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A number of my clients have recently asked me about HANA and what it means to their existing data warehouse landscape and BI strategy; and if this technology is relevant for them. In order to answer these questions, two example scenarios may help to explain the options and benefits available to those thinking about deploying HANA.

But before we look at these scenarios, we need to first understand what is HANA.  The HANA acronym stands for “High Performance Analytical Appliance” and it is essentially a database that utilises in-memory technology. I am not going to go into the technical details of in-memory database technology (we could be here all day), but what it is good at is the superfast aggregation and reporting of large volumes of data that changes frequently. So hence we get the “High Performance”. Now what does the “Appliance” bit mean? The HANA application is delivered fully installed on a server (or servers) by certified hardware vendor. This means customers don’t need to worry about system setup, but can basically “plug & play” when the server arrives.

So what’s in it for those who don’t have SAP already?

Let’s look at an organisation which is not necessarily a SAP BW customer, but has a very agile reporting requirement that involves large volumes of data. HANA provides a platform in which they can develop their own reporting database and load large volumes of data and quickly report on this data. Granted this sounds a lot like what many customers do with standalone databases today and it is, but this is an in-memory application so the performance implications are the selling point. And to be fair, the benefit is not only performance gains, but also simplifying their landscape (no need for separate aggregated data marts) and enabling users to ask questions of large data sets which were previously not possible.

There are a few additional topics within this example that need a mention here. Firstly, the recommended approach would be to use BusinessObjects Data Services to get data into HANA and secondly BusinessObjects BI4.0 would be the reporting applications used to query the data residing in HANA.

Diagram 1: SAP HANA for Customer without SAP

Already have SAP BW?

Now let’s take a look at an organisation that has already deployed SAP BW. To understand this scenario we need to understand that HANA is not a replacement for SAP BW. BW is an application designed to build and maintain an Enterprise Data Warehouse. HANA is a database. Don’t get me wrong, as far as databases go it has great potential in the analytics arena. But today it is not going to replace BW, it is designed for something entirely different (remember we mentioned the superfast aggregation and reporting of large volumes of data that changes frequently). So what is the co-existence between HANA and BW?

For those wanting to immediately benefit from the performance of HANA, it can be deployed alongside an existing SAP BW system or even a SAP ERP system. In both instances data is loaded into HANA to enable high performance analytics using the BusinessObjects BI suite of tools. However, there are slight variations in how data can be loaded into HANA depending if the source is BW or ERP. For BW, BusinessObjects DataServices is used for the mass scheduling of data loads from BW into HANA (this could be part of the batch jobs that load data into SAP BW). In the case of ERP, SAP’s Sybase Replication Server can be used to load data in real time into HANA enabling right time reporting.

Diagram 2: SAP HANA for SAP Customers

What’s next?

Simply, we are going to be able to run SAP BW 7.3 on this in-memory database. For those of you familiar with the BIA, this is like saying the whole of BW is going to be in or on an in-memory database, replacing the existing database  that your BW systems runs on currently. But is this a good thing? Well, for starters, you get everything to build an Enterprise Data Warehouse courtesy of SAP BW 7.3. Not much change here for existing SAP BW customers, but before we move on let’s remember one of the big benefits of customers running SAP BW and SAP ERP (or any of the other Business Suites), is of course SAP Business Content. This is an important difference between HANA 1.0 and the next release. Unlike, HAHA 1.0 which would require a few “middleware” components (as mentioned above) for data extraction and replication into the database, we will now be able to leverage those standard delivered extractors to get data out of SAP source systems and into our Enterprise Data Warehouse. And our EDW is now entirely in-memory. So theoretically we are ensured of great reporting performance over large volumes of data. Well that’s the plan anyway!  For those BW customers who are looking to move to BW 7.3 or who are indeed already using BW 7.3, apparently the migration path to HANA will be very similar to the current database migration process.