internal Dual SD Module providing hypervisor redundancy

Dell’s focus on reliability starts with product design and ends only when it has delivered a
solution that meets strict testing and quality control standards.

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

Additional software needed

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

Support Services
Dell is an expert in SAP HANA system support. Dell has a strong systems management and
support practice as well as an in-depth understanding of SAP hardware and software solutions.
Dell’s SAP HANA appliance comes with 3 years of Dell’s award-winning ProSupport Mission
Critical services and a 3-year extended hardware warranty. Customers receive 24x7x365
phone support, escalation management, and collaborative support leveraging Dell’s global
ProSupport infrastructure of more than 30,000 technicians supporting more than 100 countries
in 55 languages.
Dell’s ProSupport Mission Critical services are designed to accelerate rapid resolution of your
technical problems by ensuring that parts and/or technicians will arrive promptly and by
providing access to Dell’s Critical Situation Process.

Key support features:

 Onsite Response — 4 hour onsite service with 6-hour hardware repair available 24x7,
including holidays.
CritSit Procedures — Severity Level 1 issues will be reviewed by Dell and may be
nominated for CritSit incident coverage through Dell Global Command Centers. During a
CritSit incident, expert resource teams are mobilized to get you back up and running as
quickly as possible.
Emergency dispatch — Onsite service technicians are dispatched in parallel with
phone-based troubleshooting when you declare a Severity Level 1 incident.

Optional SAP HANA services

Dell offers optional SAP HANA services to assist with your implementation.

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

Customer success stories

Atos, a Belgium-based international information technology services company with 74,000
employees, turned to Dell to install a SAP HANA platform for its Atos SAP Competence Center
in Belgium. The Competence Center supports roughly 10,000 Atos consultants for the training
and demonstration environments required for customer engagements. Dell Deployment
Services delivered the SAP HANA appliance on Dell PowerEdge R910 servers. Thu far, the
new system is successfully meeting the needs of Atos consultants.

“I don’t imagine there were many people who knew more about SAP HANA than the Dell
consultant we worked with.”
— Michael Mertens, Head of the Atos SAP Competence Center

Gesellschaft für Information und Bildung (G.I.B), based in Siegen, Germany, is an expert
in SAP software. The company builds add-ons for SAP environments, and is experiencing
growing success with its G.I.B Dispo-Cockpit solution, which improves supply chain
management. G.I.B customers want faster access to supply chain data to help them increase
efficiency and make better decisions. To achieve these objectives, G.I.B welcomed the
development of SAP® HANA™, which enables businesses to analyze SAP data faster and in
real time.
The company was looking for a partner with significant SAP expertise, data center credibility,
robust support and consulting services, and an accredited SAP HANA appliance. So, it turned
to its long-standing IT partner: Dell. They specifically needed to meet a very tight deadline to
develop a SAP HANA platform for their new Dispo-Cockpit application 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 was
previously the case
Business ensures SAP HANA demonstration is ready for key event
Flexible support helps G.I.B meet its business needs
G.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 demonstration
environment to show customers how much faster its Dispo-Cockpit software operates with SAN
HANA.

“Our Dispo-Cockpit solution running on a Dell SAP HANA appliance offers customers
even more value. The response of customers has been positive and we are looking for
pilot customers to jointly install the solution. Dell supported us well, highlighting the close
relationship we have with our technology partners.”
— Nikolaj Schmitz, IT Manager, G.I.B

Contact information for inquiries

Dell offers customers a complete portfolio of end-to-end solutions in support of SAP HANA
applications that reduce IT costs while helping organizations transform their business. Contact
your Dell Sales or Services Account Executive to learn more.
Fujitsu SAP HANA Solutions
Fujitsu, the recipient of the 2012 SAP® Pinnacle award in the “Technology Innovator of the
Year” category, has been recognized for its engagement and excellence in developing
ingenious SAP HANA infrastructure solutions. The Fujitsu portfolio for SAP HANA addresses the
requirements of various customer segments — from specific turnkey appliances for small and
midsize companies to customized solutions for large enterprises. The end-to-end offering
including consultancy services, solution appliance, integration and migration services as well as
the services for the operation and support makes the Fujitsu offering unique.
The following aspects underline the strong position of Fujitsu in combination with SAP:

Mission-critical readiness is a top priority reached by the comprehensive scale-out

offering and extensive high-availability features.
Fujitsu is the first SAP partner worldwide to offer a certified platform for SAP Business
One Analytics powered by SAP HANA.
Fujitsu, a global player managed services, has capabilities to offer managed SAP HANA
to multinationals as well as local small and medium enterprises.
The Fujitsu SAP HANA Global Demo Center can be used remotely by customers who
wish to test and experience the business impact of SAP HANA. A hosted proof of
concept service for tests with original customer data is also in place.

In terms of TCO reduction the Fujitsu offering scores with:

Quick return on investment supported by jump-start services for fast implementation and
an option for rapid deployment of SAP HANA with pre-defined use cases
Reduced downtime via professional solution maintenance
Low operation efforts thanks to an easy administration concept for upgrade and
maintenance

Fujitsu SAP HANA Product Family

Fujitsu SAP HANA infrastructure solutions are based on industry-standard PRIMERGY servers,
which represent a unique combination of Japanese-style innovation and German quality
standards. With rock-solid reliability and independently proven leading price performance, one
benefits from favorable lifecycle costs. Operational costs are reduced through server
management, benchmark proven energy efficiency, and innovative market-leading technology.
Further major building blocks of the Fujitsu SAP HANA infrastructure solution are NetApp
FAS3200 Series storage systems (scale-out offering) and Fujitsu network infrastructure.

T-Shirt Sizes offered

The Fujitsu T-shirt size options are based on PRIMERGY RX600 servers. They represent a
TCO-optimized entry-level offering, which provides ample performance and capacity without
investment in an external storage system. The XS configuration can be upgraded seamlessly to
the M size model.
* All configurations are constantly reviewed and the latest technology is validated and made available whenever applicable.

The single node configurations are ideal for proof of concept/proof of value projects,
development, tests, quality assurance, training and initial SAP HANA implementations with a
defined scope. However, these systems can also be included as building blocks in a multi-node
environment.

Scale-out offering
The Fujitsu multi-node offering for SAP HANA is based on industry-standard PRIMERGY
building blocks combined with a shared NetApp storage system and high performance Brocade
Ethernet Fabric switches as the standard option. Customers can start small and easily add and
integrate PRIMERGY servers and storage capacity as requirements grow. Today the solution
is certified for massive scalability of up to 16 nodes and 8 TB of main memory, however the
concept is already disposed to further growth.

High Availability
Special attention was paid to high availability as a major component for mission-critical
readiness of the overall SAP HANA solution. Thus high availability is already an integral part of
the building block concept. One server can be assigned as a fail-over server and quickly take
over in case a productive server breaks down.
The second pillar of the high availability concept is the utilization of NFS (Network File
System) and the shared NetApp FAS 3240 series. The pivotal idea of in-memory computing is
to store data in the main memory of a computer to allow fast access. The risk of this concept is
that data stored in the main memory is volatile. Once the computer is down, data kept in the
main memory is irretrievably lost. The usage of NFS ensures that all data is constantly mirrored
on the NetApp FAS system. In case of a data loss in main memory, data can be copied back
from the storage system. Besides, the inclusion of an external FAS storage system provides
the classical back-up and restore functionalities.
Highest demand concerning system availability can be met by expanding the infrastructure to
a two-site concept, which means that all infrastructure components and data are reflected in a
second data center. This guarantees disaster resilience with continuous operation even in case
of a total data center breakdown.

Support infrastructure
As an additional, certified component the Fujitsu SAP HANA infrastructure solution always
includes a PRIMERGY RX 100 Infrastructure Management Server (IMS). This mono socket
rack server is used for:

Efficient SAP HANA software maintenance: initial installation and upgrade

Seamless integration into the customer’s systems management landscape
Easy remote support access as a key part of the solution maintenance offering
(SolutionContract)

System administrators especially benefit from the IMS component when software updates
are required in multi-node environments, as the update only needs to be started once from the
IMS and is then automatically distributed within the entire server environment.

Additional software needed

AISConnect software (enables remote access to the SAP HANA landscape)

Support Services
The Fujitsu end-to-end offering comprises a complete set of services for non-disruptive
implementation, integration and operation of the SAP HANA solution.
Services for HANA Implementation and Integration
Fujitsu SAP HANA SolutionContract (Services for SAP HANA Operation)
SolutionContract is the maintenance and support service for defined Fujitsu solutions. It
represents a mix of proactive and reactive services, which ensure that malfunctions are
detected and corrected before they can have any impact on operations. The concept takes into
account that Fujitsu solutions consist of hardware, software and network products from
different vendors. Fujitsu is the single point of contact for all infrastructure components of a
Fujitsu solution as well as their interoperability. SolutionContract offers several service-level
options depending on individual requirements. Note: SAP Software support is not part of this
solution contract!

Additional SAP HANA Services

Fujitsu SmartStart — Short Time to Value Offering (Rapid Deployment)
SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions support a fast implementation and utilization by providing
business users with modular, pre-packed and ready-to-use business content. The Fujitsu
SmartStart option expands this approach. SAP HANA, the Rapid Deployment Solution and
customer-specific settings are implemented and pre-tested on certified Fujitsu infrastructure in
the Fujitsu staging center. The end-to-end offering also comprises the onsite implementation
plus infrastructure and application integration. Thus SmartStart combines SAP Rapid
Deployment Solutions benefits with Fujitsu expertise and services to quickly go live with SAP
HANA business scenarios fully integrated with the SAP Business Suite.
Fujitsu Global SAP HANA Demo Center
Fujitsu has set up the first Global SAP HANA Demo and Proof of Value Center to provide
customers with a practical insight into the scope of SAP HANA capabilities and services.

Customer Success Stories

SAP Business Warehouse Migration to SAP HANA
A leading international manufacturer of automotive components has to date used an SAP
Business Warehouse (BW), but it took several hours to generate reports meaning that
important information was often only available the next day. To accelerate this process
management opted for the innovative SAP HANA appliance software.
The complementary portfolio of SAP HANA infrastructure and services, jointly offered by
Fujitsu and TDS*, convinced the management to entrust this vital project to the two companies
in combination. SAP experts at TDS’s IT Consulting business unit were tasked with design and
implementation, and with operation and support of the production system and Fujitsu
contributed the certified SAP HANA infrastructure solution based on powerful PRIMERGY
RX600 rack servers.
*(TDS — a Fujitsu company)

Mitsui
“To promote the growth of Mitsui’s businesses, it is essential to have an IT platform that flexibly
adapts to change and supports rapid decision making. The objectives of SAP HANA align with
these needs. We greatly value Fujitsu’s early leadership in support of SAP HANA, as well
as Fujitsu’s capabilities in providing global support for our IT platforms, and we intend to
continue to work with Fujitsu in this area in the future. With the global cooperation from the
team at Fujitsu, we have already begun implementing this technology, and look forward to
continuing to work with Fujitsu to achieve our mutual objectives”.
— Mr. Toru Nakajima
Associate Officer and General Manager of Information Technology Promotion Division
Mitsui & Co., Ltd.

Contact information for inquiries

Global Fujitsu SAP Competence Center
expert.sap@ts.fujitsu.com
Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Select for SAP HANA
Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Select for SAP HANA is an SAP-certified, optimized, and
converged infrastructure platform for SAP HANA that enhances an organization’s decision-
making capabilities while providing advanced business insights based on instant, intuitive access
to data. This platform is comprised of Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 and Hitachi Unified Storage
(HUS) 130, an enterprise-class storage system rated at 99.999% uptime with SAP in-memory
computing technology for a broad range of high-speed analytic capabilities.
The HDS SAP HANA Solution is pre-integrated in Hitachi Data Systems distribution centers
and is architected to meet SAP’s high standards, including SUSE Linux 11 (for SAP) and SAP
HANA.
Customers can derive the following benefits from Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Select for
SAP HANA:

Predictable, repeatable, reliable results: Pre-validated reference architectures, pre-

packaged solutions with enterprise-class components across the entire stack, and
targeted provisioning to help ensure consistent, predictable results as organizations look
to manage and store massive volumes of rapidly changing data.
Exceptional performance: High-density computing and throughput with wide-striping
technology for enhanced utilization. Customers benefit from flexible server management
capabilities and scalable architectures.
Faster time-to-value: Quicker, simpler deployment offered from a single source for
ordering and for providing services for planning and implementation. Pre-configuration
and SAP validation of key components drastically reduce onsite deployment time.
Intelligent automation of complex tasks enables rapid provisioning of resources with the
assurance that the appropriate underlying infrastructure components are in place.

As additional applications and business units use SAP HANA or the organization’s data
volumes increase, all three Hitachi SAP HANA appliances sizes — ‘Small’, ‘Medium’, and ‘Large’
—enable users to easily scale system processing capability without “forklift upgrades” 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 the server 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. In addition,
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 for high
availability, down to the dual battery backup that protects the cache during power outages.
 It contains symmetric active-active controllers that self-balance workloads.
SAN: Fibre Channel host bus adaptors
Blade servers: Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 offers the considerable I/O capacity and
onboard 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 1.0

SAP IMCE Server 1.0, Client, Studio
SAP Host Agent
Sybase 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 Unified Storage 130
storage subsystems and with SAP HANA pre-loaded.

Hitachi supports SAP HANA from the smallest configuration with a single Compute Blade and
256 GB of RAM to the largest configuration of 4 Compute Blade 2000s and 1.0 terabytes of
RAM.
 Operating System: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 for SAP
Storage: Hitachi HUS 130, which is designed for high availability, down to the dual
battery backup that protects the cache during power outage. It contains symmetric
active-active controllers that self-balance workloads.
Network: Fibre Channel host bus adaptors
Compute: Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 offers the large I/O capacity and onboard
memory required for effective implementation of SAP HANA

Figure 1 — Hitachi SAP HANA Appliance Architecture

Hitachi-SAP Alliance
Since 1994, Hitachi, Ltd., and its subsidiaries, including Hitachi Data Systems, have had a
strategic relationship with SAP that includes the sale, integration, and implementation of SAP
solutions. During this time, Hitachi has won numerous SAP awards for exceptional customer
satisfaction.
 In 2011, Hitachi became an SAP Global Technology Partner, the highest level of partnership
SAP offers. Many large global enterprises run their business on SAP and Hitachi.
Hitachi also ensures the necessary storage performance and high throughput to meet the
stringent demands of in-memory computing. By dramatically reducing the traditional delay
between operations and analytics, this platform helps business leaders gain near real-time
insights and information to make smarter business decisions, faster.
Services
Hitachi Data Systems Global Solution Services (GSS) offers experienced infrastructure
consultants, proven methodologies, and comprehensive services for converged platforms to
help customers further streamline their SAP environments. The HANA Implementation Service
ensures a smooth integration with lower risk and accelerated deployment of the Hitachi Unified
Compute Platform Select for SAP HANA tailored to our customer’s specific needs. Along with
our consulting partners such as Hitachi Consulting, we can integrate and customize the solution
into the customer’s SAP environment.
Support Infrastructure
Hitachi Data Systems Global Services and Hitachi Consulting are equipped to support every
aspect of an SAP HANA solution. In addition, they provide strategy; infrastructure; and HANA
Appliance, Integration, Development, and Support Services for a HANA initiative.
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 capabilities delivers one fully
integrated, highly-optimized environment that ensures the desired results 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 email sap@hds.com. You
can find additional information at www.hds.com/go/sap or Hitachi Consulting:
http://www.hitachiconsulting.com/hana.
HP SAP HANA Solutions
Through a close, collaborative partnership that spans more than 20 years, HP and SAP have
worked together to offer an innovative and comprehensive portfolio of products and services
that help more than 25,000 joint customers around the world of all sizes, in all industries, solve
their business problems. This strategic partnership has ultimately resulted in product offerings
like HP AppSystems for SAP HANA as well as value-added services to implement rapid-
deployment solutions for SAP HANA.
During this partnership, HP received numerous SAP Innovation and Impact awards across 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 HANA
SAP Services Partner of the Year, SAP HANA

HP has also recently received the following Pinnacle awards:

Run SAP Partner of the Year winner

Global Software Solution Partner of the Year finalist
Global 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 predefined configurations
for a powerful and comprehensive set of solutions that are designed to work together. The
portfolio includes:

Multiple single-node configurations (XS, S, M, M+, L) based on industry-leading HP

ProLiant DL580 and DL980 G7 Servers
An XL scale-out configuration, based on industry-leading HP BladeSystem Servers, with
fully automated failover for high availability

HP’s Unique Value Proposition for SAP HANA

HP 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 Warehouse Accelerator.
Based on that experience, HP has developed the core competencies to deliver successful
implementations of HP AppSystems for SAP HANA. The company offers a portfolio of six
configurations (XS, S, M, M+, L, XL) to meet the needs of any-sized business.
HP has implemented more than 77,000 SAP installations worldwide, and HP infrastructure
runs nearly half of all SAP installations in the world. In fact, HP is a global leader in SAP
operations, supporting 1.7 million users in more than 50 countries. in addition, 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 HANA

HP designed the HP AppSystems for SAP HANA on industry-leading x86 HP ProLiant DL580
and DL980 G7 Servers for single-node SAP HANA implementations, and on HP ProLiant BL680
G7 Server Blades for larger scale-out requirements, providing a large contiguous memory
footprint for faster in-memory applications. The scale-out solution in the portfolio of HP
AppSystems for SAP HANA is based on HP ProLiant BL680c G7 Server Blades, the industry-
leading blade solution that is ideal for SAP HANA scale-out implementations.
For the SAP HANA scale-out technology, HP delivers a unique storage platform based on the
HP X9300 Network Storage System that offers unlimited scale-out capability and disaster-
tolerant features. Designed to be extremely scalable, flexible, and cost-efficient, HP X9300
Network Storage Systems deliver excellent performance and a modular storage infrastructure
to accommodate unprecedented storage growth and performance.

HP AppSystems for SAP HANA

Based on HP Converged Infrastructure products

Multiple configuration choices, sized for your company’s needs (XS, S, M, M+, L, XL)
HP ProLiant DL580 G7 Servers or HP ProLiant DL980 G7 Servers for XS to L
single-node configurations
HP ProLiant BL680 G7 Server Blades for XL highly scalable configurations [for?] up
to 8 TB of compressed data
HP Storage for log files and data files
HP X9300 Network Storage Systems for scale-out cluster file systems
HP Networking with HP Virtual Connect and ProCurve
HP ProLiant Service packages and HP Insight Control management software
HP Fast Start Service
HP Technology Support Services

SAP HANA T-Shirt Sizes Offered

Scale-out Offering
HP offers a unique scale-out offering that provides the high availability your business demands
today, 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 with future 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 HANA scale-
out implementations for balanced computing to handle the most demanding enterprise
class applications.
The HP X9300 IBRIX Network Storage System is a unique storage platform that offers
unlimited scale-out capability and disaster-tolerant features.
HP P6500 Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVA) delivers high-throughput, mission-critical,
redundant storage for data and log files, SYS files, config files, traces, and more.
HP networking solutions like HP Virtual Connect for simplifying and virtualizing the
connectivity between the HANA blade nodes, the network, and the shared storage.
 HP’s scale-out solution provides high availability through a stand-by blade with automatic
failover, in addition to disaster-tolerant technology. HP offers both synchronous and
asynchronous disaster-tolerance solutions, available either as standard integrated functionality
of the scale-out solution or as an add-on. These solutions are designed to protect your
information systems in the event of a catastrophic event. In doing so they help to mitigate risk,
improve IT availability, and reduce the costs of downtime.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery

With HP AppSystems for SAP HANA, HP has delivered a fully automated failover mechanism
for high availability, a stand-by blade that automatically is activated upon a failure of any node in
the cluster. Only one node is needed, regardless of the number of nodes in the cluster.
As mentioned earlier, disaster tolerance is designed into HP’s SAP HANA technology today.
Consequently, once SAP HANA software is released with disaster-tolerance capability, HP’s
scale-out solution is already equipped to enable this functionality.

Storage Infrastructure
HP PCIe IO Accelerator for HP ProLiant Servers is a direct-attach, solid-state PCIe card-
based solution for enhancing application performance. Based on Multi-Level Cell (MLC) and
Single-Level Cell (SLC) NAND Flash technology, these devices are ideal for accelerating I/O
performance and maintaining SAP HANA log file data.
For mission-critical deployments and shared-storage infrastructures, the HP X9300 IBRIX
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 scalability while delivering
excellent performance and a modular storage infrastructure to accommodate unprecedented
storage growth.

Additional Software
HP ensures global quality standards by preloading and configuring SAP HANA software at the
factory before delivery. No additional software is necessary for the HP AppSystems for SAP
HANA. All solutions are built to your specifications, and they include all required components,
services and support.
HP also provides monitoring and backup software solutions HP to further enhance your
solution. HP AppSystems for SAP HANA can be easily monitored utilizing HP Systems Insight
Manager (SIM), available both with HP ProLiant servers and as a free download from HP. This
powerful yet intuitive solution provides hardware-level management for system administrators to
improve system uptime and health. SIM is also available as a component 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 of physical and virtual
servers, from any location. Insight Control integrates specific management functionality into HP
Systems Insight Manager to manage server health, deploy and migrate servers quickly,
optimize power consumption and performance, and control servers from anywhere.
Support Services
HP delivers a comprehensive solution that encompasses hardware, software, and services
from a single resource. HP delivers the full lifecyle of services required to progress from the
assessment and design of an SAP HANA solution to the build, implementation, and support of
the solution.

Design and Build

With every SAP HANA system, HP includes the resources to assist with the sizing and
configuration of an SAP HANA environment. This includes the sizing of the appropriate system,
in addition to recommendations concerning the configurations to address your requirements for
multiple SAP landscapes, high availability, and disaster tolerance. Then, with every SAP HANA
order, HP includes its core competency process for factory integration, where we integrate the
hardware, load all of the software components, and apply your unique environmental settings
for network and source systems. Finally, the system completes a burn-in test before we ship
the order to your location.

Implementation
Delivery of the SAP HANA appliance is not the final step. Beyond the design and build of a SAP
HANA solution, integration of the solution into your environment is equally, if not more, critical to
successfully getting SAP HANA up and running. HP understands this, so they include
installation, implementation, and training with every SAP HANA solution we deliver. The basic
foundational service includes the following:

Incorporation of SAP HANA in the local network

Connection of SAP HANA to source systems
Implementation of basic security and authorizations
Configuration of SAP BusinessObjects front end or Microsoft® Excel to communicate
with SAP HANA
Validation of the integrated environment and the end-to-end functionality of the SAP
HANA system
Review of the access to, and use of, the SAP in-memory computing studio
Installation and configuration troubleshooting

Support
After a successful implementation, HP turns over support of your SAP HANA solution to HP’s
support services team, which delivers HP Proactive Care Service. Proactive Care Service
includes proactive support as well as hardware and software support to provide an additional
level of support for organizations that are managing complex IT environments. 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 that includes an assigned local HP specialist who delivers
an “Account Support Plan” customized to fit your needs. Each customized plan includes
delivering updates to your hardware firmware and operating system, regular system health
checks, and setup of remote monitoring. For hardware and software support, HP delivers
enhanced support from trained specialists in its Advanced Solution Center. With a connection to
SAP’s support operation, HP can take the first call on any SAP HANA support issue. Based on
this well-established process, HP is able to deliver industry-leading support and help improve
performance of SAP HANA solutions.

Additional SAP HANA services from HP

HP provides services to help you identify your strategy, quantify your business opportunity,
computing your ROI, and implementing an HP AppSystem for SAP HANA into your SAP
landscape. These services were designed exclusively for SAP HANA. They include 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 to
enable your organization to realize that strategy. This service includes a roadmap for
implementation.
The HP Impact Analysis for SAP HANA helps you understand the technical feasibility of
introducing SAP HANA to meet your real-time and high-volume data analysis
requirements. It is highly recommended for each SAP HANA implementation.
The HP Financial Assessment for SAP HANA provides granular information to support
your decision-making process. It is formatted to be suitable for use in supporting
budgeting processes.
The HP Solution Assessment for SAP HANA is an engagement during which HP
consultants will assess your existing information landscape in detail, identify data sets for
use with SAP HANA, detect any gaps in the current environment, and create a solution
blueprint based on the findings.
The HP Landscape Preparation Service for SAP HANA is designed to ensure that the
surrounding solution landscape is in place and is optimized to allow for the inclusion of
the SAP HANA appliance and to speed time-to-value of the SAP HANA solution. This
service includes upgrading or installing SAP and non-SAP components in the landscape.
HP Fast Start Service includes required services that accompany the appliance to ensure
that the appliance is properly installed; database connections are made; and the
replication and extract, transform, load (ETL) of data from the source systems have
been tested and confirmed as fully functional.
The HP Implementation Service for SAP HANA is a complete end-to-end SAP HANA
implementation based on a solution blueprint designed by a team of HP consultants.
These consultants follow the HP Global Implementation Methodology for Business
Intelligence for all SAP HANA implementation projects
Implementation services for rapid-deployment solutions covering a wide range of
business reporting and analytics.
HP Migration Services—SAP HANA Appliance Software Service Pack 3 supports the
deployment of an HP AppSystem for SAP HANA as the database for SAP NetWeaver
 Business Warehouse. HP is offering a migration package for current SAP NetWeaver
BW customers to assist them in migrating from their existing database to an HP
AppSystem for SAP HANA. In addition to migration services, this package includes
complimentary phone assessment services, asset recovery services, and financial
services, as listed below.
On-site migration assessment workshops
SAP NetWeaver BW upgrade service
SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3 migration to a database built on SAP HANA
SAP NetWeaver BW optimization for the SAP HANA database

HP Financial Services
HP Financial Services can make your transition to SAP HANA easy and cost effective, and it
can help you get started even sooner. You can expand your organization’s SAP HANA initiatives
by taking advantage of an efficient, effective way to maximum return from IT and BI solutions,
while minimizing risk and aggressively managing costs. HP Financial Services 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 safeguard privacy, and it complies with
applicable environmental regulations for disposing of SAP infrastructure assets that are
displaced by your new HP AppSystems for SAP HANA. For further 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 extra effort
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 the
SAP 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 standard application
benchmark simulates the current demands of typical SAP NetWeaver BW customers. 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 the ability
of an HP AppSystem for the SAP HANA database to deliver on today’s new customer
requirements. These systems have revolutionized user access to data, and they deliver
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 amazing 65,990 ad-hoc
query navigation steps per hour with 1 billion records (certification number 2012023) 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 Stories

For 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 that reflect their
smartphone and data needs. A key component of the company’s marketing strategy is to
conduct highly targeted customer communications concerning mobile phone services and offers.
Unfortunately, its previous analytics solution was too complex and could not track customer
offers in a timely way.
The solution—built on HP Converged Infrastructure in collaboration with SAP AG and
deployed in just two weeks—enhances T-Mobile’s ability to deliver targeted marketing
campaigns to customers by transforming the way it delivers, manages, and measures its
wireless 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 quickly delivered 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 a unique 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 constantly added
new branches in different cities, it needed to implement a database solution that could keep
pace with its impressive growth while providing the real-time, accurate data its executives
needed to make informed business decisions. To accomplish this task, Nongfu Spring chose HP
AppSystems for SAP HANA due to the stable, powerful performance of its HP ProLiant DL980
server and the professional services provided by the HP team.
With the new system in place, Nongfu Spring’s manufacturing environment now runs more
smoothly—and with more accurate data. For example, the increased computing speeds enable
the company to analyze data 200-300 times faster than with their previous database platform.
Another benefit: Financial reporting times have reduced from seven to three days.
“The market today is changing constantly, and companies and the market environment have
more new IT requirements,” asserts Nongfu Spring CIO Patrick Hoo. “By cooperating with HP
on SAP HANA 1.0, we have proven that HANA is a high-speed in-memory computing column-
storage database product that is mature and practical. It fundamentally solved the problem of
slow computing and presentation of data caused by having too much data, which had affected
our business. It also built a solid foundation for our IT department to provide strong support for
the company’s rapid future business development.”
Contact information for inquiries
For more information, visit http://www.hp.com/go/sap/hana or contact your HP sales
representative.
IBM Systems and Services Solutions for SAP HANA
SAP HANA deployed on IBM System x Workload Optimized Solutions with the IBM General
Parallel File System (GPFS) offer simple, seamless scalability for your SAP HANA
environment. In addition, IBM offers installation and managed services to help you manage your
SAP HANA infrastructure cost-effectively. IBM Global Business Services (GBS) can help you
extract the business value out of your SAP HANA implementation.

IBM and SAP team for long-term business innovation

With a unique combination of expertise, experience and proven methodologies — and a history
of shared innovation — IBM can help strengthen and optimize your information infrastructure to
support your SAP applications.
IBM and SAP have worked together for 40 years to deliver innovation to their shared
customers. Since 2006, IBM has been the market leader for implementing SAP’s original in-
memory appliance, the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA). Hundreds of
BWA deployments have been successfully completed in multiple industries and countries. These
BWA appliances have been successfully deployed in many of SAP’s largest business
warehouse implementations, which are based on IBM hardware and DB2 — optimized for SAP.
IBM and SAP offer solutions that move business forward and anticipate organizational
change by strengthening your business analytics information infrastructure for greater
operational efficiency and offering a way to make smarter decisions faster.

IBM eX5 Systems with GPFS Power SAP HANA

SAP HANA, delivered on IBM eX5 enterprise servers with fifth-generation IBM® Enterprise X-
Architecture® technology (eX5), helps transform the enterprise by addressing current needs
while delivering the robust scalability and performance needed to accommodate growth. SAP
HANA running on powerful IBM eX5 enterprise servers with the Intel Xeon processor E7 family
combines the speed and efficiency of in-memory processing with the ability to analyze massive
amounts of business data — enabling companies to eliminate barriers between real-time events
and real-time business decisions.
IBM is the first to decouple memory and input/output (I/O) from the processor — moving
processing power from what’s theoretically possible to what’s actually possible. IBM System x
servers with fifth-generation IBM eX5 technology enable SAP HANA customers to benefit from
a shared vision that delivers simplicity and automation designed to help organizations
accelerate business outcomes while lowering TCO.
IBM eX5 enterprise servers with Intel Xeon processors offer extreme memory and
performance scalability. With improved hardware economics and new technology offerings,
IBM is helping SAP realize a real-time enterprise with in-memory business applications. IBM
eX5 enterprise servers deliver a long history of leading SAP benchmark performance.
These System x servers are equipped with processors from the Intel Xeon processor E7
family, which combine exceptional raw compute power with increased memory bandwidth and
support for significantly greater memory capacity to deliver superior performance to previous-
generation processors. With up to ten cores in each processor, the four-socket x3850 X5 can
be scaled to 40 cores and 80 threads with the use of Intel Hyper-Threading Technology.
Organizations can achieve extreme scaling within each node for running demanding workloads
on a compact system.
SAP HANA is a business-critical technology and requires a robust and reliable enterprise
computing platform. Sophisticated eX5 features such as Predictive Failure Alerts warn ahead of
potential hardware failures, trigger preemptive action, and help maintain application availability.
In addition, eX5 features such as eXFlash solid-state disk technology can yield significant
performance improvements in storage access, helping deliver an optimized system solution for
SAP HANA. Standard features in the solution such as the High IOPS MLC Duo Adapter for IBM
System x can also provide fast access to storage.

Workload Optimized Solutions

IBM offers several Workload Optimized Solution models for SAP HANA. These models, based
on the 2-socket x3690 X5 and 4-socket x3950 X5, are optimally designed and certified by SAP
and can be ordered as a single appliance part number. They are delivered preconfigured with
key software components preinstalled to help speed delivery and deployment of the solution.
The IBM System x3690 X5 is a 2U rack-optimized server. This machine brings the eX5
features and performance to the mid tier. It is an ideal match for the smaller, two-CPU
configurations for SAP HANA. The x3690 X5–based configurations offer 128 to 256 GB of
memory and the choice of only solid-state disk or a combination of spinning disk and solid-state
disk. The x3950 X5–based configurations leverage the scalability of eX5 and offer the capability
to pay as you grow — starting with a 2-processor, 256 GB configuration and growing to a 8-
processor, 1 TB configuration.
The IBM System x3950 X5 is the workload-optimized version of the 4U x3850 X5 server, the
new flagship server of the IBM x86 server family. These systems are designed for maximum
utilization, reliability, and performance for compute-intensive and memory-intensive workloads
such as SAP HANA. This server is ideal for the medium- and large-scale SAP HANA
implementations. The x3950 X5–based configurations integrate either the 320 GB High IOPS
SD Class SSD PCIe adapter or the 640 GB High IOPS MLC Duo Adapter. Note: An 8-socket
configuration uses a scalability kit that combines the 7143-H2x* with the 7143-H3x* to create a
single 8-socket, 1 TB system.
IBM and SAP have worked closely together to validate each of the workload-optimized
configurations and have also collaborated on performance testing. Performance testing of SAP
HANA running on IBM eX5 enterprise servers and have demonstrated the ability to handle
10,000 queries per hour against 1.3 TB of data, returning results within seconds.
Outstanding results like this are founded on years of joint product development which allows
IBM and SAP offerings to be integrated for simplified implementation. This is true of IBM’s DB2
database which is tightly aligned with SAP HANA for seamless replication of data when using
the Sybase replication server.

Simple and Seamless Scalability

Using the workload-optimized solution models you can combine multiple models together to
create multi-node scale-out configurations. These multi-node scale-out configurations enable
you to achieve larger SAP HANA memory sizes simply by adding compute nodes. IBM was the
first vendor to have multi-node scale-out configurations and currently has 4-node x3690 X5 and
x3950 X5 and 16 node x3950 X5 solutions validated. You can start with one 256GB node,
upgrade to a 512GB node, and grow your environment to 16 nodes. This modular approach
enables you to invest in a Workload-Optimized solution for SAP HANA and grow your
infrastructure as your SAP HANA environment grows. In addition, you can handle unplanned
outages by including an additional High-Availability (HA) node in your configuration.
These multi-node scale-out configurations do not require an external Storage Area Network
(SAN) or multiple SANs. The IBM General Parallel File System™ (GPFS™) software in these
configurations has the unique capability to use the storage contained within each node helping
to simplify the infrastructure required for SAP HANA. Only IBM has a High-Availability concept
which allows customers to seamlessly extend their installation to enable High Availability using
GPFS replication and an additional stand-by node.
GPFS™, with its high-performance enterprise file management, can help move beyond
simply adding storage to optimizing data management for SAP HANA. High-performance
enterprise file management using GPFS gives SAP HANA applications:

Performance to satisfy the most demanding SAP HANA applications

Seamless capacity expansion to handle the explosive growth of data SAP HANA
environments
High reliability and availability to help eliminate production outages and provide
disruption-free maintenance and capacity upgrades
Seamless capacity and performance scaling — along with the proven reliability features
and flexible architecture of GPFS — help your company foster innovation by simplifying
your environment and streamlining data workflows for increased efficiency for SAP
HANA applications.

IBM Intelligent Cluster integrated packaging and assembly can help speed installation and
deployment of multi-node scale-out HA configurations as well as reduce implementation risk if
you require all of your HANA server nodes preassembled and packaged in a rack.
By implementing SAP HANA on eX5 enterprise servers with GPFS, you can realize faster
performance, less complexity and greater efficiency from a powerful and proven converged
infrastructure environment of integrated technologies. These workload-optimized solutions for
SAP HANA can help simplify operations, consolidate resources and dynamically migrate
functionality as business changes, while delivering the ability to quickly change the way users
look at mass amounts of data without compromising data integrity or security.
For more information about the IBM Systems solution for SAP HANA and the IBM System x
Workload Optimized Solutions for SAP HANA, please read the IBM Redpaper: SAP In-Memory
Computing on IBM eX5 Systems

Services to speed deployment

To help speed deployment and simplify maintenance of your x3690 X5 and x3950 X5: Workload
Optimized Solution for SAP HANA, IBM Lab Services and IBM Global Technology Services
offer quick-start services to help set up and configure the appliance and health-check services
to ensure it continues to run optimally. In addition, IBM also offers skills and enablement
services for administration and management of IBM eX5 enterprise servers. IBM offers Quick
Start implementation services to help you install and configure your SAP HANA appliance and
HealthCheck services to help you manage and maintain your SAP HANA appliance. IBM also
offers skills enablement services to provide technical training to your teams that need to
manage the HANA appliance. If you determine that you do not want to manage the SAP HANA
appliance, then IBM offers a Managed Service that can provide 24x7 monitoring and
management of the SAP HANA appliance.

A trusted service partner

Many clients require more than software and hardware products. They need a partner to help
them assess their current capabilities, identify areas for improvement and develop a strategy
for moving forward. This is where IBM Global Business Services (GBS) provides immeasurable
value with thousands of SAP consultants in 80 countries. GBS combines its SAP
implementation experience and skills with the broader IBM business intelligence competencies
to create an unparalleled opportunity for our clients to not only implement SAP HANA solutions,
but to then take that implementation to new heights and identify transformational opportunities.
The GBS HANA team within IBM has leveraged the experiences gained to date on SAP
HANA offerings and grouped efforts into two main opportunities for clients who wish to deploy
SAP HANA — “Do New Things” and “Run Existing Things Faster”.
The GBS Consulting Practice offers a broad range of services for SAP HANA such as:

Discovery and assessment services to maximize business impact

Architecture assessment and benchmark services
Proof of concept services
Express deployment offerings, including industry best practices

These services have been grouped into four key offerings as shown in the table below:
 Combining the strengths of GBS with IBM System x Workload Optimized Solutions for SAP
HANA allows our customers to gain the maximum benefits of their investment in SAP HANA —
and to bring those solutions to life to address immediate information needs and identify the
transformational opportunities that can bring the organization to the highest levels of insight and
action.

IBM can also offer financing options helping clients to acquire IT solutions that are
tailored to their individual goals and budget.

For more information

To learn more about the IBM Systems and Services solutions for SAP HANA and IBM eX5
Workload Optimized Systems, please contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM
Business Partner, or visit: www.ibm-sap.com/hana.
NEC SAP HANA Solutions
NEC delivers SAP HANA as a key platform to realize a world where people can reach all the
information they need or want and to discover something new and worthwhile from massive
amount of data produced daily.
The NEC High-Performance Appliance for SAP HANA incorporates the truly innovative in-
memory computing technology of SAP and the truly dependable hardware platform of NEC
which has kept the No.1 market share in PC-servers in the Japan market for 16 years.
Currently, NEC offers three certified SAP HANA models (XS, S and L size), with future plan
towards offering an M-size model also.
All the NEC SAP HANA appliances are constructed on the Express5800 Scalable Enterprise
Server that offers upward scalability to 8 sockets and 2TB memory, fault-management
functionalities through EXPRESSSCOPE® Engine SP2, and ViridentTM FlashMax device for
high-workload environments.

Why Express5800 is ideal platform for SAP HANA

High-performance Express5800 Scalable Enterprise Servers, which leverage NEC’s long
heritage in the development of supercomputer and mainframe technologies to achieve highly
fault tolerant and flexible system expandability, are leveraged as the platform for SAP HANA.
The flagship NEC Express5800/A1080a model has capabilities to mount up to 8CPUs and 2TB
RAM within a single 7U chassis, and NEC Express5800/A1040a also has capabilities to mount
up to 4CPU and 1TB RAM.
One noteworthy hardware feature is its EXPRESSSCOPE® Engine SP2, a uniquely
developed device by NEC based on our experience in UNIX servers, enables to monitor and
control Express5800/A1080a and A1040a with remote and centralized interface regardless of
the power status of servers. It significantly increases maintainability and reduces downtime of
SAP HANA.

SAP HANA T-Shirt sizes offered

Support Infrastructure
Virident FlashMax — is a Storage Class Memory (SCM) solution that offers enterprises
unconditional performance combined with the industry’s highest storage capacity in the smallest
footprint. FlashMAX has been designed from the ground up to fully exploit modern computer
architectures, such as SAP HANA, which leverage many fast CPU cores and the PCI Express
interconnect bus to deliver maximum application performance. It also offers supreme
performance without compromise over the entire lifetime of the device, across all application
workloads, even when the device is full or nearly full.
The scale-up configurations of NEC High-Performance Appliance for SAP HANA leverage
Virident FlashMax to implement Log volume backup which is a key component to achieving
smooth collaboration with existing database tools.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications — is a fine-tuned and supported
operating system based on fully open source technology towards the nature of SAP
application’s workload and its system lifecycle. Its priority support provides unlimited 24hx7d
technical support from SUSE, and its extended support offers additional 18 months for package
maintenance. It also maximizes system uptime with highly-selected package-updates; only
packages that affect SAP system shall be upgraded.
NEC High-Performance Appliance for SAP HANA uses SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP
Applications, including its priority support. NEC has a lot of experience providing mission-critical
grade support on Linux systems, and has contributed various kind of open source community
including Linux kernel development. Through the long-standing partnership with SUSE, NEC
provides mission-critical class support for SAP HANA.

Additional software supported

NEC ESMPRO/ServerManager — is server management software that provides
administrators a centralized view to manage or monitor distributed multiple nodes.
It leverages EXPRESSSCOPE® Engine SP2 of Express5800 servers and
ESMPRO/ServerAgent installed on the system, to collect the run-time information of both
hardware and software; which enables administrators to identify issues quickly if and when
something should happen.

Support and Additional Services

Through the longstanding partnership with SAP and SUSE, NEC will offer mission-critical grade
support service from hardware to applications, for the global market.
NEC was one of the first distributors of SAP BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence (BI)
solutions in Japan market, which is the front-end tool for visualization and analytics for SAP
HANA, and NEC has experience supporting more than 500 installations with help of our sales,
support and consulting organizations.
In addition, NEC has established an evaluation team of SAP HANA to make the latest
technology commercially available as soon as possible.

Support Service
For more information, please contact NEC sales representative in your region.
 Chapter 11
SAP HANA Projects and Implementation
“He who fails to plan is planning to fail.”
— Winston Churchill

Introduction
So, you’ve decided to move forward with SAP HANA. Great! But how do you get started? SAP
HANA is a new technology, so your organization may lack the in-house expertise to implement it
on their own. Fortunately, whatever your situation, expert project planning, implementation, and
development services are available that can help ensure that you get the maximum business
value from SAP HANA, as quickly as possible.

Selecting the Right SAP HANA Service Partner

It’s important to choose a partner who can help you be successful with SAP HANA. A recent
IDC report found that four of the top six impediments to implementing in-memory technologies
— lack of skills, risk, organizational barriers, and return-on-investment concerns — highlight the
need for a service provider who is highly experienced with in-memory technologies.9 Such a
partner should be able to help your company plan, deploy, and use SAP HANA to create value
across the organization — harnessing the power of big data, delivering real-time analytics and
business processes, and managing a robust architecture complete with system landscapes and
solutions. The right partner should also provide you with access to experienced, certified
experts in areas such as architecture, deployment, and development. Throughout the
implementation process, you’ll need to think about how SAP HANA fits into your overall IT
strategy now, and how it can serve as a basis for growth and innovation in the future.
Listen to how USHA International, a leading Indian consumer products company, with the help of SAP Services,
utilized SAP Netweaver Business Warehouse, powered by SAP HANA, to improve supply chain productivity 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 will benefit from
your SAP HANA investment. First and foremost, a good implementation partner should help you
develop a comprehensive roadmap detailing how in-memory computing can help your company
run at maximum speed and solve specific business problems. To accomplish these goals, that
partner must ask the critical questions that mean the difference between success and failure —
and be able to answer these questions correctly.
Although the specific questions will vary by engagement, you should start by identifying the
right business use case for SAP HANA in your company. At SAP, we often distinguish between
business intelligence and technology intelligence. The best technology in the world will not
necessarily create value if it isn’t aligned with the proper business scenario. Thus, the first
question to consider is: Where can an in-memory solution create the most value for the least
investment in the shortest timeframe, with the least disruption for business users? The answer
to that question will help you align desires (what you want) and needs (what you actually need).
At that point you can begin mapping the solution back to a technical landscape.

Proper risk assessment is also crucial. Ask yourself:

How can we realize the solution in the shortest time with the least risk?
Does either SAP or its implementation partners offer any predefined services or
application solutions that can help?
What does the high-level project plan look like, and how well does it align with our
business requirements and expectations?
What personnel do we need to ensure successful planning and delivery?

Everyone Wants a Low-Cost, Rapid Implementation — But How?

Once you’ve documented and received signoff on the planning phase, it’s time to identify the
expertise and skill sets you need, whether internal or external (or both). The goal: an efficient,
low-cost implementation that mitigates risk to both business and IT.
Your solution partner should be able to offer a wide range of solution scenarios including end-
to-end project implementation experience coupled with a holistic delivery methodology. For
many projects, prepackaged fixed-price offerings based on globally compiled best practices,
such as SAP Rapid Deployment solutions, can accelerate deployment while limiting costs. Such
solutions include preconfigured software, implementation services, content, and end user
enablement that together can radically accelerate time to value — delivering benefits in weeks
rather than months.
What about Highly Complex Projects?
If your business problem is really complex — for example, you need to manage large amounts
of data, work with highly-customized systems, extend existing solutions, or build new solutions
specific to your needs — you may want to consider specialized services. If you choose this
option, it’s especially important that you select a partner with deep knowledge and skilled
resources, one who understands your unique issues and has a track record for delivering
custom solutions that successfully address their clients’ needs.

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 fully reap the
benefits of this new technology. In addition to educating your technical and IT staff, you need to
make certain that your business users know the full extent of what is now 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 and
certifications to give technical consultants and internal IT staff the knowledge and skills they need to fully leverage
the power of SAP HANA. For more information visit the SAP Learning and Software Services for HANA 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 implementation partner.
The next step is to determine how best to use SAP HANA within your current environment to
deliver maximum value in your organization.

SAP HANA Use Cases

We’ve reviewed many of the key factors that you need to consider when you select an SAP
HANA implementation partner. Now we’ll turn our attention to how best to use this powerful new
technology to generate the most business value for this investment.
SAP HANA is incredibly versatile. It can add value to a wide range of business scenarios, and
it can be deployed in myriad ways to meet your project expectations and technical
requirements. SAP HANA can also complement existing landscapes and replace outdated
solutions.
With that versatility in mind, we’ll review four typical use cases for SAP HANA deployments
today, as well as some of the potential scenarios for the future. These use cases are:
 Agile data marts
SAP Business Suite accelerator
Primary database for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse
Custom application development

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/1
For More information, please visit the SAP HANA Services website:

Agile Data Mart

One way to quickly get the most value from in-memory technology is to use SAP HANA as a
standalone data mart for a specific use case. In this scenario, SAP HANA acts as a central
hub, collecting source-system data from multiple sources via in-memory technology and then
displaying focused reports and analytics via a reporting front end. The data can then be used in
multiple ways, depending on the organization’s reporting requirements and formats.
This arrangement has the advantage of providing a focused solution to an immediate
business problem while minimizing disruption to the existing landscape. Such projects are
usually completed quickly: The business problem is understood, and the required data and
source systems are easily identified. Such installations offer instant value — making previously
difficult and time-consuming tasks fast and easy.

SAP Business Suite Accelerator

SAP HANA is frequently used to accelerate transactions and reports inside the SAP Business
Suite. As with the agile data mart scenario, SAP HANA is set up as a standalone system, side
by side with the database under the SAP Business Suite applications. In this scenario,
however, SAP HANA is used to “offload” some transactions or reports that typically take hours
or days to run, though it is not used as the primary database under the application.
As we explained previous chapters, certain transactions or reports inside the SAP Business
Suite can run slowly, primarily due to the slow I/O of the underlying disk-based database and
the huge data requests required by these transactions or reports. To run its calculations and
present a result, a typical budgeting or planning transaction in SAP must collect data from many
different tables in the system. Reports can also be very data-intensive, requiring extensive data
from many tables dispersed throughout the database. In both of these cases, the application
must request the data from the database, load it into a buffer table in the SAP application
server, run the algorithm or calculation, and then display the results to users.
To overcome system latency that slows down these common reports, SAP has developed
“HANAfied” versions of several existing reports. These reports consist of three preconfigured
reporting dashboards and 23 reports from the following business areas:

Financial reporting
Sales reporting
Purchasing reporting
Shipping reporting
Master data reporting

These dashboards and reports leverage existing reporting capabilities from SAP ERP.
However, they offload the physical processing of the reports to a dedicated SAP HANA system
that sits beside the live SAP ERP system. All relevant tables for each dashboard or report are
physically copied from the SAP ERP system onto the SAP HANA system, which is then used to
generate the reports and display them to users in a variety of user interfaces. Let’s review the
key elements of each bundle.
Accelerated Sales & Distribution Reporting
The SAP HANA business content for Sales and Distribution (SD) enables sales managers and
sales representatives to check basic key figures for sales in real time. Whereas sales
managers use sales analytics to access instant overview information regarding the various
performance indicators for their sales teams, the sales representatives focus on detailed
information relating to the results of their sales activities.

Accelerated Financial Reporting

The SAP HANA Financials content package provides the prerequisites for building reports that
provide the following analysis data:

Real-time analysis of the subledger for Accounts Payable (FI-AP) and Accounts
Receivable (FI-AR)
Flexible analysis of customer and vendor items based on the single line items from the
back-end ERP system
Calculation and analysis of the days sales outstanding (DSO)
Note that currently only General Ledger Accounting (new) is supported.

Accelerated Procurement Reporting

The purchasing content package for SAP HANA enables procurement managers to analyze key
procurement processes in real time. Procurement managers use spending key figures along
different dimensions including Material Groups, Vendors, Plants, and Purchasing Organizations
to gain instant insight into inefficiencies that may point to savings potentials or internal and
external process improvements.
Accelerated Master Data Reporting
Master data are essential for nearly all business transactions, irrespective of the business area.
The master data in this package concentrate on master data objects that are available in SAP
ERP, such as material, customer, and vendor.

Accelerated Shipping Reporting

The SAP HANA content for Shipping enables shipping and warehouse managers to check basic
shipping and stock key figures in real time. Managers use shipping analytics to obtain instant
information for planning and monitoring outbound delivery-related activities. In addition, the
managers can get an up-to-date overview on materials stock at any time.

SAP HANA Accelerates Reports

Imagine a “long-running” ABAP report within a particular business function, one that’s been an ongoing problem for
users. As a result of system latency, many reports could not provide real-time data analysis — and therefore
could not be used to make proactive business decisions. SAP HANA can reduce a report’s run time from several
hours to minutes or even seconds, making the information much more current and valuable.

Primary Database for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse

In our third use case example, SAP BW is powered by SAP HANA. In this scenario a company
replaces the previously underlying database for their SAP BW system with SAP HANA. The IT
team can perform a standard DB migration over to SAP HANA and then enable specific objects
to be in-memory optimized as necessary depending on the company’s requirements.
SAP BW is the first SAP application that was optimized to run with SAP HANA as its primary
underlying database. With SAP HANA, SAP BW can leverage in-memory capabilities for
improved performance, without the need for any sidecar accelerators or extensive modeling
workarounds. The entire database physically sits under the SAP BW system, eliminating the
need for in-memory aggregation. This arrangement simplifies the data modeling and query
design, which in turn greatly enhances system performance while lowering IT ownership costs.
Replacing an old database with SAP HANA generates speed and flexibility for two key
reasons. First, keeping the entire database in memory eliminates the need to send large
amounts of data between the application and DB servers, thereby reducing latency. In fact,
running SAP BW on SAP HANA eliminates most of the problematic issues that slow down the
system, from both a user and an administrator perspective.
To watch a video of Home Trust’s BW migration project, click here: Home Trust:
http://youtu.be/Q6057Cpr8V4

Custom Applications for SAP HANA

As stated earlier, SAP HANA is a full-blown, do-just-about-anything-you-want application
platform. It speaks pure SQL, and it includes all of the most common APIs, so you can literally
write any type of application you want on top of it. There are a few rules and “guide rails” that
are designed to keep things from going wrong. Overall, however, the sky truly is the limit when
it comes to imagining what to build with SAP HANA.
Although SAP HANA is valuable for a broad range of applications, it “shines” particularly well
in a few unique situations. If you’re building an enterprise-scale application for a business
scenario that has high data volumes, needs detailed/granular data analysis, needs to search or
aggregate huge data volumes, requires complex algorithmic or statistical calculations, or suffers
from latency between transactional recording and reporting, SAP HANA is a great choice.

Future Use Case Scenarios

As SAP HANA matures and SAP updates its portfolio of solutions to take advantage of the
extensive horsepower of SAP HANA, you can expect to see nearly every SAP product
supported natively on SAP HANA as a primary database — plus many more “native SAP
HANA” applications.
By now you should have a good understanding of how typical use cases take advantage of
SAP HANA. The next step is to ensure that you understand the best ways to deploy this new
technology in your environment to drive maximum value.
SAP HANA Implementation Scenarios
As we’ve discussed, there are many different ways to use SAP HANA, and it stands to reason
that there are also many different implementation scenarios. However, there isn’t a one-to-one
correlation between a use case and an implementation scenario. Rather, for each use case,
you need to look at the business problem you are trying to solve, which will typically dictate the
most appropriate implementation scenario. If, for example, your use case is for a specific need
not addressed by an SAP application, you’ll likely need a custom development project. In
contrast, if your business issue is a more common or typical one, then SAP may have already
created a new SAP HANA application to meet your needs. For many repeatable business
issues, SAP has created packaged solutions such as SAP Rapid Deployment solutions or
accelerators. These solutions contain preconfigured software, technical content, and
implementation services, and they are priced and scoped for rapid implementation.

Custom Development
Although there are standard best practices that must be considered when developing custom
solutions, there are also many possibilities when it comes to imagining what to build with SAP
HANA.
SAP HANA aligns well with several specific requirements and situations. Are you building an
enterprise-scale application for a business scenario with high data volumes? Do you need
detailed or granular data analysis? Do you have to query large data volumes? Do you require
complex algorithmic or statistical calculations, or suffer from latency between transactional
recording and reporting? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then SAP HANA is a
great choice.

SAP Application Deployment

SAP is delivering a new class of solutions on top of the SAP HANA platform — solutions that
combine real-time insights into big data with state-of-the-art analysis. These innovative real-
time solutions can help organizations transform their business by making smarter and faster
decisions, reacting more quickly to events, and unlocking new opportunities. Companies can
utilize these solutions to take advantage of new, data-driven business models and processes —
options that would be difficult or even impossible with disk-based databases. These solutions
include:

SAP Sales Pipeline Analysis, powered by SAP HANA

SAP BusinessObjects Sales Analysis for Retail, powered by SAP
HANA SAP Smart Meter Analytics, powered by SAP HANA

Packaged Solutions
Do you have to address an urgent business need? Do you prefer working with a fixed scope?
SAP Rapid Deployment solutions can help you implement SAP HANA using a package of
preconfigured software, content, and end user enablement plus implementation services.
Clearly priced and scoped implementation services help you speed up time to value and limit
risk. Examples are:
 SAP ERP Rapid Deployment solution for accelerated finance and controlling with SAP
HANA
SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for profitability analysis with SAP HANA
SAP Rapid Deployment solution for customer segmentation with SAP HANA

SAP is continuously adding more Rapid Deployment solutions. To see what’s available today,
visit: www.sap.com/solutions/rds.
Now that we’ve reviewed typical implementation scenarios, let’s review what a successful
implementation requires.

Taking a Systematic Approach for Your Implementation

You may be familiar with the traditional ASAP methodology used by SAP — and the fact that a
complex ERP implementation can last for months, if not years. Because SAP HANA is a new
technology, to stay on top of its learning curve you need to work with a solution implementation
partner who has a deep understanding of the technology, the capabilities, and best practices
for implementation.
To successfully implement SAP HANA, you must follow a structured implementation
methodology. Your solution partner should approach the solution with a phased, deliverable-
oriented implementation plan based in project and organizational change management. The
goals here: to streamline implementation, minimize risk, and reduce the total costs of
implementation.
A robust methodology should include templates, tools, questionnaires, and checklists,
including guidebooks and accelerators to support team members and increase project
predictability.
There are six basic steps that need to be a part of any SAP HANA implementation. The
amount of emphasis you place on each step will be dictated by the type of SAP HANA project
you are implementing.
1. Customer education. Education is especially important for an SAP HANA project. The
technology is new, so the relevant knowledge is not yet widespread. The technology is
also rapidly evolving, with new use cases being created almost daily. Both the project
team and the executive sponsors must be educated so they understand what SAP HANA
can do and how it works. (Hint: Give them a copy of this book!)
2. Use case identification. Workshops can help determine where to apply the power of
SAP HANA within the organization. Ask yourself: What are the possible scenarios for
SAP HANA, and where might the company make improvements? Where could the
technology have the biggest impact on corporate objectives or unlock deeper insights
into the reported data? Once you have defined a use case, you should perform a
comprehensive requirements gathering to ensure that the end solution addresses all of
your company’s needs and maps back to your original use case expectations.
3. Solution approach. The SAP HANA solution must be designed and documented so that
if your personnel or solution partners change, the new resources will understand how to
support the solution. Most likely, this will be an iterative process, looking closely at use
cases and their supporting infrastructure. As new information becomes available, the
solution approach will evolve into a comprehensive deliverable.
4. Modeling / Development A key task to implement your SAP HANA solution is creation
of the data models and the different views to it. These models are adapted, modified,
and enhanced to improve performance. For packaged applications this content is
delivered by SAP, but can be adapted to your specific needs. Custom development
projects will include both traditional application development and modeling aspects.
5. QA/testing. This is the final test of all front-end reporting, data quality, data integration,
and performance. The production system is up and running, and business processes
 begin to operate in the new SAP HANA environment. Quality assurance continues, along
with end-user training and support.
6. Go live. SAP HANA is delivered as a production solution.

Common Scoping Pitfalls to Avoid

If changes are required for front-end reports or analytics, then expectations must be managed. Often, as a result
of dependencies, even small changes to a report can have a large impact on underlying systems; for instance, a
change to a field may require changing a data model.
Because of this factor, it is important to fully define requirements and to ask about any proposed report
modifications. Reviewing the original form of a current report can be very helpful because you can see what the
business user is accustomed to seeing, as well as how it might be improved. You should also perform a proper
data decomposition to document how the current report is built and how it is working. In addition, identify any
custom code within the business rules that may be difficult to replicate inside the SAP HANA modeler. Finally,
map the sources from which the data are drawn, and how the data are imported into a formal deliverable for signoff.
The right services partner can provide the needed level of due diligence in this area during planning.

After you’ve outlined a systematic approach to implementation, you need to identify the key
timelines and activities for your SAP HANA implementation.

Timelines and Key Activity Considerations

Just as there is no one size fits all, there is no single timeline for an SAP HANA project. Each
project is different; each has distinctive contributing factors and characteristics. It is SAP best
practice to use a standard project methodology, such as the SAP ASAP implementation
methodology, to ensure that a project addresses all of the critical activities, phases, and
deliverables that are necessary for success.
The SAP ASAP methodology has been updated to incorporate the SAP HANA activities
required for a standard in-memory project. Accelerators, best practices, and implementation
tools have also been updated or developed to shorten the project timeline and reduce risk.
Methodology, timelines, and key activities vary based on three considerations:

Current technical landscape. Depending on the current landscape, the customer may
have to consider prerequisites for delivering in-memory solutions. For example, data
quality may need to be addressed, or the organization may first need to upgrade some
applications that work in conjunction with SAP HANA.

Expectations for in-memory functionality. As customers learn more about the

capabilities of in-memory solutions, they may want to introduce additional functionality. It
is important to manage this need and to consider it during the initial requirements phase.

Original requirements per use case(s) identified during assessment. A key

component of the successful delivery of SAP HANA is ensuring that the final solution
meets the company’s requirements and expectations, as identified in the original use
case scenario.

In addition to defining an implementation methodology, you’ll need to identify the key skills
required to ensure your implementation of SAP HANA is a success.
Critical SAP HANA Skills Needed for Successful Projects
Because SAP HANA is a new technology the success of any implementation will depend in
large part on your ability to locate experts who can fill any skill gaps on your team. Critical
resources for an SAP HANA project will also vary depending on how you choose to leverage
the SAP HANA in-memory solution, or which use case you select.

The following roles are specific to agile data mart use case implementations:

System architect/system administrator. This resource is responsible for the physical

SAP HANA landscape, including CPU, memory, and disk usage. He or she performs
maintenance and system monitoring, along with configuration and application of any
necessary patches. The system architect also performs SAP source system configuration
and replication, and manages the SAP Landscape Transformation (SLT) replication server.
Finally, he or she ensures that the SAP HANA database is backed up regularly, and also
monitors and processes backup log files.

Solution architect. As the name implies, the solution architect is responsible for solution
design. He or she gathers requirements for the use case(s) and creates the technical
design documentation.

SAP HANA data modeler. The SAP HANA data modeler is responsible primarily for
modeling solution design and development and unit testing of all SAP HANA models. He or
she also performs SAP HANA model lifecycle management, which includes the various
steps contained in the process of moving from development to production.

Data services/SLT developer. The data services developer is responsible primarily for
design and development of jobs to extract, transform, and load data into SAP HANA via
data services or SLT. The developer also performs lifecycle management, which includes
steps contained in moving from development to production.

Two other roles are specific to implementations of SAP BW powered by SAP HANA.

SAP technology consultant. This expert on SAP HANA technology collaborates with the
project manager to plan technical requirements for the project. He or she then implements
these required technical tasks within the system.

Certified OS/DB migration consultant. This individual is responsible for technical planning
and design of the in-memory infrastructure, including database planning, project
organization, design, audit, and project review.

If you perform a custom development, you will need additional development skills:

SAP HANA developer. This expert builds your applications beyond pure data modeling
using the different development capabilities of SAP HANA (SQLScript, Business Function
Library, etc.).
 Depending on the specific scope and architecture of your project, you may need development
experts in the specific application domain and advanced technologies, such as predictive
analytics, scripting languages, etc. Implementing SAP HANA is a major step in dramatically
improving your ability to obtain optimal value from your big data. With the right service provider,
use case, implementation methodology, and skilled resources, you’ll be able to enjoy the
power, speed, and performance of SAP HANA. Let’s conclude this discussion by examining
some truly stellar examples of successful SAP HANA implementations.

Putting it All Together — Examples of Stellar Projects

Now that we have discussed the SAP HANA technology and how to obtain the best business
value from this technology, we will present some innovative ways that customers have “put it all
together.” The first example is a chemicals company that was able to improve compliance
reporting by accelerating its standard SAP system. The second example involves a large
university hospital that successfully implemented SAP HANA as the engine of a new custom
application, enabling it to dramatically increase the speed with which it analyzed medical
records. Finally, a financial services company used SAP HANA as a primary database for SAP
Business Warehouse, with impressive results.
SAP Business Suite Accelerator at a Chemicals Company
Our first example is a European consumer chemicals company that specializes in developing
new fragrances and flavors. Every one of its hundreds of new recipes — each with unique
ingredients and compositions — must be checked for compliance with legal regulations. As the
demand for these chemicals increased and their recipes became more complex, the company
simply became unable to scale its compliance checking. To resolve this problem, the company
collaborated with SAP to build an application that enables it to quickly check new recipes while
they are still in development to ensure that they comply with a vast array of local legal
regulations. Using SAP HANA to augment support of existing processes, we have
demonstrated how the new application can cut processing time from 20 minutes to less than 4
seconds. This vastly improved performance enhances their scientists’ productivity while
simultaneously driving down the costs of new product development.
Custom SAP HANA Application in Use at a University Hospital
With a mature analytics program in place, the biggest university hospital in Europe provides
150,000 inpatient and 600,000 outpatient treatments every year. The hospital invested in SAP
HANA to harness the big data associated with its vast inventory of patient data, medical
records, and study results and make a positive impact on patient care and healthcare research.
For example, the hospital now uses SAP HANA Oncolyzer to search for and examine
information involving cancer patients, such as tumor types, gender, age, risk factors,
treatments, and diagnoses. This information enables the hospital to quickly identify the best
candidates for each clinical study. In the future, when DNA is added to the data set, the
Oncolyzer will analyze up to 500,000 data points per patient in real time. SAP HANA analyzes
both structured and unstructured data and greatly accelerates the identification process.
Primary Database for SAP Business Warehouse in Use at a Financial Institution
A leading North American mortgage lender has successfully completed proof of concept,
migrating a half-terabyte of data from a competitive database to the SAP HANA database and
upgrading to SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, powered by SAP HANA. The result has
been a dramatic improvement in reporting runtimes in the data warehouse and business
intelligence environments. Data query speeds have increased on average 8-12 times, simple
queries run up to 450 times faster, and data store object activation is 19 times faster. Based on
these impressive results, the customer is re-architecting its entire reporting environment to
leverage the power of SAP HANA.

Final Words of Wisdom on SAP HANA Implementation

We’ve reviewed the importance of selecting the right SAP HANA services partner — one who
can help you plan and implement your solution and provide the right set of skill resources to
ensure your implementation delivers on the value of SAP HANA. We’ve also reviewed common
use cases, including the agile data mart, SAP Business Suite accelerator, primary database for
SAP Business Warehouse, and custom SAP HANA applications. SAP HANA implementation
scenarios can vary depending on your business need — from custom development to SAP
application development to rapid deployment solutions. Next we reviewed the importance of
taking a systematic approach to your implementation and the benefits of following a
methodology built on education, use case identification, solution approach, modeling, QA and
testing, and go-live best practices. Prior to implementation, you’ll also need to identify your
timeline, key activities, and skilled resources needed to implement SAP HANA. The key is
planning and ensuring you understand the entire scope of the implementation, while remaining
flexible enough to leverage the latest in SAP HANA use cases.
In conclusion, we’d like to leave you with a short list of six key takeaways to ensure a
successful SAP HANA implementation:

1. Make certain that business requirements are completely understood and that the use
case complements the technical requirements. Remember, technology intelligence
doesn’t necessarily equal business intelligence!
2. Establish ROI metrics early in the scoping process. Build them into the project/solution to
ensure that success can be properly measured and quantified.
3. Ensure proper collaboration across application delivery teams (EPR, BW, CRM,
reporting, etc.), depending on project requirements.
4. Start with a focused use case to demonstrate business value, and then expand across
other functional areas of the business. Establishing a quick win helps with sponsorship
and funding for additional in-memory projects.
5. Make sure that data quality is considered as part of overall SAP HANA solution planning.
Acquiring data quickly can’t help the business if the data are not accurate.
6. Define (or redefine) specific in-memory terminology with all users to make certain that
each term is understood by — and means the same thing to — IT, developers, business
users, and executive sponsors. Small clarifications on such terms as “real-time” and
 “self-serve” can go a long way toward preventing misunderstandings concerning both the
functionality to be delivered and the value it brings.
7. Bonus Advice: Encourage everyone involved with the project (Technical & Business) to
download and read a copy of this book. It really helps get everyone “on the same page”
and ensures you’re all speaking the same language.

For more information about SAP HANA services offerings, subscribe to SAPServices on
Twitter band review the details on the SAP HANA services website.
Top Advice from SAP Mentors for SAP HANA Projects
SAP Mentors are the most influential community participants in the SAP ecosystem. They
comprise a super-smart and engaged global cohort of nearly 110 bloggers, consultants, and
technical wizards nominated by SAP Community Network peers and selected by SAP. All SAP
Mentors are hands-on experts of an SAP product or service, as well as true project champions.
The majority of SAP Mentors work for customers or partners of SAP.
The following three SAP Mentors are experts in SAP HANA implementations. They provide
their best tips and tricks for a successful SAP HANA project. Pay attention, these guys really
know their stuff!
Vijay Vijayasankar
Associate Partner
IBM Global Business Services
Twitter: @vijayasankarv

1. Find the best data modeler you can for your SAP HANA projects. That is the make-or-
break issue for most SAP HANA projects.
2. Do not jump into a POC (Proof-of-Concept) just to prove loading/ reporting works faster
in a data mart. SAP or IBM can easily show you how quickly their systems can report
and load data.
3. Spend a lot of time refining your use case offline before you start the project. An
important part of this step is to accurately define success up front. This helps reduce
wasteful scoping efforts during the project, and it will help the project team focus on
specific targets.
4. Size the hardware correctly. If you do not, then you will not see the expected results.
Even if you want to scale out and buy new boxes, you should be aware that these boxes
are not available off the shelf. Consequently, they will require some lead time to acquire.
5. Each HW vendor has some “secret sauce” on what makes them special for SAP HANA.
Make sure you understand that before investing in HW.
6. Check SAP HANA performance under a variety of situations — reporting performance
while heavy loads happen, while multiple people are working on system, logging on from
different parts of network, etc.
7. Engage closely with your SI (system integrator) and SAP while the project is going on.
SAP HANA is fairly new, and it will probably need a few workarounds. Your SI and SAP
will probably have seen your issues before, and they can advise you and help minimize
time spent “reinventing the wheel.”
8. If you are going to migrate to SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on SAP HANA, test
as you go when migrating objects to their in-memory versions so that you can spot
challenges sooner. Definitely consider re-engineering the design of SAP BW to take
advantage of SAP HANA and avoid doing only an en-masse migration and leaving it at
that.
9. SAP HANA security/administration is a specialized skill, and a good design is needed to
make it work for all your use cases consistently. Plan to spend time refining the model.
10. Last but not least — poor data quality is even more damaging when the data come at
you in “lightning speed.” Garbage In/Garbage Out still applies. Profile the data, and fix
them at the source or as close to the source as possible before sending them to SAP
HANA.
Harald Reiter
Senior Manager — SAP
Deloitte Consulting
Twitter: @hreiter

1. Rethink what is possible

a. Revisit analytics that previously were not possible or were too difficult to perform.
b. Processes can now actually change, be simplified, or be minimized because you don’t
need as big a staff to conduct the analysis.
c. Eliminate the data volume and speed barriers from the equation, and focus on the real
business needs.
2. Develop a roadmap
a. Move from theory to reality — real-time BI delivers true value.
b. Make it dynamic to adapt quickly to new capabilities and integration options.
c. Align business and IT goals.
d. Be proactive to influence the product development, and make your voice heard to
ensure timely delivery of new capabilities.
3. Pilot early
a. Get used to rapid development cycles and capabilities.
b. Don’t get caught up in all the hype and excitement — be pragmatic, and don’t forget
basic due diligence. Focus your efforts, define what is really important, achieve
success, and build on that success iteratively.
c. Don’t try to throw all the data into the database just because you can.
4. Start with the hard stuff
a. Be realistic — don’t assume you go through fewer cycles of data analysis to find the
best answer (or question); you will be able to do the cycles faster, though. This allows
you to change your assumptions, quickly run scenarios, and ask different questions to
uncover anomalies in your data.
b. Embed statistical models and predictive analysis into your daily operations to detect
risk, negative trending, and anomalies.
c. Make sure there is a measureable ROI
5. Establish priorities
a. Define what you really want, and make certain your objectives have a positive impact
on your organization
b. Don’t forget to look at unstructured data in your organization; these data can provide
a new perspective. Incorporating unstructured data and rapid processing enables
meaningful and timely analysis to minimize risk, losses, or negative exposure.
c. Don’t underestimate the importance of data quality. Revisit your data quality initiatives
using SAP HANA to quickly identify issues that result from processing massive data
sets in one pass. Correlation of results without complex partitioning and staging areas
can uncover skewed results.
6. Begin cultivating talent
 a. Team composition is key for successful implementations.
b. Don’t forget about change management. Focus on changes for end users because
they can be empowered to do agile reporting as well as on changes for administrative
staff due to technology and implementation tools.
c. Resources can now be assigned real value-added tasks instead of time-consuming
administrative tasks just to obtain basic information.
7. Incorporate mobility
a. Continuous monitoring of key metrics is a reality using mobility and SAP HANA
8. Revisit your technology architecture
a. Examine your overall landscape, and identify all areas that can benefit from
technology modernization.
b. Understand the database operations capabilities of SAP HANA.
c. Identify your must-have requirements, and address any shortcomings.
d. Identify the best tool for each job.
9. Size right
a. One size does not fit all
b. Data composition and data source impact the compression rate and thus the sizing
estimation.
c. When in doubt, move up one T-shirt size.
d. Scale-out capability mitigates the risk of not sizing correctly, but it should not be relied
on.
e. The quality of the data model impacts the available size for data versus workspace.
10. Establish metrics and plan for tuning and performance testing
a. Don’t forget about SLAs (service-level agreements).
b. Tuning and performance testing can make the fast even faster.
c. Reveal bad data model designs.
Vitaliy Rudnytskiy
Lead BI Architect
HP Enterprise Information Solutions
Twitter: @Sygyzmundovych

1. Accept nothing less than excellence from your project team and partners
a. Technology makes things faster, better, and cheaper; but technology itself is still just
a tool. Make sure you assemble an excellent team: business, project team, partners,
and SAP support.
2. Understand the technology
a. If you are reading this book, you are already on the right track.
3. Think about details, but always consider them in the context of the big picture
a. “The devil is in the details,” so think them through. At the same time, however, never
lose sight of the complete picture of where all the details fit into.
4. Open your mind to the “New World”
a. Question your old habits; forget about your “15 years of technical/project experience
under the belt.” Old techniques do not necessarily work well or at all with new
paradigms.
5. Don’t build the solutions for “Go Live”
a. Your solution will live a long time after the go-live date and will need to accomodate
new requirements, unexpected cases, and a surrounding environment that is in constant
transition. Build for the long run.
Ranjeet Panicker
Practice Manager
SAP Next Generation Services
HANA/In-Memory Center of Excellence

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) & Return on Investment (ROI) Analysis

Do 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, they apply 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 business processes. For example,
reducing the time it takes to run a BW analytic report from 4 hours 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 into true business value.
The well-known adage “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is especially relevant to value management. If
you don’t identify, track, and ensure the ongoing value of a project, you’re unlikely to achieve its financial and
operational objectives. Learn more about how strategy management helps you track 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 Technology
SAP HANA represents a paradigm shift in how we know and use an RDBMS. It is also a new
database technology – one that is evolving as SAP customers find new ways to challenge the
speed and performance of the database. The SAP HANA platform is evolving very quickly, and
SAP continuously adds new and innovative functionality. To enable customers to take
advantage of this new functionality quickly and efficiently, SAP has made the process of
upgrading very simple.

HANA Should Not Be Only an IT Project

Recognize the business drivers which catalyzed the decision to make SAP HANA the platform
for your business. Although switching the database underneath BW is part of the formula for
success with SAP HANA, the full value of a BW powered by SAP HANA solution is realized
through additional activities such as optimizing in-memory objects and examining processes to
re-architect the information layers. Such activities will help you save not only on the
maintenance of these objects, but also on storage, resources, and memory. Ultimately they will
enable your business to report more quickly and efficiently.

Executive Sponsorship
Buy-in at the highest level brings the authority and credibility that can mean the difference
between success and failure for your SAP HANA project. Executive sponsorship helps drive the
vision for SAP HANA in your organization, and it facilitates the change management that is
required when you adopt a new technology. To secure and maintain this 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-on endeavors.

Size Does Matter

Do not rely purely on the size of the data set on source systems to predict the size of the SAP
HANA appliance. Instead, analyze ways to reduce redundant data before loading/migrating into
SAP HANA. Examine solutions like near-line storage (NLS) that may help mitigate rapid data
growth in SAP HANA. Invest in hardware that can be scaled instead of being replaced. Adopt
realistic goals on sharing an SAP HANA appliance between applications. Finally, look into items
such as backup and restore, patching, and performance 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 MAY 2013

 The rest of the story….

S ince the SAP HANA Essentials book is being written in “real time”, it will be continuously
updated as new chapters are completed and content revisions are added.
Make sure to register for the mailing list on www.saphanabook.com to be informed when
new chapters are available and follow the book on twitter @EpistemyPress and @jeff_word.
Please share the website and voucher code with your colleagues so they can benefit from
the information in this book as well.
 About the Author

Jeffrey Word, Ph.D.

Follow Jeff on : @jeff_word

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