Copyright © 2012 Epistemy Press LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrievalsystem or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise,except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permissionof the Publisher. For reproduction or quotation permission, please send a written request to epistemypress@gmail.com.

Epistemy Press LLC makes no warranties or representations with respect to the content and specifically disclaims any impliedwarranties or guarantees of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. Epistemy Press LLC assumesno responsibility for any errors or omissions that may appear in the publication.

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

This publication contains references to the products of SAP AG. SAP, the SAP Logo, R/3, SAP NetWeaver, SAP HANA and otherSAP products and services mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in severalother countries all over the world. Business Objects and the Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects, Crystal Reports, CrystalDecisions, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius and other Business Objects products and services mentioned herein are trademarks orregistered trademarks of Business Objects in the United States and/or other countries. All other products mentioned in this bookare 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 notbe liable for errors or omissions with respect to the materials.

This material outlines SAP’s general product direction and should not be relied on in making a purchase decision. This material isnot subject to your license agreement or any other agreement with SAP.

SAP has no obligation to pursue any course of business outlined in this material or to develop or release any functionalitymentioned in this document. This material and SAP’s strategy and possible future developments are subject to change and maybe changed by SAP at any time for any reason without notice.

This document is provided without a warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to, the impliedwarranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. SAP assumes no responsibility for errors oromissions in this document.

ISBN: 978-0-9856008-0-8

T

About the Cover Image

he cover image is a European “No Speed Limit” sign. If you’ve ever driven on the Autobahnin 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 evercomes first). In terms of SAP HANA, we selected this image because SAP HANA allows yourcompany to run at top speed with no artificial limit to how fast it can go. If you ever go visit SAPheadquarters in Germany, you’ll see this sign about 2 miles south of the Frankfurt airport on theA5 — and there’s no speed limit on your way to visit SAP.

S

Note from the Author

ince this book is about the shift to “real-time” business, it’s fitting that we’ve been writing thisbook 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 writingeach chapter and expect everyone to hold their breath until the entire book is finished and readyto print. And trust me, SAP HANA is moving extremely fast right now and you could be holdingyour 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 ofossified rules of the game, we’ll be doing much the same with this book. Who says you have towait till the whole book is written to release it? Who says you have to charge $$ for anextremely valuable book? Who says it has to be printed on paper with ink and sold in abookstore?

We’ve decided to break all those traditional publishing rules and release chapters as they arefinished 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 newchapters and content updates. That’s pretty easy: Follow the book on twitter @EpistemyPressand @jeff_word, sign up for the email updates from the saphanabook.com website when youregister to download the ebook and keep watching saphana.com.

Table of Contents

1 SAP HANA OverviewUpdated scale out and release date details

2 SAP HANA Architecture3 SAP HANA Business Cases

New Chapter4 SAP HANA Applications5 SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on SAP6 Data Provisioning with SAP HANA7 Data Modeling with SAP HANA8 Application Development with SAP HANA9 SAP HANA Administration & Operations10 SAP HANA Hardware

Updated PAM, Dell, Hitachi, HP sections11 SAP HANA Projects & Implementation

Updated RDS section and new advice section12 SAP HANA Resources

A

Acknowledgments

lthough we’re at the beginning of this journey, many people have already been phenomenallyhelpful 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 ColleaguesMargaret Anderson, Puneet Suppal, Uddhav Gupta, Storm Archer, Scott Shepard, BalajiKrishna, Daniel Rutschman, Ben Gruber, Bhuvan Wadhwa, Lothar Henkes, Adolf Brosig,Thomas Zureck, Lucas Kiesow, Prasad Ilapani, Wolfram Kleis, Gunther Liebich, 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, JasonLovinger, Michael Rey, Gigi Read, David Hull, Nadav Helfman, Lori Vanourek, Bill Lawler, ScottLeatherman, Kathlynn Gallagher, David Jonker, Naren Chawla, David Porter, Steve Thibodeau

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

SAP PartnersLane Goode (HP), Tag Robertson (IBM), Rick Speyer (Cisco), Andrea Voigt (Fujitsu), NathanSaunders (Dell), KaiGai Kohei (NEC), Chris March (Hitachi)

ProductionRobert Weiss (Development Editor)

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

T

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

his book is designed to provide an introduction to SAP HANA to a wide range 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, butwill 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 introductionchapter and then skip to the subsequent chapters that most interest them. Business people willlikely skip to the applications and business case chapters while techies will jump ahead to theapplication development and hardware chapters. In fact, it would probably be odd if anyoneactually 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 atechnology and business perspective, we’ve unfortunately had to make a few compromises inthe 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 canunderstand the concepts and get comfortable with the big picture of SAP HANA. We’ve alsotried to cover as many of the high-level concepts as possible and provide copious links todeeper technical resources for easy access. Hopefully, you will enjoy reading the chapters andfind it quite easy to “punch out” to additional technical information as you go regardless of yourlevel 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 severalLevel 2 technical books on SAP HANA and are committed to providing as much technical andbusiness 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 shouldhave free access to the essential information they will need to understand SAP HANA andevaluate its impact on their future landscape. SAP sponsored the writing of this book and hasfunded its publication as a free ebook to ensure that everyone can easily access thisknowledge.

SAP HANA is a rapidly evolving product and its level of importance to SAP customers willcontinue to increase exponentially over the next several years. We will attempt to provideupdated editions of this book on a semi-annual basis to ensure that you can easily access themost up-to-date knowledge on SAP HANA. Please continue to visit the SAP HANA Essentialswebsite to download updated and revised editions when they are released (typically in May andNovember of each year). You can also follow @EpistemyPress on Twitter for updates.

T

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

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

India to Greece — individuals whose voices were amplified and aggregated by moderntechnology 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 theharbinger of social networking. But social networking is not new. A recent issue of theEconomist described Martin Luther’s use of social networking, especially the Gutenberg press,to start the Protestant Reformation. During the American Revolution, Thomas Paine publishedhis Common Sense manifesto on a derivation of the Gutenberg press. Within a single year, itreached 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, empowerand renew us and serve to amplify our reach and our abilities. The ensuing connectednessdissolves away intermediary layers of inefficiency and indirection. Some of the most visiblerecent 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 rapidlydisappearing, as have physical compact discs, phonograph records, videotapes and the storesthat 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, moremodular 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 ourmusic from the housings that confined it. The iPhone has a high-definition camera within it, alongwith 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 andfactories 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 soundindistinguishable from that produced by factory-built flutes of yesterday.

I see layers of inefficiency dissolving all around us. An empowered populace gets moreconnected, and uses this connectivity to bypass the intermediaries and get straight at the thingsit seeks, connecting and acting in real-time — whether it is to stage uprisings or rentapartments, 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 simplificationthat is pervading other parts of our lives. The IT industry has focused on too much repackagingand reassembly of existing layers into new bundles, ostensibly to lower the costs of integratedsystems. In reality, this re-bundling increases the clutter that already exists in enterpriselandscapes. It is time for a rethink.

At SAP, we have been engaged in such rethinking, or intellectual renewal, as our chairmanand co-founder Hasso Plattner challenged me, for the last several years, and our customersare starting to see its results. This renewal of SAP’s architecture, and consequently that of ourcustomers, 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 toradically simplify enterprise computing and dramatically improve the performance of businesseswithout disruption.

SAP HANA achieves this simplification by taking advantage of tremendous advances inhardware over the last two decades. Today’s machines can bring large amounts of main-memory, and lots of multi-core CPUs to bear on massively parallel processing of informationvery inexpensively. SAP HANA was designed from the ground-up to leverage this, and thebusiness consequences are radical. At Yodobashi, a large Japanese retailer, the calculation ofincentives for loyalty customers used to take 3 days of data processing, once a month. WithSAP HANA, this happens now in 2 seconds — a performance improvement of over 100,000times. But even more important is the opportunity to rethink business processes. The incentivefor a customer can be calculated on the fly, while the customer is in a store, based on thepurchases she is about to make. The empowered store-manager can determine these at thepoint of sale, as the transaction unfolds. With SAP HANA, batch processing is converting to realtime, and business processes are being rethought. Customers like Colgate-Palmolive, theEssar 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 HANAbrings these benefits non-disruptively, without forcing a modification of existing systems. And inFall 2011, we delivered SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA, a complete removal of thetraditional database underneath, delivering fundamental improvements in performance andsimplification, without disruption.

SAP HANA provides a single in-memory database foundation for managing transactional aswell as analytical data processing. Thus a complex question can be posed to real-timeoperational 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 singlesystem. And it scales simply with addition of more processors or more blades. Thus varioustypes 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 thelayers of complexity in enterprise landscapes. SAP HANA hardware is built by various leadinghardware vendors from industry standard commodity components, and can be delivered asappliances, private or public clouds. While this architecture is vastly disruptive to a traditionalrelational database architecture, to our customers it brings fundamental innovation withoutdisruption.

Looking ahead, I expect that we will see lots of amazing improvements similar toYodobashi’s. Even more exciting, are the unprecedented applications that are now within ourreach. By my estimate, a cloud of approximately 1000 servers of 80-cores and 2 terabytes ofmemory each, can enable more than 1 billion people on the planet to interactively explore theirenergy consumption based on real-time information from their energy meters and appliances,and take control of their energy management. The management and optimization of theirfinances, healthcare, insurance, communications, entertainment and other activities, cansimilarly be made truly dynamic. Banks can manage risks in real-time, oil companies can betterexplore energy sources, mining vast amounts of data as needed. Airlines and heavy machinerymakers can do predictive maintenance on their machines, and healthcare companies cananalyze vast amounts of genome data in real time. One of our customers in Japan is workingon using SAP HANA to analyze genome data for hundreds of patients each day, something thatwas impossible before SAP HANA. Another customer is using SAP HANA to determine optimalroutes for taxicabs. The possibilities are endless.

Just as the iPod put our entire music libraries in our pockets, SAP HANA, combined withmobility and cloud-based delivery, enables us to take our entire business with us in our pocket.Empowering us to take actions in real time, based on our instincts as well as our analysis. Tore-think our solutions to solving existing problems — and to help businesses imagine and deliversolutions for previously unsolved problems. And it is this empowerment and renewal, driven bypurposeful technologies, that continually brings us all forward.

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

E

Chapter 1

SAP HANA Overview“Significant shifts in market share and fortunes occur not because companies try toplay the game better than the competition but because they change the rules of thegame”— Constantinos Markides1

very industry has a certain set of “rules” that govern the way the companies in that industryoperate. 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 changesthe rules or even the entire game. SAP HANA is one of those massively disruptive innovationsfor 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 bookindustry has operated under the same basic rules since Gutenberg mechanized the productionof books in 1440. There were a few subsequent innovations within the industry, primarily in thedistribution chain, but the basic processes of writing a book, printing it, and reading it remainedlargely unchanged for several hundred years. That is — until Amazon and Apple came alongand digitized the production, distribution, and consumption of books. These companies are alsostarting to revolutionize the writing of books by providing new authoring tools that make theentire process digital and paper-free. This technology represents an overwhelming assault ofdisruptive 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 Amazonand Apple have disrupted the publishing industry. Before we discuss how this happens, weneed to consider a few fundamental rules of that industry.

The IT Industry: A History of Technology ConstraintsThroughout the history of the IT industry, the capabilities of applications have always been

constrained to a great degree by the capabilities of the hardware that they were designed torun on. This explains the “leapfrogging” behavior of software and hardware products, where amore capable version of an application is released shortly after a newer, more capablegeneration of hardware — processors, storage, memory, and so on — is released. Forexample, each version of Adobe Photoshop was designed to maximize the most currenthardware resources available to achieve the optimal performance. Rendering a large image inPhotoshop 10 years ago could take several hours on the most powerful PC. In contrast, thelatest version, when run on current hardware, can perform the same task in just a couple ofseconds, even on a low-end PC.

Enterprise software has operated on a very similar model. In the early days of mainframesystems, all of the software — specifically, the applications, operating system, and database— was designed to maximize the hardware resources located inside the mainframe as acontained system. The transactional data from the application and the data used for reportingwere physically stored in the same system. Consequently, you could either processtransactions or process reports, but you couldn’t do both at the same time or you’d kill thesystem. 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: BottlenecksWhen SAP R/3 came out in 1992, it was designed to take advantage of a new hardwarearchitecture — client-server — where the application could be run on multiple, relatively cheapapplication servers connected to a larger central database server. The major advantage of thisarchitecture was that, as more users performed more activities on the system, you could justadd 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 theapplication servers and back again created a huge performance bottleneck.

Eventually, the ever-increasing requests for data from so many application servers began tocrush even the largest database servers. The problem wasn’t that the servers lacked sufficientprocessing power. Rather, the requests from the application servers got stuck in the sameinput/output (IO) bottleneck trying to get data in and out of the database. To address thisproblem, SAP engineered quite a few “innovative techniques” in their applications to minimizethe 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 transactionaldata — known as online transaction processing, or OLTP — from documents such as purchaseorders and production orders were stored in multiple locations within the database. Theapplication would read a small quantity of data when the purchasing screen was started up, theuser 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. Eachtransactional record by itself doesn’t contain very much data. When you have to run a reportacross every transaction in a process for several months, however, you start dealing with hugeamounts 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 datafrom the database, which essentially prevents users from doing anything else in the systemwhile it’s generating the report. To resolve this problem, companies began to build separateOLAP systems such as SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse to copy the transaction dataover 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 onprocessing transactions.

Unfortunately, even though servers were getting faster and more powerful (and cheaper), thebottleneck associated with obtaining data from the disk wasn’t getting better; in fact, it wasactually getting worse. As more processes in the company were being automated in thetransactional system, it was producing more and more data, which would then get dumped intothe reporting system. Because the reporting system contained more, broader data about thecompany’s operations, more people wanted to use the data, which in turn generated morerequests for reports from the database under the reporting system. Of course, as the numberof 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 ArchitectureThis is the reality that SAP was seeing at their customers at the beginning of the 2000’s. SAPR/3 had been hugely successful, and customers were generating dramatically increasingquantities of data. SAP had also just released SAP NetWeaver2, which added extensiveinternet and integration capabilities to its applications. SAP NetWeaver added many new usersand disparate systems that talked to the applications in the SAP landscape. Again, the greaterthe number of users, the greater the number of application servers that flooded the databasewith requests. Similarly, as the amount of operational data in the SAP NetWeaver BusinessWarehouse database increased exponentially, so did the number of requests for reports.Looking forward, SAP could see this trend becoming even more widespread and the bottleneckof the database slowing things down more and more. SAP was concerned that customers whohad invested massive amounts of time and money into acquiring and implementing thesesystems to make their businesses more productive and profitable would be unable to getmaximum value from them.

Fast forward a few years, and now the acquisitions of Business Objects and Sybase weregenerating another exponential increase in demands for data from both the transactional andanalytic databases from increasing numbers of analytics users and mobile users. Both thevolume of data and the volume of users requesting data were now growing thousands of timesfaster than the improvements in database I/O.

Having become aware of this issue, in 2004 SAP initiated several projects to innovate thecore architecture of their applications to eliminate this performance bottleneck. The objectivewas to enable their customers to leverage the full capabilities of their investment in SAP whileavoiding 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 proliferationof 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 financialtransactions. These requirements increased the pressure on already stressed systems toanalyze more data more quickly. The SAP projects resulted in the delivery of SAP HANA in2011, the first step in the transition to a new in-memory architecture for enterprise applicationsand 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 thecompany’s operations.

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

The Beginnings: LiveCache and SAP BWAWhen SAP introduced Advanced Planning Optimizer (APO) as part of its supply chainmanagement application in the late 1990s, the logistics planning algorithms required asignificant speed boost to overcome the disk I/O bottleneck. These algorithms — some of themost 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 problemin 1999 by taking some of the capabilities of its open-source database, SAP MaxDB (calledSAP DB at the time), and built them into a memory-resident cache system called SAPLiveCache. Basically, LiveCache keeps a persistent copy of all of the relevant application logicand master data needed in memory, thus eliminating the need to make multiple trips back andforth to the disk. LiveCache worked extremely well; in fact, it processed data 600 times fasterthan disk-based I/O. Within its narrow focus, it clearly demonstrated that in-memory cachingcould solve a major latency issue for SAP customers.

In 2003, a team in SAP’s headquarters in Waldorf, Germany, began to productize aspecialized search engine for SAP systems called TREX (Text Retrieval and informationEXtraction). TREX approached enterprise data in much the same way that Google approachesinternet data. That is, TREX scans the tables in a database and then creates an index of theinformation contained in the table. Because the index is a tiny fraction of the size of the actualdata, the TREX team came up with the idea of putting the entire index in the RAM memory ofthe server to speed up searches of the index. When this technology became operational, theirbosses asked them to apply the same technique to a much more imposing problem: the datafrom a SAP BW cube. Thus, Project Euclid was born.

At that time, many of the larger SAP BW customers were having significant performanceissues 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 justabout everything possible in the SAP BW application to increase performance, but had run outof options in the application layer. The only remaining solution was to eliminate the bottleneckitself. In the best spirit of disruptive innovators, the TREX team devised a strategy to eliminatethe 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 queryresponses for the same reports on the same data thousands of times faster than the oldsystem. Eventually, the team discovered how to package Euclid into a stand-alone server thatwould sit next to the existing SAP BW system and act as a non-disruptive “turbocharger” for acustomer’s slow SAP BW reports. At the same time, SAP held some senior-level meetings withIntel to formulate a joint-engineering project to optimize Intel’s new dual-core chips to nativelyprocess the SAP operations in parallel, thereby increasing performance exponentially. Intelimmediately sent a team to SAP headquarters to begin the optimization work. Since that timethe two companies have continuously worked together to optimize every successive generationof chips.

In 2005, SAP launched the product SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence Accelerator, orBIA. (The company subsequently changed the name to SAP NetWeaver Business WarehouseAccelerator, or BWA) BWA has since evolved into one of SAP’s best-selling products, with oneof 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. Alongwith LiveCache, the success of BWA proved to SAP and its customers that in-memory dataprocessing just might be an architectural solution to database bottlenecks.

The Next Step: The Tracker ProjectOnce the results for BWA and LiveCache began to attract attention, SAP decided to take thenext big step and determine whether it could run an entire database for an SAP system inmemory. As we’ll see later, this undertaking is a lot more complicated than it sounds. Usingmemory as a cache to temporarily store data or storing indexes of data in memory were keyinnovations, but eliminating the disk completely from the architecture takes the concept to anentirely different level of complexity and introduces a great deal of unknown technical issuesinto 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 earlyexperimental stage and the final product could seriously disrupt the market, the Tracker Projectwas strictly “Top Secret,” even to SAP employees.

The Tracker team was composed of the TREX/BWA engineers, a few of the key architectsfrom the SAP MaxDB open-source database team, the key engineers who built LiveCache, theSAP ERP performance optimization and benchmarking gurus, and several database expertsfrom outside the company. Basically, the team was an all-star lineup of everyone inside andoutside 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 Stanfordresearchers went on to found companies to commercialize their research. One product was adatabase query optimization tool known as Callixa, and the other was a native in-memorydatabase called P*Time. In late 2005, SAP quietly acquired Callixa and P*time (as well as acouple of other specialist database companies), hired several of the most distinguisheddatabase geniuses on the planet, and put them to work with the Tracker team. The teamcompleted the porting and verification of the in-memory database on a server with 64gb ofRAM, 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 passedits primary performance and “reality check” goal: the SAP Standard Application Benchmark for1000 user SD two-tier benchmark with more than 6000 SAPs, which essentially matched theperformance of the two leading certified databases at the time. To put that in perspective, ittook Microsoft several years of engineering to port Microsoft SQL to SAP and pass thebenchmark the first time. Passing the benchmark in such a short time with a small team — intotal secrecy — was a truly amazing feat. Suddenly, an entirely new world of possibilities hadopened 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 toexperiment with the inner workings of in-memory databases with faculty and students at theHasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam in Germany. The researchers examinedthe prototypes from the Tracker team — now called NewDB — and added some valuableexternal 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 levelof scalability and reliability needed for a database to become the mission-critical heart of aFortune 50 company. So, for the next four years, SAP embarked on a “bullet-proofing” effort toevolve 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 applicationportfolio. If you haven’t seen his keynote speech, it’s worth watching. If you saw it when hedelivered it, it’s probably worth watching again. It’s Professor Plattner at his best.

Different Game, Different Rules: SAP HANAOne year later, SAP announced the first live customers on SAP HANA and that SAP HANA wasnow generally available. SAP also introduced the first SAP applications that were being builtnatively on top of SAP HANA as an application platform. Not only did these revelations shockthe technology world into the “new reality” of in-memory databases, but they initiated a massiveshift 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 BusinessWarehouse 7.3. SAP had renovated this software so that it could run natively on top of SAPHANA. This development sent shockwaves throughout the data warehousing world becausealmost every SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse customer could immediately3 replace their

old, disk-based database with SAP HANA. What made this new architecture especiallyattractive was the fact that SAP customers did not have to modify their current systems toaccommodate it. To make the transition as painless as possible for its customers, SAPdesigned Business Warehouse 7.3 to be a non-disruptive innovation.

Innovation without DisruptionClay Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma was very popular reading among the Trackerteam during the early days. In addition to all the technical challenges of building a completelynew enterprise-scale database from scratch on a completely new hardware architecture, SAPalso had to be very thoughtful about how its customers would eventually adopt such afundamentally different core technology underneath the SAP Business Suite.

To accomplish this difficult balancing act, SAP’s senior executives made the team’s primaryobjective the development of a disruptive technology innovation that could be introduced intoSAP’s customers’ landscapes in a non-disruptive way. They realized that even the mostincredible database would be essentially useless if SAP’s customers couldn’t make thebusiness case to adopt it because it was too disruptive to their existing systems. The teamspoke, under NDA, with the senior IT leadership of several of SAP’s largest customers toobtain insights concerning the types of concerns they would have about such a monumentaltechnology shift at the bottom of their “stacks.” The customers provided some valuableguidelines for how SAP should engineer and introduce such a disruptive innovation into theirmission-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 switchdatabases only if the new database was minimally disruptive to implement and extremely lowrisk to operate. In essence, SAP would have to build a hugely disruptive innovation to thedatabase layer that could be adopted and implemented by its customers in a non-disruptiveway at the business application layer.

The Business Impact of a New ArchitectureWhen viewed from a holistic perspective, the entire “stack” needed to run a Fortune 50company is maddeningly complex. So, to engineer a new technology architecture for acompany, you first have to focus on WHAT the entire system has to do for the business. At itscore, the new SAP database architecture was created to help users run their businessprocesses more effectively4. It had to enabled them to track their inventory more accurately,sell their products more effectively, manufacture their products more efficiently, and purchasematerials economically. At the same time, however, it also had to reduce the complexity andcosts of managing the landscape for the IT department.

Today, every business process in a company has some amount of “latency” associated withit. For example, one public company might require 10 days to complete its quarterly closingprocess, while its primary competitor accomplishes this task in 5 days — even though bothcompanies are using the same SAP software to manage the process. Why does it take onecompany twice as long as its competitor to complete the same process? What factorscontribute to that additional “process latency”?

The answers lie in the reality that the software is simply the enabler for the execution of thebusiness process. The people who have to work together to complete the process, both insideand outside the company, often have to do a lot of “waiting” both during and between thevarious process steps. Some of that waiting is due to human activities, such as lunch breaks ormeetings. Much of it, however, occurs because people have to wait while their informationsystems 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 daysto obtain an answer from your SAP system is a primary contributor to process latency. It alsodiscourages people from using the software frequently or as it was intended. Slow-performingsystems force people to take more time to complete their jobs, and they result in less effectiveuse of all the system’s capabilities. Both of these factors introduce latency into processexecution.

Clearly, latency is a bad thing. Unfortunately, however, there’s an even darker side to slowsystems. When businesspeople can’t use a system to get a quick response to their questionsor get their job done when they need to, they invent workarounds to avoid the constraint. Theeffort and costs spent on “inventing” workarounds to the performance limitations of the systemwaste a substantial amount of institutional energy and creativeness that ideally should bechanneled into business innovation. In addition, workarounds can seriously compromise dataquality and integrity.

As we have discussed, the major benefits of in-memory storage are that users no longerhave to wait for the system, and the information they need to make more intelligent decisions isinstantly available at their fingertips. Thus, companies that employ in-memory systems areoperating 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 aspotlight on all the problem areas of the process now that the system latency is no longerclouding up business transparency.

The Need for Business FlexibilityIn addition to speeding up database I/O throughput and simplifying the enterprise systemarchitecture, SAP also had to innovate in a third direction: business flexibility. Over the years,SAP had become adept at automating “standard” business processes for 24 different industriesglobally. 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 ofbusiness possibilities for customers. SAP’s customers needed a huge amount of flexibility tomodify, extend, and adapt their core business processes to reflect their rapidly changingbusiness 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 mucheasier to modify. However, none of that flexibility was going to benefit their customers if theapplications and platform that managed those dynamic business processes were chained to aslow, 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 (seeThe Innovator’s Dilemma for all the reasons why), and SAP couldn’t afford to sit by and watchthese problems continue to get worse for their customers. SAP needed to engineer abreakthrough innovation in in-memory databases to build the foundations for a futurearchitecture 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 totackle, and it couldn’t have been more critical to SAP’s future success.

Faster, Better, CheaperThere’s another fundamental law of the technology industry: Faster, Better, Cheaper. That is,each new generation of product or technology has to be faster, better, and cheaper than thegeneration it is replacing, or customers won’t purchase it. Geoffrey Moore has some greatthoughts on how game-changing technologies “cross the chasm.” He maintains, among otherthings, that faster, better, and cheaper are fundamental characteristics that must be present fora successful product introduction.

In-memory computing fits the faster, better, cheaper model perfectly. I/O is hundreds tothousands of times faster on RAM than on disks. There’s really no comparison in how rapidlyyou can get memory off a database in RAM than off a database on disk. In-memory databasesare a better architecture due to their simplicity, tighter integration with the apps, hybridrow/column store, and ease of operations. Finally, when you compare the cost of an in-memorydatabase to that of a disk-based database on the appropriate metric — cost per gigabyte persecond — 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 traditionaldatabases 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 reallylook at what the switch from an “old” platform to a “new” platform can do for overall usability ofthe solutions on top of the platform, there are some amazing possibilities.

Take the ubiquitous iPod for example. When Apple introduced the iPod in 2001, itrevolutionized the way that people listened to music, even though it wasn’t the first MP3 playeron the market. The key innovation was that Apple was able to fit a tiny 1.8-inch hard drive intoits small case so you could carry 5gb of music in your pocket, at a time when most other MP3players 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, sothe cost per megabyte per second calculation wasn’t terribly relevant. By that measure, 5gb ofdisk for roughly the same price as 64mb of RAM was a huge difference. It wasn’t significantlyfaster than its competitors, but it was so phenomenally better and cheaper per megabyte (evenat $399) that it became a category killer.

In hindsight, Apple had to make several architectural compromises to squeeze that hard driveinto the iPod. First, the hard drive took up most of the case, leaving very little room for anythingelse. There was a tiny monochrome display, a clunky mechanical “click wheel” user interface, afairly weak processor, and, most importantly, a disappointingly short battery life. The physicsneeded 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 5gbmodel. Significantly, the new model sold at the same price as the original. In addition to thevastly 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, in2001 people had been thrilled with 5gb of storage, because they could download their entireCD collection onto the iPod. Meanwhile, Moore’s law had been in effect for four full cycles and16gb of memory cost about the same as a 160gb hard drive. In 2007, Apple could build aniPod with 16gb of solid-state RAM storage — which was only one-tenth of the capacity of thecurrent 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 changedthe game for Apple. Removing the hard drive and its spinning disks had a huge impact onApple’s design parameters, for several reasons. First, it enabled the company to shrink thethickness and reduce the weight of the iPod, making it easier to carry and store. In addition, itcreated more room for a bigger motherboard and a larger display. In fact, Apple could now turnthe 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 alarger, more powerful processor in the device. Most importantly, however, eliminating thephysical hard drive more than doubled the battery life since there were no more mechanicaldisks to spin.

These innovations essentially transformed a simple music player into a miniature computerthat you could carry in your pocket. It had an operating system, long battery life, audio andvideo capabilities, and a sufficient amount of storage. Going even further, Apple could also buildanother 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 onlymade sense that developers would build new applications to exploit the capabilities of the newplatform. Although Apple couldn’t have predicted the success of games like “Angry Birds,” theyrealized that innovation couldn’t be unleashed on their new platform until they removed thesingle biggest piece of the architecture that was imposing all the constraints. Ironically, it wasthe same piece of technology that made the original iPod so successful. Think about that for asecond: Apple had to eliminate the key technology in the iPod that had made them sosuccessful 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 hugeleap of faith to take.

In essence, getting rid of the hard drive in the iPods was the most critical technology decisionApple made to deliver the iPod Touch, iPhone, and, eventually, the iPad. Most of the otherpieces 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 toinnovate without constraints and allowed them to change the rules of the game again, back tothe 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 applicationplatform. 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 businessapplications 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 iPodsales. So, somebody must be buying the “old” iPods and Apple must be making some money off of them, but do you knowanyone 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 thefeatures 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’llcontinue to support that option, but they’re predicting a similar adoption trend once the SAP Business Suite is supported on SAPHANA. At that point, you’ll need an overwhelmingly compelling business reason to forego all the goodness of the new architectureand renovated SAP apps on top of SAP HANA.

In-Memory BasicsThus far, we’ve focused on the transition to in-memory computing and its implications for IT.With this information as background, we next “dive into the deep end” of SAP HANA. Before wedo so, however, here are a few basic concepts about in-memory computing that you’ll need tounderstand. Some of these concepts might be similar to what you already know aboutdatabases and server technology. There are also some cutting-edge concepts, however, thatmerit discussion.

Storing data in memory isn’t a new concept. What is new is that now you can store yourwhole operational or analytic database entirely in RAM as the primary persistence layer5.Historically database systems were designed to perform well on computer systems with limitedRAM. As we have seen, in these systems slow disk I/O was the main bottleneck in datathroughput. 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. Withthe 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 systemmemory, which allows them to hold complete databases in RAM. Significantly, this arrangementshifts the performance bottleneck from disk I/O to the data transfer between CPU cache andmain memory (which is already blazing fast and getting faster).

In a disk-based database architecture, there are several levels of caching and temporarystorage to keep data closer to the application and avoid excessive numbers of round-trips tothe database (which slows things down). The key difference with SAP HANA is that all of thosecaches and layers are eliminated because the entire physical database is literally sitting on themotherboard and is therefore in memory all the time. This arrangement dramatically simplifiesthe 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 inmemory. There’s a techie book6 on all those conceptual differences if you really want to getdown into the details. What follows here is a brief summary of some of the key advantages ofSAP HANA over its aging disk-based cousins.

Pure In-Memory DatabaseWith SAP HANA, all relevant data are available in main memory, which avoids the performancepenalty of disk I/O completely. Either disk or solid-state drives are still required for permanentpersistency in the event of a power failure or some other catastrophe. This doesn’t slow downperformance, however, because the required backup operations to disk can take placeasynchronously as a background task.

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

Columnar and Row-Based Data StorageConceptually, a database table is a two-dimensional data structure with cells organized in rowsand columns, just like a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Computer memory, in contrast, isorganized as a linear structure. To store a table in linear memory, two options exist: row-basedstorage and column storage. A row-oriented storage system stores a table as a sequence ofrecords, each of which contains the fields of one row. Conversely, in column storage the entriesof a column are stored in contiguous memory locations. SAP HANA is a “hybrid” database thatuses 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 bestored column-wise or row-wise. It also enables the developer to alter an existing table fromcolumnar to row-based and vice versa. The decision to use columnar or row-based tables istypically a determined by how the data will be used and which method is the most efficient forthat 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 containonly 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 manyselects 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).

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

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

SAP HANA Architectural OverviewNow that we’ve discussed the key concepts underlying in-memory storage, we can focus morespecifically on the SAP HANA architecture. As we noted earlier, conceptually SAP HANA is verysimilar to most databases you’re familiar with. Applications have to put data in and take dataout of the database, data sources have to interface with it, and it has to store and manage datareliably. Despite these surface similarities, however, SAP HANA is quite different “under thehood” 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 andversatile 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-installedappliance on certified hardware. This eliminates many of the typical activities and problems youfind in regular databases. Second, it includes all of the standard application interfaces andlibraries so that developers can immediately get to work using it, without re-learning anyproprietary APIs.

SAP HANA in-memory appliance

Finally, SAP HANA comes with several ways to connect easily to nearly any source system ineither real-time or near real-time.

These features are designed to make SAP HANA as close to “plug-and-play” as it can be andto make it a non-disruptive addition to your existing landscape. We’ll spend a few momentshere explaining these capabilities at a basic level. We’ll discuss them in much more technicaldetail in the SAP HANA Architecture chapter.

Programming Interfaces for SAP HANA

SQLSQL is the main interface for client applications. The SQL implementation of the SAP HANAdatabase is based on SQL 92 entry-level features and core features of SQL 99. However, itoffers several SQL extensions on top of this standard. These extensions are available forcreating tables as both row-based and column-based tables and for conversion between thetwo formats. For most SQL statements it is irrelevant whether the table is column-based orrow-based. However, there are some features — for example, time-based queries and column-store specific parameters — that are supported only for columnar tables.

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

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

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

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

Calculation EngineWhat truly makes SAP HANA unique is that, in addition to its being a standard SQL database, italso natively supports data calculation inside the database itself. By incorporating procedurallanguage support — C++, Python, and ABAP — directly into the database kernel through adedicated calculation engine, it can achieve exceptional performance because the data do notneed to be moved out of the database, processed, and then written back in.

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

JDBC driver for Java clientsODBC driver for Windows/Unix/Linux clients, especially for MS Office integrationDBSL (Database Shared Library) for ABAP

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

SAP HANA StudioThe SAP HANA Studio is the primary interface for developers, administrators, and datamodelers. It is based on the open-source Eclipse framework, and it consists of 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/stopthe 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 datamodels 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 SAPHANA).

Data Modeling in SAP HANABusiness and IT users can either create on-the-fly non-materialized data views or build reusableones on top of standard SQL tables via a very intuitive user interface, which utilizes SQLScriptand stored procedures to perform business logic on the data models. Information modelscreated in SAP HANA can be consumed directly by Business Objects BI clients or indirectly byusing 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-flycalculations.

In traditional databases, users experience bottlenecks when changing business requirementsrequires modifications to the existing data model, which required users to delete and re-loaddata into materialized views. In contrast, in SAP HANA, dynamic data modeling on the lowestgranular level is loaded into the system. These raw data are constantly available in memory foranalytical purposes, and they are not pre-loaded in cache, physical aggregate tables, indextables, or any other redundant data storage.

Data Provisioning for SAP HANASAP HANA offers both real-time replication and near real-time/batch replication to move datafrom source systems to the SAP HANA database. Replication-based data provisioning likeSybase 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 initialreplication of historical records, the changed data are pushed from the source to SAP HANAbased on triggers such as table updates. SAP SLT can also be used to “direct write” data backto the source system in scenarios where “write back” or “round trip” synchronization to the SAPsource 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 thetarget system. The type of data provisioning tool used is primarily determined by the businessneeds of the use case and the characteristics of the source system.

Real-Time Replication Using SLTSLT replicator provides near-real-time and scheduled data replication from SAP sourcesystems to SAP HANA. It is based on SAP’s proven System Landscape Optimization (SLO)technology that has been used for many years for Near Zero Down Time upgrade andmigration projects. Trigger-Based Data Replication using SLT is based on capturing databasechanges at a high level of abstraction in the source SAP system. It benefits from beingdatabase and OS agnostic, and it can parallelize database changes on multiple tables or bysegmenting large table changes. SLT can be installed on an existing SAP source system or asan additional lightweight SAP system side-by-side with the source system.

Real-Time Replication with Direct Write/Write-backSAP 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 secondarydatabase to an SAP ECC system and provide accelerated data processing for existing SAPapplications. Applications can use the DBSL on the application server layer to simultaneouslywrite to traditional databases and the SAP HANA database.

Extraction (ETL) / Periodic LoadThe ETL-based data load scenario uses SAP BusinessObjects DataServices to load therelevant business data from virtually any source system (SAP and non-SAP) to the SAP HANAdatabase. SAP BusinessObjects Data Services is a proven ETL tool that supports broadconnectivity to databases, applications, legacy, file formats, and unstructured data. It providesthe modeling environment to model data flows from one or more source systems along withtransformations and data cleansing.

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

System MonitoringThe Administration console provides tools to monitor the system’s status, its services, and theconsumption of its resources. Administrators are notified by an alert mechanism when criticalsituations arise. Analytics and statistics on historical monitoring data are also provided toenable efficient data center operations and for planning future resource allocations.

Backup & RecoveryThe Administration console in the SAP HANA Studio supports the following scenarios:

Recovery to the last data backupRecovery to both the last and previous data backupsRecovery to last state before the crash

Point-in-time recovery

In the event of disaster scenarios such as fires, power outages, earthquakes or hardwarefailures, SAP HANA supports Hot Standby using synchronous mirroring with the redundant datacenter concept — including a redundant SAP HANA system — in addition to Cold Standby usinga standby system within one SAP HANA landscape, where the failover is triggeredautomatically.

User ProvisioningSAP HANA supports user provisioning with authentication, role-based security and analysisauthorization using analytic privileges. Analytical privileges provide security to the analyticalobjects based on a set of attribute values. These values can be applied to a set of users byassigning them to user/role.

SAP HANA HardwareSAP HANA is delivered as a flexible, multipurpose appliance that combines SAP softwarecomponents optimized on hardware provided by SAP’s leading hardware partners such asCisco, Dell, IBM, HP, Hitachi, NEC, and Fujitsu, using the latest Intel Xeon E7 processors. SAPHANA servers are sold in “t-shirt” sizes ranging from Extra-Small (128GB RAM) all the way upto Extra Large (>2TB RAM). Because RAM is the key technology for SAP HANA, SAP uses theamount of RAM to determine the server’s t-shirt size as well as its price. SAP’s underlyingphilosophy is “the more processors (cores), the better,” so it does not impose a per-processorcharge for SAP HANA.

With the current certified Scale-Out options from SAP HANA hardware providers, companiescan deploy up to 16 Extra Large server nodes into on logical database instance, which equatesto a maximum of 32TB of RAM and 128 CPUs with 1280 total cores. SAP is currently testing a60 node SAP HANA instance in the labs.

The hardware vendor provides factory pre-installation for the hardware, the OS, and the SAPsoftware. It may also add specific best-practices and configuration. The vendor finalizes theinstallation with on-site setup and configuration of the SAP HANA components, includingdeployment in the customer data center, connectivity to the network, Solution Manager setup,SAP router connectivity, and SSL support. The customer then establishes connectivity to thesource systems and clients, including the deployment of additional replication components onthe source system(s) and, potentially, the installation and configuration of SAP BusinessObjectsbusiness analytics client components.

Although the term “appliance” suggests a “black box” that plugs into an outlet, in realityinstalling SAP HANA requires on-site activities and coordination on a high technical level. Theappliance approach for SAP HANA systems reduces the implementation and maintenance effortsignificantly, but it does not eliminate it completely.

SAP HANA Use CasesBecause SAP HANA is both a database (in the traditional sense) and a database platform (inthe 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 tablestructure, however, it really shines in scenarios that involve both types of data. It’s important toremember that SAP has developed SAP HANA to be a non-disruptive addition to existinglandscapes. With this point in mind, we’ll discuss the key use cases that are most typical forSAP 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 datamart, SAP Business Suite accelerator, a primary database for SAP NetWeaver BusinessWarehouse, and a development platform for new applications. As SAP HANA matures andSAP renovates its entire portfolio of solutions to take advantage of all the horsepower in SAPHANA, you can expect to see nearly every product that SAP provides supported natively onSAP 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 SAPHANA live customers by industry and function, please visit the SAP HANA Use CaseRepository.

Agile Data MartThe earliest scenarios where SAP HANA has been deployed in production are as a stand-alonedata mart for a specific use case. In this scenario, SAP HANA acts as the central hub to collectdata from a few SAP and non-SAP source systems and then display some fairly simple andfocused analytics in a single-purpose dashboard for users.

This use case has the advantages of (1) being completely non-disruptive to the existinglandscape and (2) providing an immediate, focused solution to an urgent business analyticsproblem. These projects are also typically completed very quickly, sometimes in just a fewweeks, because the business problem is well known and the relevant data and source systemsare easily identified. SAP HANA is set up as a stand-alone system in the landscape, which isthen connected to the source systems and displayed to a small number of users in a simpleWeb-based or mobile user interface. This process involves zero disruption to the existinglandscape, and companies get instant value because they can now do things that wereimpossible before they acquired SAP HANA.

Additionally, the development cycles for these use cases are typically very short, becausemost of these scenarios use a standard SAP BusinessObjects front end with self-serviceanalytics or Microsoft Excel. We label these systems “agile data marts” because they performa 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 scenarioswere either completely impossible to build in a traditional database architecture or they were socost prohibitive that companies could not justify building them. The scenarios might bestraightforward, 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 talkingenthusiastically 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 HANAthat includes the extractors and connectors needed to obtain data from source systems and thefront-end tools needed to build analytical applications on top of the data.

SAP Business Suite AcceleratorThe second major scenario where SAP HANA is being used is to accelerate transactions andreports inside the SAP Business Suite. Again, SAP HANA is being set up as a stand-alonesystem in the landscape, side-by-side with the database under the SAP Business Suiteapplications. In this scenario, however, SAP HANA is being used to “off load” some of thetransactions or reports that typically take a long time (hours or days) to run, but it is not beingused as the primary database under the application.

We explained earlier that certain transactions or reports inside the SAP Business Suite canbe very slow, due primarily to the slow I/O of the disk-based database underneath the systemand the huge requests for data generated by these transactions and reports. Budgeting andplanning transactions in SAP require the system to call data from many different tables in orderto run its calculations and present a result. Reports are also very data-intensive, involving vastamounts of data contained in multiple tables. For both transactions and reports, then, theapplication must request the data from the database, load it into a buffer table in the SAPapplication 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 adjustmentsto the results and then save the changes back to the database. Quite often, this process isiterative, meaning that the user must run the report or transaction, review the results, makesome changes, and then run the report or transaction again to reflect the changes. Imagine ascenario where every time the transaction or report runs, it takes one hour to finish (from whenyou press “Enter” until the results are displayed on the screen). What if it took several hours oreven a day or two to run that transaction or report? Clearly, system latency can seriously slowdown the entire company.

Eliminating System Latency: The Case of HiltiTo illustrate severe system latency, let’s consider the case of Hilti, the global construction toolsmanufacturer. Hilti used to generate a list of 9 million customers from 53 million databaserecords in its SAP ERP system in about three hours. A salesperson used to hit “Enter” andthen return three hours later to obtain the results. Significantly, 99% of the time the system tookto generate that list came from simply retrieving the records off the disk-based database. Oncethe data were conveyed to the SAP application, the algorithm only took a few fractions of asecond 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 productionSAP ERP system and then copied the relevant tables into SAP HANA. The results? Hilti cannow run the exact same report in about three seconds. In addition, installing SAP HANA wastotally non-disruptive. It required no changes to the algorithm, no changes to the productiondatabase, 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 theprocess to take several hours — as always — so they got up from their desks to do somethingelse. To their complete surprise, the completed report appeared on their screen before theycould get out of their chairs. Watch Hilti’s SAP HANA story here.

Technically, there is very little that needs to be done to accelerate a few problematictransactions or reports in an SAP Business Suite application. We’ll discuss this topic that indetail in the chapter on the Accelerated SAP Business Suite. In summary, SAP has alreadydelivered the content for most of the truly problematic transactions and reports as part of thelatest service packs for the SAP Business Suite — for free. Once the relevant tables have beenreplicated to the SAP HANA system, there is a quick change in the configuration screen toredirect 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, andthe results come back incredibly fast. SAP has also set up special fixed-price, fixed-scope SAPrapid deployment solutions (RDS) to assist customers in the rapid implementation of these“accelerated” transactions and reports.

Accelerated SAP ERP Transactions and ReportsYou can expect to see many more “problem” transactions and reports generated at previouslyunimaginable speeds as SAP introduces enhancement pack updates to SAP HANA. Here’s ashort listing of some of the SAP ERP transactions and reports that are currently available:

Sales ReportingQuickly 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, withinstant analysis of your credit memo and billing list.

Financial ReportingObtain immediate insights across your business — into revenue, customers, accountspayable and receivable, open and overdue items, top general ledger transaction, and dayssales outstanding (DSO). Make the right financial decisions, armed with real-timeinformation.

Shipping ReportingRely on real-time shipping reporting for complete stock overview analysis. You can betterplan and monitor outbound delivery — and assess and optimize stock levels — withaccurate information at your fingertips.

Purchasing ReportingGain timely insights into purchase orders, vendors, and the movement of goods — withreal-time purchasing reporting. Make better purchasing decisions, based on a completeanalysis of your order history.

Master Data ReportingObtain real-time reporting on your main master data — including customer, vendor, andmaterial lists — for improved productivity and accuracy.

SAP Solutions for Accelerated Applications

SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 10.0 Powered by SAP HANAThe power of SAP HANA dramatically enhances unified planning, budgeting, forecastingand consolidation processes. Powered by SAP HANA, SAP BusinessObjects Planning andConsolidation 10.0, version for SAP NetWeaver aims to increase agility by helpingenterprises harness big data to plan better and act faster with better insight into all relevantinformation and rapid write-back. The application is planned to be the first enterpriseperformance management (EPM) application to support the SAP NetWeaver BusinessWarehouse component, powered by SAP HANA announced last year. SAP intends to allowcustomers running the application that have invested in SAP HANA to leverage the power ofin-memory computing technology to boost performance by accelerating planning andconsolidation processing.

SAP CO-PA AcceleratorSAP CO-PA Accelerator dramatically improves the speed and depth of working withmassive 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 largescale 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 atsignificantly faster processing time and be empowered with easy, self-service access totrusted profitability information.

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

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

SAP Finance and Controlling AcceleratorSAP Finance and Controlling Accelerator supports finance departments with instant accessto vast amounts of ledger, cost and material ledger data in ERP as well as easyexploration 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, accelerateperiod-end closing, and make smarter decisions.

SAP Sales Pipeline AnalysisWith 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 flycalculations and in-depth analysis on any business dimension. Sales managers can nowleverage the power of SAP HANA combined with SAP Customer Relationship Management(CRM) for complete and instant visibility of accurate and consolidated pipeline data. Theycan react more quickly to changing sales conditions with real-time information, andaccelerate deals through the pipeline with powerful and user-driven analytics. As a result,best-run businesses can unlock hidden revenue opportunities as well as significantlyincrease profits and sales effectiveness.

SAP Customer Segmentation AcceleratorThe SAP Customer Segmentation Accelerator helps marketing departments build highlyspecific segmentations on high volumes of customer data and at unparalleled speed.Marketers can now work with large amounts of granular data to better understandcustomer demands, behaviors and preferences — targeting the precise audience with theright offers across every customer segments, tactics and channels. The power of SAPHANA combined with SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) empowersmarketers to maximize profits with highly tailored campaigns, dramatically reduce the costof marketing by targeting more easily high margin customers, and react quicker to optimizecampaigns and tactics.

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

SAP HANA Rapid Deployment SolutionsA great majority of these solutions powered by SAP HANA can be deployed as rapid-deployment solutions in order to ensure a quick time to value. The rapid deployment solutionsstreamline the implementation process bringing together software, best practices, and servicesensuring maximum predictability with fixed cost and scope editions.

SAP Rapid Deployment solutions leverage an innovative delivery model to accelerate theimplementation times and lower risk. Implementation is supported by a standardizedmethodology, accelerators developed uniquely for each offering, and predefined best practices,meeting typical business requirements to address the customer’s immediate needs. Even ascustomers benefit from prebuilt functionality, these solutions provide a platform designed toevolve and extend as the customer’s business grows.

SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions are available through SAP as well as SAP partners bytraditional licensing or subscription pricing, transparency of price and scope eliminate projectrisks for companies. A good example is the SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for operationalreporting with SAP HANA that can help you quickly generate insightful reports — from sales tofinancials to shipping — on high volumes of ERP data.

A second example is SAP rapid-deployment solution for sales pipeline analysis with SAPHANA that helps you to analyze massive amounts of pipeline data in CRM.

You can view a demonstration of the solution here.Here are a few of the SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions that are available to enable the

accelerated SAP applications:SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for accelerated finance and controlling with 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 throughaccelerated reporting, analyses, and period-end closings.

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

SAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for profitability analysis with SAP HANA Analyzemassive amounts of profitability data in enterprise resource planning (ERP) (CO-PA) fasterthan ever before. Our ERP profitability analysis solution with SAP HANA can help youperform real-time reporting and conduct instant, on-the-fly analysis — for more profitabledecision making across your enterprise.

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

SAP rapid-deployment solution for sales pipeline analysis with SAP HANA Gain instantinsight into massive volumes of sales pipeline data while performing on-the-fly calculationsand 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 applicationsand RDS packages in the Accelerated SAP Business Suite chapter.

SAP offers a specific licensing bundle to utilize SAP HANA for this use case that includesadditional replication tools needed for the connections to the SAP source system.

SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Powered by SAP HANAPossibly the “killer” use case for SAP HANA in 2012 is SAP BW 7.3 on SAP HANA. In thisscenario, companies replace the entire database under their SAP BW 7.3 system with SAPHANA. They simply swap out whatever disk-based database their system is currently runningon 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 firstSAP application that was renovated and updated to natively run on SAP HANA as its primaryrun-time database. Most of these renovations were necessary to more closely tie the SAP BWapplication to the SAP HANA database. In a disk-based architecture, SAP BW is separatedfrom the database by an abstraction layer, essentially making it impossible for the applicationto “see” anything in the database other than bare tables. Once the abstraction layer isremoved, the SAP BW application cannot only “see” everything in the database, but the entiredatabase is designed around the needs of that specific application. This opens up a whole newworld of possibilities for SAP customers.

With SAP HANA, SAP BW now generates turbo-charged query responses natively, withoutthe need for any side-car accelerators or crazy multi-layered third-party architectures. Becausethe entire database under the SAP BW system physically sits in memory, every activity — notjust queries — is executed orders of magnitude faster.

SAP released the 7.3 version of SAP BW in general availability in early 2011 and thenreleased the SAP HANA-enabled version into general availability in April 2012. SAP NW BW onSAP HANA is now Generally Available to all customers globally. All of the SAP HANA-specificenhancements were bundled into the SPS05 update, and customers who had already upgradedto 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 abouttheir amazing 10-DAY project to get up and running at the Sapphire Now 2011 conference inMadrid, Spain. The whole effort was incredibly non-disruptive. SAP is seeing similar results withthe other customers in the ramp-up project. All of the changes on the SAP BW side aredelivered “under the hood” in the service pack, and the database migration can be performedwithout any changes to the SAP BW application. All of the customer’s content and configurationare completely unchanged. Have a look at the end-to-end migration guide for a great overviewof the SAP BW database migration process. You should also read a great blog post by JohnAppleby, 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 twofundamental benefits of keeping the entire database in memory: (1) This architecture eliminatesthe need to send huge amounts of data between application and DB servers, and (2) it allowsusers 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 nastythings that historically slowed down the system, from both a user perspective and anadministration perspective. We’ll explore all of the technical enhancements in the SAP BW onSAP 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 reportingAd-hoc reporting capabilitiesReduction of TCO.

Please see these links for more details and results:http://www.sap.com/campaigns/benchmark/appbm_bweml.epxhttp://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/bweml-results.htmhttp://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 primarypersistence 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 yourSAP account executive for the details. SAP has also set up a special migration fund to provideprofessional services credits to migrate to SAP BW on SAP HANA.

SAP HANA as an Application Development PlatformProbably the most wide-open innovation opportunity for SAP HANA is as an applicationplatform. If the speed and simplification that were achieved by porting SAP BW are anyindication, users can realize an unbelievable amount of value not only by renovating existingapplications (SAP and non-SAP) to run natively on SAP HANA, but by also building entirely newapplications that are designed from scratch to maximize SAP HANA’s powerful capabilities. Theperformance limitations of traditional databases and processing power have often ledorganizations to compromise on how to deploy business processes on their enterpriseplatforms. Now, these organizations can choose to liberate themselves from these constraintsand optimize business processes in ways that are more natural to the way their employeesactually perform their work. This is where SAP sees a clear parallel to the Apple App Storeevolution. 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, oncedevelopers considered the possibilities of combining the new capabilities of the device andwriting native applications for the iPhone/iPod Touch (Angry Birds, Foursquare), innovationexploded.

There are three basic types of applications being built on SAP HANA today:

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

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

SAP-built Applications for SAP HANASAP is delivering a new class of solutions on top of the SAP HANA platform that provide real-time insights on big data and state-of-the-art analysis capabilities. These innovative solutionscan empower organizations to transform the way they run their businesses by making smarterand faster decisions, responding more quickly to events, unlocking new opportunities, and eveninventing new data-driven business models and processes that were simply not possible withdisk-based databases. Below are a few examples of native-SAP HANA applications. We’llconsider them in greater detail in the SAP HANA Applications chapter.

SAP BusinessObjects Sales Analysis for Retail powered by SAP HANAThis solution provides retailers with real-time access to critical information and allowsnearly real-time interactive analysis, which is not possible with traditional database

technology. It offers prebuilt data models, key performance indicators (KPIs), role-specificdashboards and customized reports to provide retailers with a deeper understanding of allfactors influencing the merchandising life cycle. SAP BusinessObjects Sales Analysis forRetail aims at providing the integration needed for improved scalability and performance forretailers operating in separate sales, inventory and promotions systems. The new serviceprovides Point-of-Sale (POS) analysis allow retailers to assess performance and generatequick responses through the use of prebuilt dashboards, interactive reports and more than70 KPIs and inventory management to provide retailers with the ability to identify criticalstock and margin issues through close inventory alignment.

SAP Smart Meter AnalyticsSAP Smart Meter Analytics is a “native-HANA” application that was designed for utilitycompanies facing an exponential increase in data volume driven by their deployment ofsmart meters. This new application enables utility companies to turn massive volumes ofsmart meter data into powerful insights and transform how they engage customers and runtheir businesses. With SAP Smart Meter Analytics, utility companies can:

Instantly aggregate time of use blocks and total consumption profiles to analyze theircustomers’ energy usage by what neighborhood they are in, the size of their homes orbusinesses, building type, and by any other dimension and at any level of granularitySegment customers with precision based on energy consumption patterns that areautomatically generated by identifying customers that have similar energy usagebehaviorProvide energy efficiency benchmarking based on statistical analysis so that utilitycompanies can help their customers understand where they stand compared to theirpeers and how they can improve their energy efficiencyEmpower customers with direct access to energy usage insights via web portals andmobile devices connected to SAP Smart Meter Analytics via web services

These capabilities delivered by SAP Smart Meter Analytics enable utility companies toincrease adoption of service options such as demand response programs, launch targetedenergy efficiency programs, improve fraud detection capabilities, and develop new tariffsand more accurate load forecasts.

SAP Sales & Operations PlanningSAP Sales & Operations Planning is a next generation planning application that is poweredby SAP HANA and delivered in the cloud. The solution enables:

Planning and real-time analysis with a unified model of demand, supply chain, andfinancial data at any level of granularity and dimensionRapid, interactive simulation and scenario analysis, using the full S&OP data model tosupport demand-supply balancing decisionsEmbedded, context-aware social collaboration enables rapid planning and decision-making across the organization

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

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

Minimize supply chain disruption by proactively monitoring and predicting real-timesupply risks across a multi-tier supplier networkDrive stronger supplier performance by benchmarking supplier performance for yourcompany against others in the business network and identifying significant shifts andtrends in supplier performance using leading-edge machine learning and statisticalanalysisManage your supply base by aggregating and transforming supplier data to deliverinstant insights into the operational health of the supply base.

Recalls PlusRecalls Plus is SAP’s first consumer mobile app that enables parents to proactively monitorrecalls of their kids’ strollers, cribs, toys, and other items for greater safety and peace ofmind. Features of the app include:

Search recall history by brand or categoryCreate a personal watch list of items like car seats, cribs, strollers and so onTrack allergen related recallsShare relevant recalls with othersRead and monitor recalls from all relevant US government agencies: CPSC, NHTSA,FDA and USDA

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

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

Partner-built Applications for SAP HANAThe SAP partner ecosystem provides thousands of SAP-certified software solutions that pluginto 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 apositive impact on any partner solutions that are integrated with that system. There are alsonumerous SAP partner solutions that need to “turbocharge” themselves to increase their ownperformance — and to keep up with the turbocharged SAP systems coming on top of SAPHANA in the future.

Regardless of the programming language these partner apps are written in, they all can beported over to SAP HANA in a fairly straightforward way. However, just as SAP is renovatingits existing applications, partners too can approach re-platforming as an opportunity to rethinksome of the design parameters that they employed in the original solution design and to rebuildtheir 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 theselines. 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 solutionconducts complex, on-the-fly calculations that demand a great deal of I/O performance fromdatabases. Therefore, the addition of SAP HANA underneath their solution makes perfectsense.

Custom Applications for SAP HANAAs stated earlier, SAP HANA is a full-blown, do-just-about-anything-you-want applicationplatform. It speaks pure SQL and it includes all of the most common APIs, so you can literallywrite any type of application you want on top of it. There are a few rules and “guide rails” thatare designed to keep things from going wrong, but the sky truly is the limit when it comes toimagining what to build with SAP HANA.

Although SAP HANA is valuable for all types of activities, it “shines” particularly well in a fewunique situations. For example, if you’re building an enterprise-scale application for a businessscenario that (1) needs to search or aggregate huge volumes of data, (2) requiresdetailed/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 greatchoice.

That’s not to say that SAP HANA can’t run your “standard” applications — it certainly can dothat (really fast). Nevertheless, the most exciting use cases SAP is seeing for SAP HANA asthe foundation of custom apps are situations where a company has an urgent business needthat is literally impossible to automate today due to the limitations of traditional databases orthe lack of a supercomputer. If you’re a business owner who has a killer idea that fits the abovedescription, 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 SAPecosystem of ISVs, SAP partners, and SAP customers starts to unleash their innovation on topof SAP HANA, there literally is no limit to the amazing and game-changing applications they canbuild. It is incredibly important for SAP to renovate its portfolio and build amazing newapplications to exploit the vast potential of SAP HANA. It is even more important, however, forthe 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 RoadmapThe 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 RAMon a single “medium” SAP HANA server. With that much processing power and high-speedRAM available, there really are no limits to how fast SAP can speed up its own apps andliterally any other app on the planet. SAP will continue co-innovating with Intel and otherhardware partners to ensure that SAP HANA is continuously updated and optimized to takeadvantage of the latest and greatest technology advances to become even faster than it istoday.

Although the speed boost generated by the hardware is exciting, it is only half of theequation. Renovating applications to take advantage of the ever-increasing horsepower is alsocritical. There’s a great deal of value that can be achieved by doing things “better” in theapplications. Renovating and re-imagining how applications work and how they deal with data inthe “no constraints” paradigm represents a fundamental philosophical shift for applicationdevelopers. There are enormous opportunities to streamline, optimize, and simplify applicationarchitectures by adding SAP HANA as the database engine underneath them. SAP will investan enormous amount of resources to extend SAP HANA’s capabilities as an applicationplatform for both its own applications and non-SAP applications. This investment will result in anincreasingly rich and robust set of developer tools to renovate and re-imagine any applicationand to build amazing new applications.

This opportunity for optimization and simplification not only makes things even faster than justthe hardware speed boost, it also results in significantly lower TCO for companies. SAP HANAcan have a massive impact on reducing TCO and improving business value. “Cheaper” isn’tachieved only through industry-standard processors, RAM, and servers. Cheaper is a holisticmindset that starts from application design and then progresses through user efficiency all theway to administration and operations. SAP will continue to invest heavily in many areas to makeSAP HANA the cheapest and most efficient database to operate in production environments.These efforts include innovating in new landscape configurations such as native clouddeployments of SAP HANA.

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

In May of 2012, SAP showed the extreme scalability of SAP HANA by showcasing a 100TBRAM SAP HANA system with 100 nodes. Click here to watch Hasso Plattner show off thelargest SAP HANA system in the world.

In addition, with a robust ecosystem of ISVs, system integrators, and SAP customersbuilding their innovative applications on SAP HANA, SAP intends to become the BROADESTdatabase platform for new applications. In just the first year since SAP HANA becameavailable, 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 asa 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 thecurrent generation of SAP applications, but it will be the growth engine for all kinds of amazingNEW SAP apps. Over the next few years, SAP HANA will become the primary database forEVERY enterprise application in the SAP portfolio. That’s true for standard, on-premiseapplications like the SAP Business Suite; SME solutions like SAP Business One, SAP BusinessByDesign, and SAP All-in-One; and the emerging portfolio of cloud/on-demand solutions. Inpoker terms, SAP is going “all in” with SAP HANA. SAP has made a passionate commitment toinnovate for the future of its ecosystem, and the benefits of this shift for SAP’s customers andpartners 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 torenovate all existing applications and build amazing new applications. The renovation work ismoving very quickly inside SAP, so much so that it has surpassed even the most optimistictimelines. The SAP BW renovation and porting to SAP HANA was the first major step towardsa completely renovated SAP Business Suite. The next major step will be for SAP to completethe 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, andSAP SRM — should follow shortly after that. In parallel, SAP is adding SAP HANA to all of theother 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/Obottleneck associated with the database. Unfortunately, these “database avoidance techniques”have resulted in extensive “plaque” buildup inside the applications, in the forms of redundantcode, tedious data aggregations and transformations, replication of data, and so on. Theseproblems 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 beremoved from the system.

Obviously, SAP’s renovation efforts will involve a great deal of streamlining and cleanup. Atthe same time, however, this renovation also represents a golden opportunity for SAP’sengineers to reimagine all of the things that these applications do from the perspective of livingin a world with no constraints. These experts can question their original assumptions, inventbetter ways of doing things, remove latency from the processes, and program their applicationsto perform calculations more efficiently deep inside the database. All of these developments willlead to lower TCO and more flexibility for customers, which in turn will make their investment inSAP much more valuable.

This exercise is also having an amazing effect on the SAP culture. Going back into the codeof all of their apps with a fresh eye and ambitious dreams free from constraints has rekindled afirestorm of innovation within the SAP development group. The coffee corners in SAP labsaround the world are literally buzzing with new ideas and passionate discussions. In fact, youcan often see code samples from these discussions written on the windows because theparticipants 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 amonumental impact on the speed and volume of innovation coming from SAP. SAP HANA hasliterally awakened a sleeping giant of innovation inside SAP. Moreover, this enthusiasm appearsto be contagious: People are witnessing the same type of awakening throughout the SAPecosystem.

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 asingle SAP HANA instance, SAP can provide a massive reduction in layers and TCO in thelandscape while at the same time providing much more flexibility and business value throughreal-time access to all of the relevant data. It will take SAP several years to engineer anddeliver this vision to its customers. If the past five years of in-memory (r)evolution at SAP arean indication, however, the next five years of this journey will be extraordinarily fast andexciting.

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, withUnicode, and 7.x data flows and authorizations.

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

5 People always ask “if all the data is in volatile storage like RAM, what happens if the power goes out?” We’ll talk about that inmore 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 SAPHANA

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. Infact, SAP HANA is sometimes more than 100,000 times faster than traditional databases forquery 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 canhelp you run your business better, then how can you justify the expense and effort required tobuy and implement it?

The approach to building a business case presented in this chapter avoids the “speeds andfeeds” argument that has long plagued the software industry. Instead, it examines how SAPHANA can enable organizations to execute their business processes more quickly andefficiently. It also focuses on the value of the real-time information that SAP HANA makesavailable, as well as the resulting level(s) of business value it delivers. The primary goal of thischapter is to help you address and answer the “So what?” question and to provide someguidelines on how to construct a convincing business case in order to justify an investment inthe SAP HANA platform.

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

To demonstrate overall business value for the projectTo provide an initial financial justification for purchase and implementationTo ensure that the project is aligned with the organization’s business goals and/orinitiativesTo establish the base-line expectations for subsequent assessment of the project’ssuccessTo provide internal documentation explaining the expected business benefits 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 collectionof opinions and views from relevant stakeholders — both supporters and detractors — as wellas 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 likelyprovide an incomplete and potentially unreliable forecast of the quality of that investment. Aneffective business case must quantify not only the tangible value proposition of the project butalso 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. Thekey here is to “Think big, start small.” The big picture helps shape the long-term value from theinvestment, but starting small enables you to build in quick wins that establish success early andthen continue to build business momentum with later projects.

Going further, some uses cases should reflect “stretch” goals — ambitious projects that mayspan several years. At the same time, they should include projects that not only can beimplemented quickly, but also demonstrate measurable business value. The final collection ofuse cases can then be used to build a roadmap for current and future deployments of SAPHANA. The roadmap will balance each project›s business value against the correspondingdifficulty of implementation and/or risk involved. This approach will enable your organization toprioritize its various projects in a thoughtful and comprehensive manner, thus maximizing thelikelihood that the entire initiative will be approved.

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

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

The first step, creating the storyline, is fundamental to any SAP HANA business case. Thestoryline is what makes the business case unique to your organization. The use cases in thestoryline should map to goals and processes that distinguish your organization from thecompetition.

After you have created a viable storyline, the next step is to add the financial dimension. Nomatter 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 andprovides 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 businesscase 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 weproceed, however, we need to consider the fundamental concept of business value.

Levels of ValueWe’ve mentioned business value a couple of times already in this chapter. Exactly what do wemean by this term?

“Business value” actually covers a relatively wide range of benefits, both quantitative andqualitative. Moreover, there are different levels, or degrees, of business value. The chart belowillustrates 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. EfficiencyThe first level of business value, Efficiency, is the result of doing things the “right way.” Typicallythis 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 theeasiest to quantify. There are two basic subcategories of Efficiency: IT Efficiency and BusinessEfficiency.

IT EfficiencyOrganizations are likely to focus heavily on IT Efficiency when (1) the software investmentunder consideration is part of a broader effort such as creating an analytics center ofexcellence or shared analytical services and (2) the main rationale for doing so is to reduce ITcosts. At this level of business value, IT is viewed as a cost center within the organization — anexpense or overhead item that needs to be managed and contained. The following list identifiessome common examples of IT Efficiency.

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

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

Line of Business Examples:

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

2. EffectivenessThe second level of value — Effectiveness — redirects the focus from “doing things the rightway” to “doing the right things at the right time.” To properly assess this level, we need todiscard many of the prevailing assumptions that underlie current business processes.

Although efficiency can deliver a fair amount of business value, effectiveness offers thepromise of much more. In fact, SAP HANA provides organizations with the opportunity tofundamentally rethink their basic business processes (i. e., what they do and when and howthey 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 aconcern, the top-performing companies in each industry incorporate analytics into theirinfrastructure in order to create and maintain competitive advantage.

At the Efficiency level of business value, business performance is improved first throughvisibility and then through insight. Visibility provides the ability to access relevant informationquickly and in context. Then, insight provides a deeper understanding of the underlying causesof a situation or the likely outcome of a course of action under consideration.

Recall from previous chapters that SAP HANA a disruptive technology. Consequently, thebusiness 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, theirmonetary value is frequently greater. Instead of precise estimates, effectiveness gains can beexpressed as ranges of financial value, as illustrated by the following list.

Higher customer valueImproved product mix (margins)Better sales pipeline conversion ratioEnhanced customer retentionMore accurate demand forecastsMore successful segmentationEnhanced understanding of real costsGreater production yieldsMore efficient order fulfillmentFaster collectionsLower production costsReduced risk/impact of risksMore timely anticipation of market changesMore efficient asset utilization

3. TransformationBusiness Transformation is the highest level of business value, but also the most difficult toachieve. Transformation goes well beyond Effectiveness by enabling new business models andprocesses. Sometimes called “innovation” or “The Art of the Possible,” business transformationcan generate extraordinary financial gains. However, the potential monetary value from thislevel of business value is the most difficult to quantify. By definition, Transformation involvesthings that have never been done before. Consequently, there are no baseline data to use forcomparison.

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

Examples:

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

Hopefully you now have a more nuanced understanding of business value. Having coveredthis topic, we return to our discussion of the three-step process for building effective businessuse cases. We begin with the first step — creating the storyline.

II. Creating the StorylineIt’s likely that you already have at least one specific use case in mind for SAP HANA —otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this chapter! However, as we mentioned previously, it’spreferable to develop multiple use cases as part of the overall business case. Also, keep inmind 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 iscritical 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 businesscase 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-performanceanalytics or process optimization?Does your organization own any data that no one else has (and can that data beexploited)?What mega-trends in the industry represent opportunities for new value?

A. Categorization/Business AttributesSometimes it’s easier to create use cases when you can place each one into a convenientcategory, or container. Below we list samples of potentially useful categories. Note that thesecategories 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 forthe most current list of use cases.

Industry-specific

Consumer Products: (Supplier Risk Mgt., Track and Trace, Product Recall, ProductLifecycle and Cost Mgt., EPA Standards Compliance, Real-Time Warranty and DefectAnalysis )Financial: (Fraud Detection, Risk Analysis, Credit Scoring, Program Trading, CustomerProfitability)Manufacturing: (Supply Chain Optimization, Production Planning, OperationalPerformance 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 DemandForecasting, 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 PromotionManagement)Supply Chain: (Transportation Planning, Inventory Mgt., Demand and Supply Planning,Supply Network Planning)

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

C. Assisted DiscoveryMany other customers, however, will prefer to leverage the expertise of SAP’s ValueEngineering (VE) group in constructing a convincing business case for SAP HANA. One of theways in which the VE organization can help you construct an SAP HANA business case isthrough a Value Discovery Workshop. Over the course of this workshop, you will have theopportunity to identify, validate, and prioritize a number of SAP HANA use cases. These usecases can describe your organization’s internal usage, and perhaps also how your organizationinteracts 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 staffshould all participate. The workshop will provide you with detailed information on data,processes, roles, modeling, consumption, clients, and security requirements for yourapplications. In addition, it will help you identify the “degree of match,” potential value-add, andcustomer interest for each use case.

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

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

Finally, after you have completed the workshop, VE resources may be available to assist youin building a formal business case. Please check with your SAP Account Executive for furtherinformation on this service.

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

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

A second — and perhaps more useful — approach is to use the repository as abrainstorming tool. It can be quite enlightening to study use cases from industries that areseemingly unrelated to yours. In many instances, you will recognize a common thread that willencourage you to adopt a broader perspective than if you limited your exploration to use casesin your industry.

Whichever approach you adopt, a guiding principle is to focus on things that you can’t dotoday. In addition, always keep in mind that SAP HANA’s strengths are in applications that havenever been built before. If you’re looking to SAP HANA for competitive advantage, then you arenot likely to find a close match in the repository.

1. SAP HANA Use Case CategoriesCurrently, the SAP HANA website has SAP HANA Use Cases categorized by industry andselected process areas:

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

Mill ProductsMiningOil & GasProfessional ServicesPublic SectorRetailSalesSupply ChainTelecommunicationsTransportationUtilitiesWholesale Distribution

III. Adding the Financial DimensionNow that you’ve developed a good storyline, it’s time to map it to the expected business valuefor each and every use case. No matter how captivating your storyline, it must be backed upwith hard numbers. Although it is important to have quantitative results, some quantitativemeasures are more defficult to obtain and monitor than others.

A. Importance of Benefits QuantificationIt is critical to acknowledge the value of IT investments through benefits measurement and postgo-live monitoring. An SAP Value Management study determined that organizations thatdevelop business cases and measure post-go live success are 1.9 times more likely to deliverprojects on time. They are also 1.5 times more likely to deliver on budget and to realize up-frontbenefits.

In most current use cases, the business value for SAP HANA is measured in a similar mannerto other business analytics investments. The capabilities of SAP HANA are seen across manyareas of an organization with an increasing number of benefit scenarios. The one fundamentaldifference is that analytical use cases for SAP HANA consider how the availability of real-timedata impacts the organization’s ability to realize value. The SAP HANA benefits quantificationevaluates what the organization can accomplish now that it can better manage data andinterpret the resulting insights at lightning-fast speeds. Data volume is exploding, resulting intheneed to store and move significant amounts of data. As a result, it slows down the ability toanalyze data. In addition, data variety is continually expanding with the usage of Facebook andTwitter. Therefore, the traditional processes that organizations have used to consolidate andanalyze data are no longer sufficient in the new environment of real-time data.

IT research firms have already concluded that investing in business analytics technologygenerates tangible benefits. Moreover, in 2010, IDC completed a study that concluded thatbusiness intelligence investments delivered the following return on investment:

112 % median ROI54% process benefit improvement (Business effectiveness measures)

42% productivity gains (Business efficiency)4% technology gains (IT efficiency)

In February 2011 Aberdeen completed a real-time business study that found thatorganizations wanted more accurate operational information. A case study concluded thatmanufacturing organizations yielded a 2% increase in production efficiencies, returning tens ofmillions of dollars in savings. The independant study demonstrates that quantitative benefits arebeing realized with real-time information. Production yield is an excellent example of benefitsquantification. Increased yield reduces the cost of operations. This section will help you identifythese 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, theymay not have the experience to transfer that approach to business analytics and SAP HANAbusiness cases. To address this problem, SAP’s Value Engineering organization has taken themethodology that has been used for the past eight years and applied it applied it to SAP HANAbenefits quantification. We discuss the value engineering and the value management approachlater in the chapter.

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

Strategy EnablementMeasurable BenefitsRisk and ComplianceInnovation

Financial measurement, known as “hard” benefits, typically falls within the measurable benefitcategory. 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 businesscase, impacts numerous process areas within an organization. SAP realized that the underlyingtransactional 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 organizationspends money in various categories such as materials, services and IT equipment. Theprocurement process controls the flow of money going out of the company for materials andservices. This critical function ensures that an organization manages its spending strategically.The primary metrics that measure success in this area are overall spending managed centrallyand year-over-year annual savings achieved by the procurement team. Spend that is notmanaged centrally does not leverage contracts negotiated with preferred vendors that includealready secured discount levels. Without real-time business insight on spend, organizations arenot fully optimizing savings with consolidated spend. The following SAP HANA case studyillustrates 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, itwas implemented in a regional format. Thus, the overall spend managed by the organization was not visible at anational level. Supplier relationships at a regional level ran the risk of not capturing increased discounts andcreating 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 ofconsolidated supplier data

Develop a benefits case based on the regional grocer spend performance

The four major regions each had consolidated supplier spend

Business Case Development:

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

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

The grocer determined that additional savings would be possible if the organization better understood theunderlying 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 anational supplier

Significant supplier data compression with transfer of spend and supplier data from four regional systemsto 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”) BenefitsA tangible or “hard” benefit is defined as an outcome that increases revenue in for-profitorganizations and reduces cost in all organizations. In addition, hard benefits can increase thecash flow that the organization utilizes to generate additional return on investments. An exampleof a cash flow benefit is the reduction of aging receivables. Efficiency gains can result intangible benefits if resulting costs are removed from the gain. An example of a hard benefitefficiency gain is the reduction of people completing a manual reporting task.

As we discussed, quantifying SAP HANA benefits follows a similar approach to othertraditional benefits quantification. The areas of improvement are derived by identifying areas ofvalue within major business process areas. Common benefit KPIs are broken down within theprocess 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

MarketingBenefit: Optimized marketing spend through improved campaign effectiveness

Metrics:

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

Outcome:

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

Sales ExecutionBenefit: Increased sales conversion rate, thereby increasing annual revenue

Metrics:

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

Outcome:

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

Demand Fulfillment

ProcurementBenefit: Reduced annual spend with increased visibility on supplier metrics

Metrics:

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

Outcome:

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

Manufacturing ProcessBenefit: Reduced inventory levels and enhanced visibility of the short horizon of stocklevels

Metrics:

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

Outcome:

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

Information Technology Management

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

Metrics:

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

Outcome:

Reduced cost of information managementImproved granular insights delivered in real time

Organizational Performance Management

Profitability AnalysisBenefit: Improved profitability analysis by product, region, and segment

Metrics:

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

Outcome:

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

Workforce ManagementBenefit: Improved worker utilization levels and reduce level of overtime

Metrics:

Worker utilization levelsOvertime percentage and cost

Outcome:

Reduced labor costsImproved worker output measured

Fraud ManagementBenefit: Improved fraud detection, thus reducing the costs associated with additionalinsurance claims

Metrics:

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

Outcome:

Reduced cost of fraud investigationsReduced combined ratio

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

2. Strategic (“Soft”) BenefitsStrategic or “soft” benefits are commonly linked to the tangible benefits measured above. Thestrategic benefits impact the organization’s overall strategies and can support the tangiblebenefits.

In some cases, productivity or efficiency metrics do not directly result in reduced costs. Anexample is a scenario in which labor costs are not reduced, but the organization utilizesappropriate 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 employeeengagement and work-life balance is another soft benefit outcome. Similarly, improveddecision-making can generate indirect impacts on the organization, such as better execution ofthe corporate values for accountability. Many organizations find it difficult to drive accountabilitywith poor information. Department leads can’t drive improvements if there is no trust in the datacomprising the actual results.. In creating and evaluating a business case, you need carefullyconsider both tangible and strategic benefits.

3. New KPIs and Breakthrough InnovationsSAP 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 tomarket and generates new revenue streams. These innovations are the most difficult to quantifybecause no baseline data exist. However, “first mover” advantage may result in the largestpayoffs 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 mentionedearlier in the chapter capturing use cases and the business transformation studies captured byValue Engineering. A business transformation study is a brief document published jointly withour customers to capture benefits realized along with the story of why the investment wasmade. It is critical to continually measure the post-implementation impact of SAP HANA tocapture benefits. The best recommendation is to simultaneously explore innovative SAP HANAscenarios while developing existing process-improvement scenarios. A simple business casecan be developed based on existing processes and then leveraged to fund breakthroughinnovations.

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

C. Best Practice Business Case ApproachBefore calculating a benefit, an organization must identify a baseline metric derived from thecurrent 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. Weillustrate this framework using the example of a profitability report.

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

As stated above, an organization needs to establish baseline metrics before it can calculatethe 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 simplyutilized as a measuring stick of success. The baseline metric allows organizations to know howmuch they have improved after the technology has been implemented. In order to truly define abenefit beyond the current state baseline, SAP Value Engineering performs this function byproviding a triangulated approach to benefits quantification. Specifically, VE provides SAPBenchmarking data that indicate average and best-in-class performance, past examples ofmeasured success by other organizations, and the ability to collect current state processes tobest calculate the benefit range. (We discuss the SAP Benchmarking database in greater detailin Section E.)

After the analysis has been completed, the next step is to identify the associated value driveroutcome(s). The benefit as described in the process areas is typically related to its impact onrevenue and expenses. We strongly recommend that when you calculate a benefit you apply abenefit range with a conservative and likely metric based on the SAP Value Engineeringapproach described above.

One final point: It is commonplace to link benefits to an overall initiative involving processimprovements through technology enablement. Benefits are more widely accepted when linkedto key business initiatives such as improving spend management or improving pricing within acertain product category. As part of the initial business case development, discussions with thebusiness unit sponsors ensure linkage to strategy and acceptance of the SAP HANAinvestment.

D. SAP HANA CalculatorTo make it easier for people to build a value-based business case, SAP Value Engineering andSAP HANA Solution Management released a web-based SAP HANA benefits calculator to ourcustomers. The tool covers the most common benefit areas that most organizations wouldconsider. The calculator provides two or three example benefits for each of five mega-processareas:

Customer FocusProcure to PayPlan to ProduceRecord to ReportQuote to Cash

The benefits calculator enables you to customize the revenue include the number ofemployees, and key baseline information for your particular organization. The benefit rangesare based on the SAP Value Engineering triangulated methodology we just described. Asummary 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 generatesideas on how SAP HANA can impact your business, and it demonstrates how you can calculatethese benefits. Your organization can then continue to develop benefits either in partnershipwith SAP VE or on your own.

E. SAP BenchmarkingOne of the most valuable resources available to you when building an SAP HANA businesscase is the SAP Benchmarking database. SAP Benchmarking is a global program launched in2004 to deliver empirical metrics, best practices, and high-impact strategies to organizationsthat 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 utlizethe surveys to capture baseline information and determine how you are performing against bestin clauss organizations. This is a significant investment by SAP to allow organizations tomeasure performance and build benefit cases.

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

SAP Benchmarking program Facts:

Established at the end of 2004Complimentary serviceAvailable to SAP and non-SAP customersMore than 12,000 participants from more than 3,000 companiesGlobal — in 2010 more than 60% participants of participants were from outside North

AmericaPartnerships with ASUG and other user groupsStudies available in 12 languagesMore than 20 business process assessments including finance, procurement, supplychain, and sales.More than 700 KPIsMore than 1,000 best practicesMore than 300 peer groups

For SAP HANA, SAP offers the Business Intelligence and Enterprise InformationManagement data sets and surveys. In addition, SAP launched a High Performance Analyticssurvey 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 theentire organization. The SAP Benchmarking program allows you to help choose a few keyprocess areas to determine where SAP HANA best fits as a starting point. The programprovides the flexibility to create a customized survey to capture the key metrics and bestpractices identified through the SAP HANA business scenario development. This process willprovide the critical peer comparison that establishes the appropriate range of improvement. Anorganization can build a realistic benefit range improvement by leveraging peer benchmarkingdata.

IV. Tying It All TogetherWe now shift our focus to the fourth and most vital stage in the business case process —packaging the business case in a manner that maximizes the likelihood that it will be funded. Toaccomplish this objective, the storyline and financial impact have to be communicated effectivelyto the stakeholders and decision makers. In addition, the presentation needs to be easilyconsumable by senior business executives, because senior management buy-in andcommitment and are critical.

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

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

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

B. Ongoing Value ManagementMost companies realize that the successful utilization of information technologies is critical tosuccess in the modern business environment. Despite this realization, however, few companiesactually realize the maximum value of their IT investment. SAP addressed this problem byintroducing Value Engineering, a practice that focuses on driving the customer value that IT isproviding 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 ITprojects. Utilizing an ongoing processes called Value Management, SAP Value Engineering hasstandardized and packaged these best practices to help organizations deliver value by aligningIT with business goals and processes, and through maximizing return on IT investment.

1. Value ManagementValue Management is a permanent management process that ensures that investments ininformation 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 ITinvestments and initiatives. The Value Management methodology is intended to keep companiesfocused on choosing the right projects, to clearly define ownership and accountability forbusiness results, and to deliver on these agreed-upon commitments. The SAP ValueEngineering team helps identify the appropriate strategic areas to enable companies to becomebest-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 expectedresults. Research conducted by SAP indicates that 98% of companies can extract more valuefrom their initiatives, yet only 35% focus on measuring the value of these technologies afterthey have been implemented. This “virtuous circle” of proper planning, execution, and ongoingvalue analysis is critical to building a strategic IT function in successful companies. Failure torealize maximum benefit from IT is a common problem that can understandably discourageexecutives from making the strategic IT investments needed to compete in today’s unforgivingbusiness 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 inweeksMinimal disruption to customers’ ongoing operations using our collaborative approachFact-based, structured problem-solving approach that leverages past engagementexperiencesHands-on participation from SAP experts — solution specialists, industry practitioners,consultants, and centers of excellence professionalsMature value management methodology based on experience with 25,000+ customers;leveraging comprehensive knowledge about best practices across industries andbusiness processesScalable, disciplined approach to business value assessments that establishes acommon language between business and IT audiences

4. Role of SAP Value EngineeringUtilizing SAP Value Engineering is not a requirement for building a solid business case for SAPHANA. 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 helpyou create a financial justification for the initiative. However, if you’re willing to invest the time ina more immersive process, VE offers a SAP HANA Value Discovery Workshop, which wedescribe in greater detail later in this chapter.

5. Continuous Value ManagementAt this point, you have completed the Discovery portion of the Value Management Cycledescribed earlier in this chapter. The remaining stages in the cycle are Realization andOptimization. The Discovery phase resulted in the all-important business case, but the othertwo phases are no less critical to the process. One strategy to ensure continued successthroughout 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 todetermine 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 thatare not easily validated.

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

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

What are some of your most important KPIs?What are some of the underlying metrics that you track?How do you track and communicate metrics and KPIs?What adjustments does your organization make based on regular reviews of KPIs andmetrics?Are there any “new” KPIs that would be relevant to your organization but have not beenadopted by your industry peers?

V. Recommendations

The purpose of this chapter is to explain why it is critical to build business use cases and toprovide some guidelines to assist you with this process. However, we did not intend thischapter to be used as a “cookbook” for building business cases for SAP HANA. Differentorganizations may follow widely varying approaches when building their internal justifications forSAP HANA.

Whatever your situation, however, we strongly recommend that you keep the following pointsin 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 todayWhat you haven’t even imagined yet

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

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

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

Strategic enablerValue creator

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

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

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

This is a business case, not a technical justification

Chapter 4

SAP HANA Applications

COMING MAY 2013

Chapter 5

SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse onSAP

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

S

Chapter 10

SAP HANA Hardware Overview

AP HANA is the first SAP solution that has been built to be specifically run as an applianceand 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. SAPimplemented this new policy to still provide customers with multiple choices in hardwareplatforms while avoiding the TCO implications of multiple OS and processor supportcombinations. In order to understand why, we need to look back historically at some of thehardware platform changes that led SAP to adopt this policy this strategy and explore why thispath offers SAP customers the best balance of broad hardware partner options and focusedinnovation around a stable set of key components.

When SAP shifted from mainframe to client-server architecture with SAP R/3, two of thecritical benefits were the lower costs and the more standardized options associated with theUNIX-based servers that had just become available. When the mass-adoption of SAP R/3 tookoff, customers began asking SAP to certify more and more new combinations of operatingsystem and database on various hardware platforms. This made sense because manycompanies were employing existing landscapes from a preferred hardware vendor and haddeveloped expertise in certain versions of operating system and database that they wanted toleverage for their SAP environment.

SAP happily obliged, building out a robust certification laboratory in its headquarters toconstantly test and validate new hardware and software combinations that were being releasedby its partners for customer use. At the time, SAP believed that providing customers with sucha broad choice would help them achieve lower TCO of their SAP solutions by reusingtechnology and resources that were already in place. SAP also felt that being hardware andOS/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 beganwith had exploded into a truly dizzying collection. Customers no longer benefited significantlyfrom such a broad list of hardware and technology choices, and the costs for SAP and itscustomers of this broad coverage were becoming unsustainable.

After SAP R/3 was released, the UNIX platform began to splinter into multiple dialects, witheach 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 ofthe early UNIX hardware vendors due to their lower costs and their support for industrystandards. Later, Linux began to displace the original UNIX operating systems due to its lowercosts and the advantages of open-source code. Soon, the Product Availability Matrix (PAM) forSAP ERP exceeded 200 combinations of OS and database, with a vast number of hardwareplatforms for those combinations. At a certain point, choice became a liability for SAP and itscustomers 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 astrategic decision to avoid all of the costs and complexity of supporting so many variations ofhardware and technology platforms. SAP was primarily concerned with the three pieces oftechnology that had the greatest impact on performance and would be the largest drivers ofTCO 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 ONEcombination of OS and processors, SAP could invest all its development and testing resourcesinto a single platform while still allowing customers to choose which hardware vendor woulddeliver and support the appliance.

SAP had been working with Novell/SUSE for many years to support Novell SLES Linux as acertified 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 wasopen-source and easily supported by third parties, it was clearly the lowest TCO option forrunning an SAP system.

In addition to selecting a single OS, SAP had to settle on a single processor family for thenew solution. Although there were many chips on the market that could handle SAP’s traditionalapplication-processing requirements, there weren’t any processors that had been designed tohandle in-memory processing tasks (because enterprise-scale in-memory computing didn’t existyet). The initial SAP HANA conversations that SAP’s executives held with anyone outside thecompany were with Intel because SAP realized that shifting to in-memory computing wouldrequire a new breed of processors that were optimized for the new architecture, and Intel hasa 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 thetwo parties discussed the level of co-innovation that would be needed to jointly engineer bothan in-memory database and optimized processors that could handle the unique needs of thisnew architecture. The top executives from each company agreed that the they would have toestablish 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 eachsuccessive 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 newgeneration of Xeon processor from Intel, and Intel has incorporated SAP’s unique in-memoryprocessing 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 SAPsolutions 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 SAPHANA, 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 setof collaborations and initiatives. Some of the most visible:

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

Collaborative product optimization. Intel engineers located on-site at SAP work with their SAP counterpartsto provide tuning expertise that enables SAP HANA and other software solutions to take advantage of thelatest hardware features.

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

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

Having created an optimized “core” (operating system, RAM, and processors) for SAPHANA, SAP needed to reach out to the server manufacturers to package the software andhardware into industry-standard appliances in a way that would remove as much configurationand integration work from the customers as possible (again, lowering TCO). SAP realized thateven 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 theimplementation, management and operations of the hardware. Plus, customers typically have apreferred hardware vendor for their enterprise landscapes. This is really where SAP felt thatcustomer choice would have the most value. So, they engaged seven of their primary hardwarevendors (see the next paragraph) to build certified SAP HANA appliances and create packagedservices 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 andhad their flagship Intel-based servers certified and in production. Hitachi joined the list later thatyear, and NEC was certified in early 2012. This broad support from industry-leading hardwarevendors provides customers with a choice of seven hardware partners to deploy their SAPHANA 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 receivedextremely well by customers because it eliminates the confusing number of hardwarecombinations and focuses on the value-added solutions that each vendor can offer on top of the“solid core.”

General SAP HANA Hardware SpecificationsSAP HANA is sold as a pre-configured, pre-installed appliance that is delivered directly from thehardware partner. SUSE Linux SLES 11 is the only supported operating system, and Intel E7processors are the only supported chips. Samsung RAM is currently the primary memory usedby all of the hardware partners.

Most partner systems use on-board 15k RPM hard disks (4x ratio for main memory) fordata-volume backup and Fusion I/O SSD cards (1:1 ratio for main memory) for log-volumebackup.

SAP ensures the quality, availability, and performance of the certified systems through arigorous process of end-to-end quality testing, performance testing, and continuous earlyaccess to next-generation technologies from all of its partners.

SAP HANA Product Availability Matrix (PAM)The latest and most accurate PAM can always be downloaded from the SAP ServiceMarketplace. Here is the August 2012 SAP HANA PAM.

Single-Node Configuration

Multi-Node Scale Out Configuration

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

Multi-Node and Scale-Out OptionsSAP HANA is a linearly scalable database, meaning, you can string together multiple physicalservers into a single logical database instance and achieve linear performance results for everyadditional server added to the landscape.

Currently, SAP HANA has certified a 16-node scale-out for production environments and iscurrently testing a 60 node scale-out landscape. Literally, you just add another node/server tothe landscape, and you immediately enjoy an exponential increase in performance, in addition tothe additional memory. Refer to the SAP HANA hardware partner section of this chapter formore 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 outsolution. The data set consisted of five years of Sales and Distribution Records (100 Billionrecords) and was run on a single logical server consisting of 16 nodes. Each node was acertified IBM X5 machine with eight Intel E7-8870 processors with 10 cores, running at 2.40GHz. The total cost of the 16 node system was roughly USD$640K.

SAP HANA was able to scan 100 Billion rows/Sec on the 100 TB dataset and was able toload 16 million records/min. SAP HANA’s compression algorithms were able to achieve 20xcompression on the raw data when loading into memory, going from 100TB on disk to 3.8TB inmemory.

Typical query results were:BW Workload: 300ms — 500msAd-Hoc Analytics: 800ms — 2s

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

several times more expensive.

High AvailabilitySAP HANA supports cold standby hosts, meaning a standby host is kept ready in the event thata failover situation occurs during production operation. In a distributed system, some of theservers are designated as worker hosts, and others as standby hosts. Significantly, you canassign multiple standby hosts to each group. Alternatively, you can group together multipleservers 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 thestandby host, but they are idle and do not enable SQL connections.

Disaster RecoveryThe SAP HANA database holds the bulk of its data in memory to ensure 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 atregular save-points. Additionally, all data changes are recorded in the log. The log is savedfrom memory to SSD after each committed database transaction. After a power failure, thedatabase can be restarted in the same way as a disk-based database, and it returns to its lastconsistent state by replaying the log since the last save-point.

Although save-points and log writing protect your data against power failures, they do nothelp if the persistent storage itself is damaged. Protecting against data loss due to disk failuresrequires 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 worknormally. 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 failedserver is reassigned to the services running on the standby host. The failed volume and all theincluded tables are reassigned and loaded into memory in accordance with the failover strategydefined for the system. This reassignment can be performed without moving any data, becauseall the persistency of the servers is stored on a shared disk. Data and logs are stored onshared 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 theservice can be restarted. During this time, the status is displayed as ”Waiting.” This procedurecan take up to a minute. The entire process of failover detection and loading may take severalminutes to complete.

SAP Hardware Partner DetailsIn the remaining section of this chapter, each Certified SAP HANA hardware partner was giventhe opportunity to briefly describe their SAP HANA offering and discuss their value-addedservices for SAP HANA implementation, support, and operations.

We encourage you to speak directly to the hardware partners for more details about theirproducts and services for SAP HANA.

Links:IntelCiscoDellFujitsuHitachi

HPIBMNEC

Intel & SAP: Co-innovation for Real-Time ComputingFor more than 10 years, Intel and SAP have worked together to deliver industry-leadingperformance of SAP solutions on Intel architecture, and a large proportion of new SAPimplementations are now deployed on Intel platforms. The latest success from that tradition ofco-innovation is available to customers of all sizes in the SAP HANA, which is fully supportedonly on the Intel Xeon® processor E7 family.

The relationship between Intel and SAP has become even stronger over the years, growingto include a broad set of collaborations and initiatives. Some of the most visible include thefollowing:

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

Operational Success and Management of Real-Time EventsIn-memory computing based on SAP solutions on the Intel Xeon® processor E7 family enablesgreater business agility and innovative usage models that let companies respond to changingconditions 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 discernspatterns and trends so you can adjust your just-in-time supply chain rapidly. You can alsomodel “what if” scenarios to structure sales and promotions for optimal outcomes based on thelatest sales and pipeline information.

Features of the Intel Xeon processor E7 family such as 30MB of L3 cache, Intel® QuickPathInterconnects, and quad-channel integrated memory controllers deliver extraordinarycapabilities for businesses of all sizes that implement SAP HANA for functionality such asbusiness intelligence and data analytics.

Performance Optimizations of SAP HANA with the Intel Xeon® Processor E7 FamilySAP HANA benefits dramatically from high-speed Intel® QuickPath processor-to-memoryinterconnects and the latest processor instructions, Streaming SIMD Extensions. Thosefeatures eliminate many I/O bottlenecks, so processor headroom is available to generateexcellent throughput and responsiveness. SAP HANA is also engineered to take particularadvantage of RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability) features of the Intel Xeonprocessor E7family, especially error correction through Machine Check Architecture Recovery,for mission-critical implementations.

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

Assured Performance with Mission-Critical Advanced Reliability of the Intel XeonProcessor E7 FamilyMachine Check Architecture Recovery, a reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) featurebuilt into the Intel Xeon® processor E7 family, enables the hardware platform to generateMachine Check Exceptions. In many cases, these notifications enable the system to takecorrective action that allows SAP HANA to keep running where an outage would otherwiseoccur.

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

Cisco Systems SAP HANA SolutionsAs part of the “Unified Appliance Environment”, Cisco has developed a full portfolio of SAPHANA appliances based on Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS™) spanning fromthe smallest T-shirt sizing, supporting as low as 64 GB memory, up to large scale-out solutionswhich can support up to 8 TB of usable memory. Depending on the compression factors, theCisco 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 correspondsto uncompressed databases up to 100 TB or more.

Cisco UCS: A Unique SAP HANA SolutionCisco UCS is a single unified system entirely programmable through unified, model-basedmanagement to simplify and speed deployment of enterprise-class applications and services.All Cisco UCS SAP HANA appliances are intelligent infrastructure that can be managed throughthe embedded, single management plane across multiple Cisco UCS rack and blade servers(Figure 1). This radically simplifies operations and lowers costs. The model-based managementapplies personality and configures server, network, and storage connectivity resources. UsingCisco service profiles, which define the model, it is simple to provision servers by applying adesired configuration to physical infrastructure. The configuration is applied quickly, accurately,and automatically, improving business agility, staff productivity, and eliminating a major sourceof errors that can cause downtime.

T he Cisco Fabric Extender Architecture reduces the number of system components topurchase, configure, manage, and maintain by condensing three network layers into one. Iteliminates both blade server and hypervisor-based switches by connecting fabric interconnectports directly to individual blade servers and virtual machines. Virtual networks are nowmanaged exactly as physical networks are, but with massive scalability. This represents aradical simplification over traditional systems, reducing capital and operating costs whileincreasing business agility, simplifying and speeding deployment, and improving performance.

Cisco UCS helps organizations go beyond efficiency: it helps them become more effectivethrough technologies that breed simplicity rather than complexity. The result is flexible, agile,high-performance, self-integrating information technology that reduces staff costs andincreases uptime through automation, providing a more rapid return on investment.

The excellent performance combined with the broad range of usable memory make the CiscoUCS SAP Appliances an excellent, easy-to-manage choice for analyzing massive amounts ofbusiness data.

Cisco UCS SAP HANA Architecture

SAP HANA T-Shirt Sizes OfferedThe Extra Small (XS) and Small (S)-size appliances are based on the Cisco C260 M2 rackmount server with 2 Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-4870 (2.4 GHz) and up to 256 GB of usablememory. This configuration is primarily used for development, test, and small production SAPHANA systems with uncompressed datasets up to 1.75 TB. The Cisco UCS applianceincorporates a persistency layer, based on internal SSD drives that require no additional driverstainting the Linux kernel.

The Medium (M)-size appliance is based on the Cisco C460 M2 rack mount server with 4Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-4870 (2.4 GHz) and up to 512 GB of usable memory. Thisconfiguration is ideal for use in mid-sized and larger production environments such as the oneused by Medtronic, a large, worldwide manufacturer of medical devices (see customerexample). The persistency layer is provided by two Fusion IO cards to avoid possiblebottlenecks in duo card configurations sharing the same PCI slot.

SAP HANA Scale-out offeringThe Cisco UCS solution that has been certified for large SAP HANA implementations is auniquely scalable appliance. It allows customers to easily adapt to the growing demands oftheir 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. Forevery four Cisco UCS blade servers, the persistency layer is provided by an EMC VNX 5300 ora NetApp FAS 3240, depending on customer preference.

The “basic configuration” of the Cisco scale-out offering is made up of redundant fabricinterconnects with embedded infrastructure management, a Cisco UCS C200 server for SAPHANA studio, a Cisco 2911 for secure remote management, and one enclosure with support forup to 4 Cisco B440 blades. The basic configuration can easily scale by adding up to 3extension bundles each providing an additional blade enclosure for up to 4 more Cisco B440 M2blade servers each and the correspondent storage from EMC or NetApp.

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

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

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

Monitoring the CPU and memory workload, and the average index read time at bladelevelAutomating quarterly maintenance, including firmware updates and file system validationEnsuring configuration management assurance for all appliance componentsMonitoring data services availabilityProactively monitoring SAP HANA subsystem components statusMonitoring query execution response times using the SAP HANA index for the queryexecution SAP HANA Query Response TimeExecuting sample queries and recording total execution time and query componentperformance breakdownProactively monitoring the SAP TREX services statistics based on thresholds

Alerting CPU, memory, or throughput thresholds for SAP TREX servicesAutomating Cisco UCS blade and rack server provisioning for use in the appliance inminutes, instead of days

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

Also included are the necessary SuSe Linux Licenses, Smartnet 24x7x4 day 2 support for theCisco hardware, as well as licenses, and first-year maintenance for EMC or NetApp storage asrequired.

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

Customer Success StoryMedtronic dramatically improved reporting performance, increasing the value of its customerinformation, with the SAP HANA™ platform and Cisco Unified Computing System™ (CiscoUCS™) server platform.

Challenge:Medtronic needed to increase its ability to analyze large amounts of data, such as customerfeedback. BI reporting on its fast-growing data warehouse was straining the capabilities of thecompany’s computer infrastructure. Because employees couldn’t generate some types ofreports (particularly using unstructured data), their ability to draw conclusions from existing datawas limited.

Solution:The company deployed the SAP HANA platform on the Cisco UCS server platform based onthe Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family. In preliminary testing, users of an “un-tuned” systemobserved query times just one-third as long as those with existing production systems. With thefully scaled and optimized implementation now in place, Medtronic hopes to cut response timeseven further.

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

For More InformationFor more information on Cisco UCS, please visit http://www.cisco.com/go/ucs

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

Dell SAP HANA SolutionsFor more than a decade, Dell has collaborated with SAP to deliver hundreds of solutions tocustomers across many industries. Dell helps organizations achieve rapid and sustainablebusiness 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 ofenterprise computing solutions consultants. Our knowledge experts incorporate their vastexperience and the knowledge they have acquired over the course of many years into anenterprise solution delivery model that spans hardware, consulting, implementation, hosting,and application management services designed to enhance value for customer investments inSAP solutions.

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

Dell’s Unique SAP HANA Value PropositionDell and SAP have teamed up to offer an optimally configured SAP HANA solution that includesa hardware appliance, preloaded software, and a full range of services. This solution is bothreliable and scalable, and it is offered in multiple configurations to address your specificbusiness needs. Dell’s end-to-end solutions give your organization full access to the power ofSAP HANA.

Dell’s SAP HANA appliance solution includes:

Powerful technology — Dell’s PowerEdge R910 incorporates Intel E7 technology, iscertified for SAP HANA, and includes everything needed to support your SAP HANAsolution. This all-in-one solution includes powerful system-management features thatprovide for seamless implementation and management.Energy-efficient system design — Built with Energy Smart technologies, DellPowerEdge servers include power management features that enable power capping,power inventory, and power budgeting within your SAP HANA environment. The carefullyengineered layout of the internal components aids with airflow direction. This designfeature helps to keep the server cool, thus offering potential savings in cooling costs inyour company’s data center.Large-scale enterprise-consulting expertise — Dell leverages its experience indelivering enterprise IT and solving “big data” issues for global companies to provideactionable and real-world technology, strategies, and solutions. Dell’s Center ofExcellence (CoE) is well-established for SAP HANA, SAP Business WarehouseAccelerator (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 leverageindustry best practices to provide better business outcomes for SAP clients.World-class support — Dell’s ProSupport™ and Mission Critical Services help keepyour SAP HANA solution running smoothly.

The combination of Dell’s PowerEdge R910 platform and SAP HANA software enables usersto 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 theiroperations.

By implementing Dell’s SAP HANA solution, an organization can position itself to identify andanalyze 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 ProductThe Dell PowerEdge Server R910 platform has been certified by SAP to run SAP HANAsoftware, thus offering customers a powerful and flexible way to query and analyze largevolumes of data with great speed. Dell customers running SAP HANA on PowerEdge R910servers can gain real-time access to information and analytics, enabling them to best addressrapidly evolving market environments.

Dell’s SAP HANA appliance provides:

Performance and reliability in a scalable 4U, four-socket server allowing largeworkload consolidation and scale for the SAP HANA in-memory database.Integrated diagnostics with Intel® Advanced RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability)Technology.Robust infrastructure, including performance resources, power efficiency, I/O, andmemory scalability.Processing power using high-performing Intel E7 Series processors, up to 512GB ofDDR3 memory, and 2 x 10Gb Optional LOM with 10 PCIe slots.Energy-efficient system design built with Energy Smart technologies that enablepower capping, power inventory, and power budgeting within your environment. Thelogical component layout of the internal components aids with airflow direction, helping tokeep the server cooler.

The SAP HANA appliance from Dell is fully contained in the PowerEdge R910 server, makinguse of fast internal disks for storage and solid state cards. Solid state technology from Delloffers high IOPs and low latency performance for the in-memory SAP HANA database. Whilesolid state drives are used to maintain the system’s logs, a RAID group made up of internallyheld 15K RPM disks is used to maintain a copy of the data image.

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

Larger Scale-Out ConfigurationsThe linear scalability of the SAP HANA software platform makes scaling to meet largerworkload demands a very straightforward process. Dell has tested and certified larger-capacitysolutions that support 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB of compressed data processing, with expandability tosupport up to 8TB of memory capacity, SAP HANA’s rated maximum. Using the samePowerEdge R910 servers, Dell combines the superior scalability and RAS features of thisplatform into a multi-node configuration, utilizing 10GbE networking, and sharing data acrossDell 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, avirtualized environment that provides tremendous flexibility in storage management. Automated

tiering of data - standard with Dell Compellent storage software - manages persistent storageto provide the quickest access to the data sets that are most necessary for analysis. Inaddition, it offers high-availability features that simplify backups, expansion, and data migrationprovide tangible enhancements to the SAP HANA analytics engine infrastructure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Support ServicesDell is an expert in SAP HANA system support. Dell has a strong systems management andsupport 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 MissionCritical services and a 3-year extended hardware warranty. Customers receive 24x7x365phone support, escalation management, and collaborative support leveraging Dell’s globalProSupport infrastructure of more than 30,000 technicians supporting more than 100 countriesin 55 languages.

Dell’s ProSupport Mission Critical services are designed to accelerate rapid resolution of yourtechnical problems by ensuring that parts and/or technicians will arrive promptly and byproviding 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 benominated for CritSit incident coverage through Dell Global Command Centers. During aCritSit incident, expert resource teams are mobilized to get you back up and running asquickly as possible.Emergency dispatch — Onsite service technicians are dispatched in parallel withphone-based troubleshooting when you declare a Severity Level 1 incident.

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

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

Customer success storiesAtos, a Belgium-based international information technology services company with 74,000employees, turned to Dell to install a SAP HANA platform for its Atos SAP Competence Centerin Belgium. The Competence Center supports roughly 10,000 Atos consultants for the trainingand demonstration environments required for customer engagements. Dell DeploymentServices delivered the SAP HANA appliance on Dell PowerEdge R910 servers. Thu far, thenew 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 Dellconsultant 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 expertin SAP software. The company builds add-ons for SAP environments, and is experiencinggrowing success with its G.I.B Dispo-Cockpit solution, which improves supply chainmanagement. G.I.B customers want faster access to supply chain data to help them increaseefficiency 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 inreal 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 turnedto its long-standing IT partner: Dell. They specifically needed to meet a very tight deadline todevelop a SAP HANA platform for their new Dispo-Cockpit application for an upcomingcustomer demonstration event. Together with Dell, G.I.B installed an SAP HANA appliancebased on Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers, and they collaborated with Dell ProSupport™ to helpthe project stay on schedule.

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

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

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

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

— Nikolaj Schmitz, IT Manager, G.I.B

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

Fujitsu SAP HANA SolutionsFujitsu, the recipient of the 2012 SAP® Pinnacle award in the “Technology Innovator of theYear” category, has been recognized for its engagement and excellence in developingingenious SAP HANA infrastructure solutions. The Fujitsu portfolio for SAP HANA addresses therequirements of various customer segments — from specific turnkey appliances for small andmidsize companies to customized solutions for large enterprises. The end-to-end offeringincluding consultancy services, solution appliance, integration and migration services as well asthe 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-outoffering and extensive high-availability features.Fujitsu is the first SAP partner worldwide to offer a certified platform for SAP BusinessOne Analytics powered by SAP HANA.Fujitsu, a global player managed services, has capabilities to offer managed SAP HANAto multinationals as well as local small and medium enterprises.The Fujitsu SAP HANA Global Demo Center can be used remotely by customers whowish to test and experience the business impact of SAP HANA. A hosted proof ofconcept 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 andan 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 andmaintenance

Fujitsu SAP HANA Product FamilyFujitsu SAP HANA infrastructure solutions are based on industry-standard PRIMERGY servers,which represent a unique combination of Japanese-style innovation and German qualitystandards. With rock-solid reliability and independently proven leading price performance, onebenefits from favorable lifecycle costs. Operational costs are reduced through servermanagement, benchmark proven energy efficiency, and innovative market-leading technology.Further major building blocks of the Fujitsu SAP HANA infrastructure solution are NetAppFAS3200 Series storage systems (scale-out offering) and Fujitsu network infrastructure.

T-Shirt Sizes offeredThe Fujitsu T-shirt size options are based on PRIMERGY RX600 servers. They represent aTCO-optimized entry-level offering, which provides ample performance and capacity withoutinvestment in an external storage system. The XS configuration can be upgraded seamlessly tothe 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 adefined scope. However, these systems can also be included as building blocks in a multi-nodeenvironment.

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

High AvailabilitySpecial attention was paid to high availability as a major component for mission-criticalreadiness of the overall SAP HANA solution. Thus high availability is already an integral part ofthe building block concept. One server can be assigned as a fail-over server and quickly takeover 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 isto store data in the main memory of a computer to allow fast access. The risk of this concept isthat data stored in the main memory is volatile. Once the computer is down, data kept in themain memory is irretrievably lost. The usage of NFS ensures that all data is constantly mirroredon the NetApp FAS system. In case of a data loss in main memory, data can be copied backfrom the storage system. Besides, the inclusion of an external FAS storage system providesthe classical back-up and restore functionalities.

Highest demand concerning system availability can be met by expanding the infrastructure toa two-site concept, which means that all infrastructure components and data are reflected in asecond data center. This guarantees disaster resilience with continuous operation even in caseof a total data center breakdown.

Support infrastructureAs an additional, certified component the Fujitsu SAP HANA infrastructure solution alwaysincludes a PRIMERGY RX 100 Infrastructure Management Server (IMS). This mono socketrack server is used for:

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

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

Additional software neededAISConnect software (enables remote access to the SAP HANA landscape)

Support ServicesThe Fujitsu end-to-end offering comprises a complete set of services for non-disruptiveimplementation, 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. Itrepresents a mix of proactive and reactive services, which ensure that malfunctions aredetected and corrected before they can have any impact on operations. The concept takes intoaccount that Fujitsu solutions consist of hardware, software and network products fromdifferent vendors. Fujitsu is the single point of contact for all infrastructure components of aFujitsu solution as well as their interoperability. SolutionContract offers several service-leveloptions depending on individual requirements. Note: SAP Software support is not part of thissolution contract!

Additional SAP HANA ServicesFujitsu SmartStart — Short Time to Value Offering (Rapid Deployment)SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions support a fast implementation and utilization by providingbusiness users with modular, pre-packed and ready-to-use business content. The FujitsuSmartStart option expands this approach. SAP HANA, the Rapid Deployment Solution and

customer-specific settings are implemented and pre-tested on certified Fujitsu infrastructure inthe Fujitsu staging center. The end-to-end offering also comprises the onsite implementationplus infrastructure and application integration. Thus SmartStart combines SAP RapidDeployment Solutions benefits with Fujitsu expertise and services to quickly go live with SAPHANA business scenarios fully integrated with the SAP Business Suite.

Fujitsu Global SAP HANA Demo CenterFujitsu has set up the first Global SAP HANA Demo and Proof of Value Center to providecustomers with a practical insight into the scope of SAP HANA capabilities and services.

Customer Success StoriesSAP Business Warehouse Migration to SAP HANAA leading international manufacturer of automotive components has to date used an SAPBusiness Warehouse (BW), but it took several hours to generate reports meaning thatimportant information was often only available the next day. To accelerate this processmanagement opted for the innovative SAP HANA appliance software.

The complementary portfolio of SAP HANA infrastructure and services, jointly offered byFujitsu and TDS*, convinced the management to entrust this vital project to the two companiesin combination. SAP experts at TDS’s IT Consulting business unit were tasked with design andimplementation, and with operation and support of the production system and Fujitsucontributed the certified SAP HANA infrastructure solution based on powerful PRIMERGYRX600 rack servers.*(TDS — a Fujitsu company)

Mitsui“To promote the growth of Mitsui’s businesses, it is essential to have an IT platform that flexiblyadapts to change and supports rapid decision making. The objectives of SAP HANA align withthese needs. We greatly value Fujitsu’s early leadership in support of SAP HANA, as wellas Fujitsu’s capabilities in providing global support for our IT platforms, and we intend tocontinue to work with Fujitsu in this area in the future. With the global cooperation from theteam at Fujitsu, we have already begun implementing this technology, and look forward tocontinuing to work with Fujitsu to achieve our mutual objectives”.

— Mr. Toru NakajimaAssociate Officer and General Manager of Information Technology Promotion Division

Mitsui & Co., Ltd.

Contact information for inquiriesGlobal Fujitsu SAP Competence Centerexpert.sap@ts.fujitsu.com

Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Select for SAP HANAHitachi Unified Compute Platform Select for SAP HANA is an SAP-certified, optimized, andconverged infrastructure platform for SAP HANA that enhances an organization’s decision-making capabilities while providing advanced business insights based on instant, intuitive accessto 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-memorycomputing technology for a broad range of high-speed analytic capabilities.

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

Customers can derive the following benefits from Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Select forSAP HANA:

Predictable, repeatable, reliable results: Pre-validated reference architectures, pre-packaged solutions with enterprise-class components across the entire stack, andtargeted provisioning to help ensure consistent, predictable results as organizations lookto manage and store massive volumes of rapidly changing data.Exceptional performance: High-density computing and throughput with wide-stripingtechnology for enhanced utilization. Customers benefit from flexible server managementcapabilities and scalable architectures.Faster time-to-value: Quicker, simpler deployment offered from a single source forordering and for providing services for planning and implementation. Pre-configurationand SAP validation of key components drastically reduce onsite deployment time.Intelligent automation of complex tasks enables rapid provisioning of resources with theassurance that the appropriate underlying infrastructure components are in place.

As additional applications and business units use SAP HANA or the organization’s datavolumes increase, all three Hitachi SAP HANA appliances sizes — ‘Small’, ‘Medium’, and ‘Large’—enable users to easily scale system processing capability without “forklift upgrades” orcomplete system overhauls. Customers may elect to start with a ‘Small’ configuration and easilyscale to ‘Medium’ or ‘Large’ by inserting additional blades into the server chassis. There is noneed to change server models because scaling requires a ‘Medium’ or ‘Large’ appliance size.

Hitachi SAP HANA Appliances SizesEach 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 SAPStorage: Hitachi Unified Storage 130, with a 99.999% uptime rating, is designed for highavailability, 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 adaptorsBlade servers: Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 offers the considerable I/O capacity andonboard memory that are required for effective implementation of SAP HANA. Systemsinclude 4-way x86 blade servers with Intel 10-core processors.

SAP HANA:

SAP HANA Load Controller 1.0SAP IMCE Server 1.0, Client, StudioSAP Host AgentSybase Replication Server 15.5 +ECDA

Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Select for SAP HANA — Small, Medium, Large — meetsvarying performance requirements. All three options come with Hitachi Unified Storage 130storage subsystems and with SAP HANA pre-loaded.

Hitachi supports SAP HANA from the smallest configuration with a single Compute Blade and256 GB of RAM to the largest configuration of 4 Compute Blade 2000s and 1.0 terabytes ofRAM.

Operating System: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 for SAPStorage: Hitachi HUS 130, which is designed for high availability, down to the dualbattery backup that protects the cache during power outage. It contains symmetricactive-active controllers that self-balance workloads.Network: Fibre Channel host bus adaptorsCompute: Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 offers the large I/O capacity and onboardmemory required for effective implementation of SAP HANA

Figure 1 — Hitachi SAP HANA Appliance Architecture

Hitachi-SAP AllianceSince 1994, Hitachi, Ltd., and its subsidiaries, including Hitachi Data Systems, have had astrategic relationship with SAP that includes the sale, integration, and implementation of SAPsolutions. During this time, Hitachi has won numerous SAP awards for exceptional customersatisfaction.

In 2011, Hitachi became an SAP Global Technology Partner, the highest level of partnershipSAP offers. Many large global enterprises run their business on SAP and Hitachi.

Hitachi also ensures the necessary storage performance and high throughput to meet thestringent demands of in-memory computing. By dramatically reducing the traditional delaybetween operations and analytics, this platform helps business leaders gain near real-timeinsights and information to make smarter business decisions, faster.

ServicesHitachi Data Systems Global Solution Services (GSS) offers experienced infrastructureconsultants, proven methodologies, and comprehensive services for converged platforms tohelp customers further streamline their SAP environments. The HANA Implementation Serviceensures a smooth integration with lower risk and accelerated deployment of the Hitachi UnifiedCompute Platform Select for SAP HANA tailored to our customer’s specific needs. Along withour consulting partners such as Hitachi Consulting, we can integrate and customize the solutioninto the customer’s SAP environment.

Support InfrastructureHitachi Data Systems Global Services and Hitachi Consulting are equipped to support everyaspect of an SAP HANA solution. In addition, they provide strategy; infrastructure; and HANAAppliance, Integration, Development, and Support Services for a HANA initiative.

Modern information technologies have blurred the lines between infrastructure, software, andapplications. Given this reality, having one partner who provides a single, fully integratedsolution is a tremendous benefit. Hitachi’s full breadth of capabilities delivers one fullyintegrated, highly-optimized environment that ensures the desired results in a lower-cost, lower-risk, high-business-value HANA initiative.

Contact HitachiIf you would like to get in touch with the SAP team at Hitachi, please email sap@hds.com. Youcan find additional information at www.hds.com/go/sap or Hitachi Consulting:http://www.hitachiconsulting.com/hana.

HP SAP HANA SolutionsThrough a close, collaborative partnership that spans more than 20 years, HP and SAP haveworked together to offer an innovative and comprehensive portfolio of products and servicesthat help more than 25,000 joint customers around the world of all sizes, in all industries, solvetheir business problems. This strategic partnership has ultimately resulted in product offeringslike 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 allthree geographic regions, with the most recent ones being:

Technology Partner of the Year/SAP HANA Impact Award (APJ)Innovation Partner of the Year Award (EMEA/DACH)North American SAP Services Partner of the Year for SAP HANASAP Services Partner of the Year, SAP HANA

HP has also recently received the following Pinnacle awards:

Run SAP Partner of the Year winnerGlobal Software Solution Partner of the Year finalistGlobal Technology Partner of the Year finalist

HP AppSystems for SAP HANA are built on an HP converged infrastructure for purpose-built,integrated solutions that address the growing and complex needs of our customers. Thissolution portfolio incorporates hardware, software, and services into predefined configurationsfor a powerful and comprehensive set of solutions that are designed to work together. Theportfolio includes:

Multiple single-node configurations (XS, S, M, M+, L) based on industry-leading HPProLiant DL580 and DL980 G7 ServersAn XL scale-out configuration, based on industry-leading HP BladeSystem Servers, withfully automated failover for high availability

HP’s Unique Value Proposition for SAP HANAHP has collaborated with SAP on in-memory technologies from the beginning In 2006 it becamethe first SAP partner to design and deliver SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse Accelerator.Based on that experience, HP has developed the core competencies to deliver successfulimplementations of HP AppSystems for SAP HANA. The company offers a portfolio of sixconfigurations (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 infrastructureruns nearly half of all SAP installations in the world. In fact, HP is a global leader in SAPoperations, supporting 1.7 million users in more than 50 countries. in addition, it has developeda core competency for designing and building SAP appliance-based solutions, successfully

implementing them on customer sites, and offering industry-leading support services to ensureoptimal performance throughout their lifecycle.

Industry-Leading Technology—Optimized for SAP HANAHP designed the HP AppSystems for SAP HANA on industry-leading x86 HP ProLiant DL580and DL980 G7 Servers for single-node SAP HANA implementations, and on HP ProLiant BL680G7 Server Blades for larger scale-out requirements, providing a large contiguous memoryfootprint for faster in-memory applications. The scale-out solution in the portfolio of HPAppSystems 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 theHP X9300 Network Storage System that offers unlimited scale-out capability and disaster-tolerant features. Designed to be extremely scalable, flexible, and cost-efficient, HP X9300Network Storage Systems deliver excellent performance and a modular storage infrastructureto accommodate unprecedented storage growth and performance.

HP AppSystems for SAP HANA

Based on HP Converged Infrastructure productsMultiple configuration choices, sized for your company’s needs (XS, S, M, M+, L, XL)

HP ProLiant DL580 G7 Servers or HP ProLiant DL980 G7 Servers for XS to Lsingle-node configurationsHP ProLiant BL680 G7 Server Blades for XL highly scalable configurations [for?] upto 8 TB of compressed dataHP Storage for log files and data filesHP X9300 Network Storage Systems for scale-out cluster file systemsHP Networking with HP Virtual Connect and ProCurveHP ProLiant Service packages and HP Insight Control management software

HP Fast Start ServiceHP Technology Support Services

SAP HANA T-Shirt Sizes Offered

Scale-out OfferingHP offers a unique scale-out offering that provides the high availability your business demandstoday, as well as a future-ready solution that can grow as your needs grow. This designsignificantly 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 enterpriseclass applications.The HP X9300 IBRIX Network Storage System is a unique storage platform that offersunlimited scale-out capability and disaster-tolerant features.HP P6500 Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVA) delivers high-throughput, mission-critical,redundant storage for data and log files, SYS files, config files, traces, and more.HP networking solutions like HP Virtual Connect for simplifying and virtualizing theconnectivity between the HANA blade nodes, the network, and the shared storage.

HP’s scale-out solution provides high availability through a stand-by blade with automaticfailover, in addition to disaster-tolerant technology. HP offers both synchronous andasynchronous disaster-tolerance solutions, available either as standard integrated functionalityof the scale-out solution or as an add-on. These solutions are designed to protect yourinformation 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 RecoveryWith HP AppSystems for SAP HANA, HP has delivered a fully automated failover mechanismfor high availability, a stand-by blade that automatically is activated upon a failure of any node inthe 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’sscale-out solution is already equipped to enable this functionality.

Storage InfrastructureHP PCIe IO Accelerator for HP ProLiant Servers is a direct-attach, solid-state PCIe card-based solution for enhancing application performance. Based on Multi-Level Cell (MLC) andSingle-Level Cell (SLC) NAND Flash technology, these devices are ideal for accelerating I/Operformance and maintaining SAP HANA log file data.

For mission-critical deployments and shared-storage infrastructures, the HP X9300 IBRIXNetwork Storage System features an NFS cluster file system and support for single-node highavailability. This system is designed for high availability and extreme scalability while deliveringexcellent performance and a modular storage infrastructure to accommodate unprecedentedstorage growth.

Additional SoftwareHP ensures global quality standards by preloading and configuring SAP HANA software at thefactory before delivery. No additional software is necessary for the HP AppSystems for SAPHANA. 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 yoursolution. HP AppSystems for SAP HANA can be easily monitored utilizing HP Systems InsightManager (SIM), available both with HP ProLiant servers and as a free download from HP. Thispowerful yet intuitive solution provides hardware-level management for system administrators toimprove system uptime and health. SIM is also available as a component of the Insight Controlsuite of management software, which is available for purchase from HP.

HP Insight Control server management software unleashes the management capabilities builtinto every HP ProLiant server. The result is superior management of physical and virtualservers, from any location. Insight Control integrates specific management functionality into HPSystems Insight Manager to manage server health, deploy and migrate servers quickly,optimize power consumption and performance, and control servers from anywhere.

Support ServicesHP delivers a comprehensive solution that encompasses hardware, software, and servicesfrom a single resource. HP delivers the full lifecyle of services required to progress from theassessment and design of an SAP HANA solution to the build, implementation, and support ofthe solution.

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

ImplementationDelivery of the SAP HANA appliance is not the final step. Beyond the design and build of a SAPHANA solution, integration of the solution into your environment is equally, if not more, critical tosuccessfully getting SAP HANA up and running. HP understands this, so they includeinstallation, implementation, and training with every SAP HANA solution we deliver. The basicfoundational service includes the following:

Incorporation of SAP HANA in the local networkConnection of SAP HANA to source systemsImplementation of basic security and authorizationsConfiguration of SAP BusinessObjects front end or Microsoft® Excel to communicatewith SAP HANAValidation of the integrated environment and the end-to-end functionality of the SAPHANA systemReview of the access to, and use of, the SAP in-memory computing studioInstallation and configuration troubleshooting

SupportAfter a successful implementation, HP turns over support of your SAP HANA solution to HP’ssupport services team, which delivers HP Proactive Care Service. Proactive Care Serviceincludes proactive support as well as hardware and software support to provide an additionallevel of support for organizations that are managing complex IT environments. Geared forconverged, virtualized, and cloud-based environments, Proactive Care Service features remoteand onsite support, proactive scans and reports, and regular consultations with HP technologyexperts. You can purchase an option that includes an assigned local HP specialist who deliversan “Account Support Plan” customized to fit your needs. Each customized plan includesdelivering updates to your hardware firmware and operating system, regular system health

checks, and setup of remote monitoring. For hardware and software support, HP deliversenhanced support from trained specialists in its Advanced Solution Center. With a connection toSAP’s support operation, HP can take the first call on any SAP HANA support issue. Based onthis well-established process, HP is able to deliver industry-leading support and help improveperformance of SAP HANA solutions.

Additional SAP HANA services from HPHP 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 SAPlandscape. These services were designed exclusively for SAP HANA. They include the followingservices.

The HP Business Intelligence Master Plan Service is an overarching BI strategy-development service designed to help you define a BI strategy and a landscape toenable your organization to realize that strategy. This service includes a roadmap forimplementation.The HP Impact Analysis for SAP HANA helps you understand the technical feasibility ofintroducing SAP HANA to meet your real-time and high-volume data analysisrequirements. It is highly recommended for each SAP HANA implementation.The HP Financial Assessment for SAP HANA provides granular information to supportyour decision-making process. It is formatted to be suitable for use in supportingbudgeting processes.The HP Solution Assessment for SAP HANA is an engagement during which HPconsultants will assess your existing information landscape in detail, identify data sets foruse with SAP HANA, detect any gaps in the current environment, and create a solutionblueprint based on the findings.The HP Landscape Preparation Service for SAP HANA is designed to ensure that thesurrounding solution landscape is in place and is optimized to allow for the inclusion ofthe SAP HANA appliance and to speed time-to-value of the SAP HANA solution. Thisservice includes upgrading or installing SAP and non-SAP components in the landscape.HP Fast Start Service includes required services that accompany the appliance to ensurethat the appliance is properly installed; database connections are made; and thereplication and extract, transform, load (ETL) of data from the source systems havebeen tested and confirmed as fully functional.The HP Implementation Service for SAP HANA is a complete end-to-end SAP HANAimplementation based on a solution blueprint designed by a team of HP consultants.These consultants follow the HP Global Implementation Methodology for BusinessIntelligence for all SAP HANA implementation projectsImplementation services for rapid-deployment solutions covering a wide range ofbusiness reporting and analytics.HP Migration Services—SAP HANA Appliance Software Service Pack 3 supports thedeployment of an HP AppSystem for SAP HANA as the database for SAP NetWeaver

Business Warehouse. HP is offering a migration package for current SAP NetWeaverBW customers to assist them in migrating from their existing database to an HPAppSystem for SAP HANA. In addition to migration services, this package includescomplimentary phone assessment services, asset recovery services, and financialservices, as listed below.

On-site migration assessment workshopsSAP NetWeaver BW upgrade serviceSAP NetWeaver BW 7.3 migration to a database built on SAP HANASAP NetWeaver BW optimization for the SAP HANA database

HP Financial ServicesHP Financial Services can make your transition to SAP HANA easy and cost effective, and itcan help you get started even sooner. You can expand your organization’s SAP HANA initiativesby 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 HPhardware leasing and SAP software license loans plus a complete, global solution that recoversvalue from older assets. This solution also helps safeguard privacy, and it complies withapplicable environmental regulations for disposing of SAP infrastructure assets that aredisplaced by your new HP AppSystems for SAP HANA. For further information please go to:www.hp.com/go/asset_recovery.

Migration AssistanceFor 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 effortand incremental costs. To help ease the transition, HP and SAP offer a migration-assistancepackage that features a combination of HP financing options and a portfolio of migrationservices you can use to clear the path to faster data analysis.

HP Leads the Way with First-ever Benchmark Results for SAP HANASAP partnered with HP to co-develop the new SAP standard application benchmark for theSAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse application, called the enhanced mixed load (EML)benchmark. SAP standard application benchmarks are designed to represent customer-relevant scenarios in many different business contexts. This new SAP EML standard applicationbenchmark simulates the current demands of typical SAP NetWeaver BW customers. Thesedemands are shaped primarily by three major requirements: near real-time reporting, ad-hocreporting capabilities, and reduction of TCO.

The results achieved by HP on the standard performance benchmark demonstrate the abilityof an HP AppSystem for the SAP HANA database to deliver on today’s new customerrequirements. These systems have revolutionized user access to data, and they deliveroutstanding, 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 theSAP HANA platform. (These are the results as of May 16, 2012.) Additional details can befound at http://www.sap.com/benchmark

Customer Success StoriesFor an example of the outstanding results that can flow from an HP–SAP collaboration,consider the case of T-Mobile. The U.S. wireless operation of Deutsche Telekom AG, T-Mobileprovides more than 33 million customers with customized wireless plans that reflect theirsmartphone and data needs. A key component of the company’s marketing strategy is toconduct highly targeted customer communications concerning mobile phone services and offers.Unfortunately, its previous analytics solution was too complex and could not track customeroffers in a timely way.

The solution—built on HP Converged Infrastructure in collaboration with SAP AG anddeployed in just two weeks—enhances T-Mobile’s ability to deliver targeted marketingcampaigns to customers by transforming the way it delivers, manages, and measures itswireless plan offers.

“T-Mobile needed faster and better customer insight from its varied data systems,” explainedPaul Miller, vice president of Converged Systems at HP. “HP and SAP quickly delivered aturnkey solution that provides simplicity, performance, and faster time-to-value.” “SAP, incooperation with HP, worked to support the creation and delivery of a unique and differentiatedcustomer-tracking solution for T-Mobile,” revealed Steve Lucas, executive vice president andgeneral manager of Global Database and Technology, SAP. “With SAP HANA, T-Mobile canmore effectively track its marketing campaigns’ success.”

Another illuminating example is Nongfu Spring, an established and expanding nationalconsumer brand in China with a vast scope of operations encompassing production, sales,planning, dispatching, logistics, and marketing. As the company expanded and constantly addednew branches in different cities, it needed to implement a database solution that could keeppace with its impressive growth while providing the real-time, accurate data its executivesneeded to make informed business decisions. To accomplish this task, Nongfu Spring chose HPAppSystems for SAP HANA due to the stable, powerful performance of its HP ProLiant DL980server and the professional services provided by the HP team.

With the new system in place, Nongfu Spring’s manufacturing environment now runs moresmoothly—and with more accurate data. For example, the increased computing speeds enablethe 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 havemore new IT requirements,” asserts Nongfu Spring CIO Patrick Hoo. “By cooperating with HPon 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 ofslow computing and presentation of data caused by having too much data, which had affectedour business. It also built a solid foundation for our IT department to provide strong support forthe company’s rapid future business development.”

Contact information for inquiriesFor more information, visit http://www.hp.com/go/sap/hana or contact your HP salesrepresentative.

IBM Systems and Services Solutions for SAP HANASAP HANA deployed on IBM System x Workload Optimized Solutions with the IBM GeneralParallel File System (GPFS) offer simple, seamless scalability for your SAP HANAenvironment. In addition, IBM offers installation and managed services to help you manage yourSAP HANA infrastructure cost-effectively. IBM Global Business Services (GBS) can help youextract the business value out of your SAP HANA implementation.

IBM and SAP team for long-term business innovationWith a unique combination of expertise, experience and proven methodologies — and a historyof shared innovation — IBM can help strengthen and optimize your information infrastructure tosupport your SAP applications.

IBM and SAP have worked together for 40 years to deliver innovation to their sharedcustomers. Since 2006, IBM has been the market leader for implementing SAP’s original in-memory appliance, the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA). Hundreds ofBWA deployments have been successfully completed in multiple industries and countries. TheseBWA appliances have been successfully deployed in many of SAP’s largest businesswarehouse implementations, which are based on IBM hardware and DB2 — optimized for SAP.

IBM and SAP offer solutions that move business forward and anticipate organizationalchange by strengthening your business analytics information infrastructure for greateroperational efficiency and offering a way to make smarter decisions faster.

IBM eX5 Systems with GPFS Power SAP HANASAP HANA, delivered on IBM eX5 enterprise servers with fifth-generation IBM® Enterprise X-Architecture® technology (eX5), helps transform the enterprise by addressing current needswhile delivering the robust scalability and performance needed to accommodate growth. SAPHANA running on powerful IBM eX5 enterprise servers with the Intel Xeon processor E7 familycombines the speed and efficiency of in-memory processing with the ability to analyze massiveamounts of business data — enabling companies to eliminate barriers between real-time eventsand real-time business decisions.

IBM is the first to decouple memory and input/output (I/O) from the processor — movingprocessing power from what’s theoretically possible to what’s actually possible. IBM System xservers with fifth-generation IBM eX5 technology enable SAP HANA customers to benefit froma shared vision that delivers simplicity and automation designed to help organizationsaccelerate business outcomes while lowering TCO.

IBM eX5 enterprise servers with Intel Xeon processors offer extreme memory andperformance scalability. With improved hardware economics and new technology offerings,IBM is helping SAP realize a real-time enterprise with in-memory business applications. IBMeX5 enterprise servers deliver a long history of leading SAP benchmark performance.

These System x servers are equipped with processors from the Intel Xeon processor E7family, which combine exceptional raw compute power with increased memory bandwidth andsupport 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 workloadson a compact system.

SAP HANA is a business-critical technology and requires a robust and reliable enterprisecomputing platform. Sophisticated eX5 features such as Predictive Failure Alerts warn ahead ofpotential hardware failures, trigger preemptive action, and help maintain application availability.In addition, eX5 features such as eXFlash solid-state disk technology can yield significantperformance improvements in storage access, helping deliver an optimized system solution forSAP HANA. Standard features in the solution such as the High IOPS MLC Duo Adapter for IBMSystem x can also provide fast access to storage.

Workload Optimized SolutionsIBM offers several Workload Optimized Solution models for SAP HANA. These models, basedon the 2-socket x3690 X5 and 4-socket x3950 X5, are optimally designed and certified by SAPand can be ordered as a single appliance part number. They are delivered preconfigured withkey 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 eX5features and performance to the mid tier. It is an ideal match for the smaller, two-CPUconfigurations for SAP HANA. The x3690 X5–based configurations offer 128 to 256 GB ofmemory and the choice of only solid-state disk or a combination of spinning disk and solid-statedisk. The x3950 X5–based configurations leverage the scalability of eX5 and offer the capabilityto 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, thenew flagship server of the IBM x86 server family. These systems are designed for maximumutilization, reliability, and performance for compute-intensive and memory-intensive workloadssuch as SAP HANA. This server is ideal for the medium- and large-scale SAP HANAimplementations. The x3950 X5–based configurations integrate either the 320 GB High IOPSSD Class SSD PCIe adapter or the 640 GB High IOPS MLC Duo Adapter. Note: An 8-socketconfiguration uses a scalability kit that combines the 7143-H2x* with the 7143-H3x* to create asingle 8-socket, 1 TB system.

IBM and SAP have worked closely together to validate each of the workload-optimizedconfigurations and have also collaborated on performance testing. Performance testing of SAPHANA running on IBM eX5 enterprise servers and have demonstrated the ability to handle10,000 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 allowsIBM and SAP offerings to be integrated for simplified implementation. This is true of IBM’s DB2database which is tightly aligned with SAP HANA for seamless replication of data when usingthe Sybase replication server.

Simple and Seamless ScalabilityUsing the workload-optimized solution models you can combine multiple models together to

create multi-node scale-out configurations. These multi-node scale-out configurations enableyou to achieve larger SAP HANA memory sizes simply by adding compute nodes. IBM was thefirst vendor to have multi-node scale-out configurations and currently has 4-node x3690 X5 andx3950 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 approachenables you to invest in a Workload-Optimized solution for SAP HANA and grow yourinfrastructure as your SAP HANA environment grows. In addition, you can handle unplannedoutages 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 theseconfigurations has the unique capability to use the storage contained within each node helpingto simplify the infrastructure required for SAP HANA. Only IBM has a High-Availability conceptwhich allows customers to seamlessly extend their installation to enable High Availability usingGPFS replication and an additional stand-by node.

GPFS™, with its high-performance enterprise file management, can help move beyondsimply adding storage to optimizing data management for SAP HANA. High-performanceenterprise file management using GPFS gives SAP HANA applications:

Performance to satisfy the most demanding SAP HANA applicationsSeamless capacity expansion to handle the explosive growth of data SAP HANAenvironmentsHigh reliability and availability to help eliminate production outages and providedisruption-free maintenance and capacity upgradesSeamless capacity and performance scaling — along with the proven reliability featuresand flexible architecture of GPFS — help your company foster innovation by simplifyingyour environment and streamlining data workflows for increased efficiency for SAPHANA applications.

IBM Intelligent Cluster integrated packaging and assembly can help speed installation anddeployment of multi-node scale-out HA configurations as well as reduce implementation risk ifyou 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 fasterperformance, less complexity and greater efficiency from a powerful and proven convergedinfrastructure environment of integrated technologies. These workload-optimized solutions forSAP HANA can help simplify operations, consolidate resources and dynamically migratefunctionality as business changes, while delivering the ability to quickly change the way userslook 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 xWorkload Optimized Solutions for SAP HANA, please read the IBM Redpaper: SAP In-MemoryComputing on IBM eX5 Systems

Services to speed deployment

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

A trusted service partnerMany clients require more than software and hardware products. They need a partner to helpthem assess their current capabilities, identify areas for improvement and develop a strategyfor moving forward. This is where IBM Global Business Services (GBS) provides immeasurablevalue with thousands of SAP consultants in 80 countries. GBS combines its SAPimplementation experience and skills with the broader IBM business intelligence competenciesto 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 SAPHANA offerings and grouped efforts into two main opportunities for clients who wish to deploySAP 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 impactArchitecture assessment and benchmark servicesProof of concept servicesExpress deployment offerings, including industry best practices

These services have been grouped into four key offerings as shown in the table below:

Combining the strengths of GBS with IBM System x Workload Optimized Solutions for SAPHANA 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 thetransformational 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 aretailored to their individual goals and budget.

For more informationTo learn more about the IBM Systems and Services solutions for SAP HANA and IBM eX5Workload Optimized Systems, please contact your IBM marketing representative or IBMBusiness Partner, or visit: www.ibm-sap.com/hana.

NEC SAP HANA SolutionsNEC delivers SAP HANA as a key platform to realize a world where people can reach all theinformation they need or want and to discover something new and worthwhile from massiveamount 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 NECwhich 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 plantowards offering an M-size model also.

All the NEC SAP HANA appliances are constructed on the Express5800 Scalable EnterpriseServer that offers upward scalability to 8 sockets and 2TB memory, fault-managementfunctionalities through EXPRESSSCOPE® Engine SP2, and ViridentTM FlashMax device forhigh-workload environments.

Why Express5800 is ideal platform for SAP HANAHigh-performance Express5800 Scalable Enterprise Servers, which leverage NEC’s longheritage in the development of supercomputer and mainframe technologies to achieve highlyfault 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 2TBRAM within a single 7U chassis, and NEC Express5800/A1040a also has capabilities to mountup to 4CPU and 1TB RAM.

One noteworthy hardware feature is its EXPRESSSCOPE® Engine SP2, a uniquelydeveloped device by NEC based on our experience in UNIX servers, enables to monitor andcontrol Express5800/A1080a and A1040a with remote and centralized interface regardless ofthe power status of servers. It significantly increases maintainability and reduces downtime ofSAP HANA.

SAP HANA T-Shirt sizes offered

Support InfrastructureVirident FlashMax — is a Storage Class Memory (SCM) solution that offers enterprisesunconditional performance combined with the industry’s highest storage capacity in the smallestfootprint. FlashMAX has been designed from the ground up to fully exploit modern computerarchitectures, such as SAP HANA, which leverage many fast CPU cores and the PCI Expressinterconnect bus to deliver maximum application performance. It also offers supremeperformance without compromise over the entire lifetime of the device, across all applicationworkloads, even when the device is full or nearly full.

The scale-up configurations of NEC High-Performance Appliance for SAP HANA leverageVirident FlashMax to implement Log volume backup which is a key component to achievingsmooth collaboration with existing database tools.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications — is a fine-tuned and supportedoperating system based on fully open source technology towards the nature of SAPapplication’s workload and its system lifecycle. Its priority support provides unlimited 24hx7dtechnical support from SUSE, and its extended support offers additional 18 months for packagemaintenance. It also maximizes system uptime with highly-selected package-updates; onlypackages that affect SAP system shall be upgraded.

NEC High-Performance Appliance for SAP HANA uses SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAPApplications, including its priority support. NEC has a lot of experience providing mission-criticalgrade support on Linux systems, and has contributed various kind of open source communityincluding Linux kernel development. Through the long-standing partnership with SUSE, NEC

provides mission-critical class support for SAP HANA.

Additional software supportedNEC ESMPRO/ServerManager — is server management software that providesadministrators a centralized view to manage or monitor distributed multiple nodes.

It leverages EXPRESSSCOPE® Engine SP2 of Express5800 servers andESMPRO/ServerAgent installed on the system, to collect the run-time information of bothhardware and software; which enables administrators to identify issues quickly if and whensomething should happen.

Support and Additional ServicesThrough the longstanding partnership with SAP and SUSE, NEC will offer mission-critical gradesupport 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 SAPHANA, 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 latesttechnology commercially available as soon as possible.

Support ServiceFor 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

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

Selecting the Right SAP HANA Service PartnerIt’s important to choose a partner who can help you be successful with SAP HANA. A recentIDC 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 theneed for a service provider who is highly experienced with in-memory technologies.9 Such apartner should be able to help your company plan, deploy, and use SAP HANA to create valueacross the organization — harnessing the power of big data, delivering real-time analytics andbusiness processes, and managing a robust architecture complete with system landscapes andsolutions. The right partner should also provide you with access to experienced, certifiedexperts in areas such as architecture, deployment, and development. Throughout theimplementation process, you’ll need to think about how SAP HANA fits into your overall ITstrategy 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 andprovide real-time insight to respond quickly to consumer demands. Usha International: http://youtu.be/B3TRsEpw-I0

It All Starts with Good PlanningThe more attention you devote to planning your implementation, the more you will benefit fromyour SAP HANA investment. First and foremost, a good implementation partner should help youdevelop a comprehensive roadmap detailing how in-memory computing can help your companyrun at maximum speed and solve specific business problems. To accomplish these goals, thatpartner 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 theright business use case for SAP HANA in your company. At SAP, we often distinguish betweenbusiness intelligence and technology intelligence. The best technology in the world will notnecessarily create value if it isn’t aligned with the proper business scenario. Thus, the firstquestion to consider is: Where can an in-memory solution create the most value for the leastinvestment in the shortest timeframe, with the least disruption for business users? The answerto 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 orapplication solutions that can help?What does the high-level project plan look like, and how well does it align with ourbusiness requirements and expectations?What personnel do we need to ensure successful planning and delivery?

Everyone Wants a Low-Cost, Rapid Implementation — But How?Once you’ve documented and received signoff on the planning phase, it’s time to identify theexpertise 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. Formany projects, prepackaged fixed-price offerings based on globally compiled best practices,such as SAP Rapid Deployment solutions, can accelerate deployment while limiting costs. Suchsolutions include preconfigured software, implementation services, content, and end userenablement that together can radically accelerate time to value — delivering benefits in weeksrather than months.

What about Highly Complex Projects?If your business problem is really complex — for example, you need to manage large amountsof data, work with highly-customized systems, extend existing solutions, or build new solutionsspecific to your needs — you may want to consider specialized services. If you choose thisoption, it’s especially important that you select a partner with deep knowledge and skilledresources, 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 thebenefits of this new technology. In addition to educating your technical and IT staff, you need tomake certain that your business users know the full extent of what is now possible and how tobest adapt for your environment. To accomplish these tasks, you should select a serviceprovider that offers skills-transfer opportunities.

Want to get the most from your SAP HANA platform? The SAP Education organization offers courses andcertifications to give technical consultants and internal IT staff the knowledge and skills they need to fully leveragethe 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 ChecklistThe 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 todeliver maximum value in your organization.

SAP HANA Use CasesWe’ve reviewed many of the key factors that you need to consider when you select an SAPHANA implementation partner. Now we’ll turn our attention to how best to use this powerful newtechnology 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, andit can be deployed in myriad ways to meet your project expectations and technicalrequirements. SAP HANA can also complement existing landscapes and replace outdatedsolutions.

With that versatility in mind, we’ll review four typical use cases for SAP HANA deploymentstoday, as well as some of the potential scenarios for the future. These use cases are:

Agile data martsSAP Business Suite acceleratorPrimary database for SAP NetWeaver Business WarehouseCustom application development

Learn how the experts from SAP can assist you with all aspects of your SAP HANA Project with their end-to-endservices. They can help you to:

Design and plan your roadmap or solution

Implement and migrate SAP HANA into your environment

Innovate and develop new and exciting solutions to your unique business issues

Support the technical and business environment and educate your technical and end users

Link: http://www.sap.com/community/ebook/2012_05_HANA_Services/en/index.html#/page/1For More information, please visit the SAP HANA Services website:

Agile Data MartOne way to quickly get the most value from in-memory technology is to use SAP HANA as astandalone data mart for a specific use case. In this scenario, SAP HANA acts as a centralhub, collecting source-system data from multiple sources via in-memory technology and thendisplaying focused reports and analytics via a reporting front end. The data can then be used inmultiple ways, depending on the organization’s reporting requirements and formats.

This arrangement has the advantage of providing a focused solution to an immediatebusiness problem while minimizing disruption to the existing landscape. Such projects areusually completed quickly: The business problem is understood, and the required data andsource systems are easily identified. Such installations offer instant value — making previouslydifficult and time-consuming tasks fast and easy.

SAP Business Suite AcceleratorSAP HANA is frequently used to accelerate transactions and reports inside the SAP BusinessSuite. As with the agile data mart scenario, SAP HANA is set up as a standalone system, sideby 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 hoursor 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 BusinessSuite can run slowly, primarily due to the slow I/O of the underlying disk-based database andthe huge data requests required by these transactions or reports. To run its calculations andpresent a result, a typical budgeting or planning transaction in SAP must collect data from manydifferent tables in the system. Reports can also be very data-intensive, requiring extensive datafrom many tables dispersed throughout the database. In both of these cases, the applicationmust request the data from the database, load it into a buffer table in the SAP applicationserver, 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 reportingSales reportingPurchasing reportingShipping reportingMaster data reporting

These dashboards and reports leverage existing reporting capabilities from SAP ERP.However, they offload the physical processing of the reports to a dedicated SAP HANA systemthat sits beside the live SAP ERP system. All relevant tables for each dashboard or report arephysically copied from the SAP ERP system onto the SAP HANA system, which is then used togenerate the reports and display them to users in a variety of user interfaces. Let’s review thekey elements of each bundle.

Accelerated Sales & Distribution ReportingThe SAP HANA business content for Sales and Distribution (SD) enables sales managers andsales representatives to check basic key figures for sales in real time. Whereas salesmanagers use sales analytics to access instant overview information regarding the variousperformance indicators for their sales teams, the sales representatives focus on detailedinformation relating to the results of their sales activities.

Accelerated Financial ReportingThe 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 AccountsReceivable (FI-AR)Flexible analysis of customer and vendor items based on the single line items from theback-end ERP systemCalculation and analysis of the days sales outstanding (DSO)Note that currently only General Ledger Accounting (new) is supported.

Accelerated Procurement ReportingThe purchasing content package for SAP HANA enables procurement managers to analyze keyprocurement processes in real time. Procurement managers use spending key figures alongdifferent dimensions including Material Groups, Vendors, Plants, and Purchasing Organizations

to gain instant insight into inefficiencies that may point to savings potentials or internal andexternal process improvements.

Accelerated Master Data ReportingMaster 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 SAPERP, such as material, customer, and vendor.

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

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

Primary Database for SAP NetWeaver Business WarehouseIn our third use case example, SAP BW is powered by SAP HANA. In this scenario a companyreplaces the previously underlying database for their SAP BW system with SAP HANA. The ITteam can perform a standard DB migration over to SAP HANA and then enable specific objectsto 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 primaryunderlying database. With SAP HANA, SAP BW can leverage in-memory capabilities forimproved performance, without the need for any sidecar accelerators or extensive modelingworkarounds. The entire database physically sits under the SAP BW system, eliminating theneed for in-memory aggregation. This arrangement simplifies the data modeling and querydesign, 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 keyreasons. First, keeping the entire database in memory eliminates the need to send largeamounts of data between the application and DB servers, thereby reducing latency. In fact,

running SAP BW on SAP HANA eliminates most of the problematic issues that slow down thesystem, from both a user and an administrator perspective.

To watch a video of Home Trust’s BW migration project, click here: Home Trust:http://youtu.be/Q6057Cpr8V4

Custom Applications for SAP HANAAs stated earlier, SAP HANA is a full-blown, do-just-about-anything-you-want applicationplatform. It speaks pure SQL, and it includes all of the most common APIs, so you can literallywrite any type of application you want on top of it. There are a few rules and “guide rails” thatare designed to keep things from going wrong. Overall, however, the sky truly is the limit whenit comes to imagining what to build with SAP HANA.

Although SAP HANA is valuable for a broad range of applications, it “shines” particularly wellin a few unique situations. If you’re building an enterprise-scale application for a businessscenario that has high data volumes, needs detailed/granular data analysis, needs to search oraggregate huge data volumes, requires complex algorithmic or statistical calculations, or suffersfrom latency between transactional recording and reporting, SAP HANA is a great choice.

Future Use Case ScenariosAs SAP HANA matures and SAP updates its portfolio of solutions to take advantage of theextensive horsepower of SAP HANA, you can expect to see nearly every SAP productsupported natively on SAP HANA as a primary database — plus many more “native SAPHANA” applications.

By now you should have a good understanding of how typical use cases take advantage ofSAP HANA. The next step is to ensure that you understand the best ways to deploy this newtechnology in your environment to drive maximum value.

SAP HANA Implementation ScenariosAs we’ve discussed, there are many different ways to use SAP HANA, and it stands to reasonthat there are also many different implementation scenarios. However, there isn’t a one-to-onecorrelation 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 themost appropriate implementation scenario. If, for example, your use case is for a specific neednot addressed by an SAP application, you’ll likely need a custom development project. Incontrast, if your business issue is a more common or typical one, then SAP may have alreadycreated a new SAP HANA application to meet your needs. For many repeatable businessissues, SAP has created packaged solutions such as SAP Rapid Deployment solutions oraccelerators. These solutions contain preconfigured software, technical content, andimplementation services, and they are priced and scoped for rapid implementation.

Custom DevelopmentAlthough there are standard best practices that must be considered when developing customsolutions, there are also many possibilities when it comes to imagining what to build with SAPHANA.

SAP HANA aligns well with several specific requirements and situations. Are you building anenterprise-scale application for a business scenario with high data volumes? Do you needdetailed or granular data analysis? Do you have to query large data volumes? Do you requirecomplex algorithmic or statistical calculations, or suffer from latency between transactionalrecording and reporting? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then SAP HANA is agreat choice.

SAP Application DeploymentSAP is delivering a new class of solutions on top of the SAP HANA platform — solutions thatcombine 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 fasterdecisions, reacting more quickly to events, and unlocking new opportunities. Companies canutilize 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 solutionsinclude:

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

Packaged SolutionsDo you have to address an urgent business need? Do you prefer working with a fixed scope?SAP Rapid Deployment solutions can help you implement SAP HANA using a package ofpreconfigured software, content, and end user enablement plus implementation services.Clearly priced and scoped implementation services help you speed up time to value and limitrisk. Examples are:

SAP ERP Rapid Deployment solution for accelerated finance and controlling with SAPHANASAP ERP rapid-deployment solution for profitability analysis with SAP HANASAP Rapid Deployment solution for customer segmentation with SAP HANA

SAP is continuously adding more Rapid Deployment solutions. To see what’s available today,visit: www.sap.com/solutions/rds.

Now that we’ve reviewed typical implementation scenarios, let’s review what a successfulimplementation requires.

Taking a Systematic Approach for Your ImplementationYou may be familiar with the traditional ASAP methodology used by SAP — and the fact that acomplex ERP implementation can last for months, if not years. Because SAP HANA is a newtechnology, to stay on top of its learning curve you need to work with a solution implementationpartner who has a deep understanding of the technology, the capabilities, and best practicesfor implementation.

To successfully implement SAP HANA, you must follow a structured implementationmethodology. Your solution partner should approach the solution with a phased, deliverable-oriented implementation plan based in project and organizational change management. Thegoals here: to streamline implementation, minimize risk, and reduce the total costs ofimplementation.

A robust methodology should include templates, tools, questionnaires, and checklists,including guidebooks and accelerators to support team members and increase projectpredictability.

There are six basic steps that need to be a part of any SAP HANA implementation. Theamount of emphasis you place on each step will be dictated by the type of SAP HANA projectyou are implementing.

1. Customer education. Education is especially important for an SAP HANA project. Thetechnology is new, so the relevant knowledge is not yet widespread. The technology isalso rapidly evolving, with new use cases being created almost daily. Both the projectteam and the executive sponsors must be educated so they understand what SAP HANAcan 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 ofSAP HANA within the organization. Ask yourself: What are the possible scenarios forSAP HANA, and where might the company make improvements? Where could thetechnology have the biggest impact on corporate objectives or unlock deeper insightsinto the reported data? Once you have defined a use case, you should perform acomprehensive requirements gathering to ensure that the end solution addresses all ofyour 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 thatif your personnel or solution partners change, the new resources will understand how tosupport the solution. Most likely, this will be an iterative process, looking closely at usecases and their supporting infrastructure. As new information becomes available, thesolution approach will evolve into a comprehensive deliverable.

4. Modeling / Development A key task to implement your SAP HANA solution is creationof the data models and the different views to it. These models are adapted, modified,and enhanced to improve performance. For packaged applications this content isdelivered by SAP, but can be adapted to your specific needs. Custom developmentprojects 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, alongwith end-user training and support.

6. Go live. SAP HANA is delivered as a production solution.

Common Scoping Pitfalls to AvoidIf changes are required for front-end reports or analytics, then expectations must be managed. Often, as a resultof dependencies, even small changes to a report can have a large impact on underlying systems; for instance, achange to a field may require changing a data model.

Because of this factor, it is important to fully define requirements and to ask about any proposed reportmodifications. Reviewing the original form of a current report can be very helpful because you can see what thebusiness user is accustomed to seeing, as well as how it might be improved. You should also perform a properdata decomposition to document how the current report is built and how it is working. In addition, identify anycustom 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 keytimelines and activities for your SAP HANA implementation.

Timelines and Key Activity ConsiderationsJust as there is no one size fits all, there is no single timeline for an SAP HANA project. Eachproject is different; each has distinctive contributing factors and characteristics. It is SAP bestpractice to use a standard project methodology, such as the SAP ASAP implementationmethodology, to ensure that a project addresses all of the critical activities, phases, anddeliverables that are necessary for success.

The SAP ASAP methodology has been updated to incorporate the SAP HANA activitiesrequired for a standard in-memory project. Accelerators, best practices, and implementationtools 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 mayhave to consider prerequisites for delivering in-memory solutions. For example, dataquality may need to be addressed, or the organization may first need to upgrade someapplications that work in conjunction with SAP HANA.

Expectations for in-memory functionality. As customers learn more about thecapabilities of in-memory solutions, they may want to introduce additional functionality. Itis important to manage this need and to consider it during the initial requirements phase.

Original requirements per use case(s) identified during assessment. A keycomponent of the successful delivery of SAP HANA is ensuring that the final solutionmeets the company’s requirements and expectations, as identified in the original usecase scenario.

In addition to defining an implementation methodology, you’ll need to identify the key skillsrequired to ensure your implementation of SAP HANA is a success.

Critical SAP HANA Skills Needed for Successful ProjectsBecause SAP HANA is a new technology the success of any implementation will depend inlarge part on your ability to locate experts who can fill any skill gaps on your team. Criticalresources for an SAP HANA project will also vary depending on how you choose to leveragethe 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 physicalSAP HANA landscape, including CPU, memory, and disk usage. He or she performsmaintenance and system monitoring, along with configuration and application of anynecessary patches. The system architect also performs SAP source system configurationand 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 alsomonitors and processes backup log files.

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

SAP HANA data modeler. The SAP HANA data modeler is responsible primarily formodeling solution design and development and unit testing of all SAP HANA models. He orshe also performs SAP HANA model lifecycle management, which includes the varioussteps contained in the process of moving from development to production.

Data services/SLT developer. The data services developer is responsible primarily fordesign and development of jobs to extract, transform, and load data into SAP HANA viadata services or SLT. The developer also performs lifecycle management, which includessteps 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 theproject manager to plan technical requirements for the project. He or she then implementsthese required technical tasks within the system.

Certified OS/DB migration consultant. This individual is responsible for technical planningand design of the in-memory infrastructure, including database planning, projectorganization, 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 modelingusing the different development capabilities of SAP HANA (SQLScript, Business FunctionLibrary, etc.).

Depending on the specific scope and architecture of your project, you may need developmentexperts in the specific application domain and advanced technologies, such as predictiveanalytics, scripting languages, etc. Implementing SAP HANA is a major step in dramaticallyimproving 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 thepower, speed, and performance of SAP HANA. Let’s conclude this discussion by examiningsome truly stellar examples of successful SAP HANA implementations.

Putting it All Together — Examples of Stellar ProjectsNow that we have discussed the SAP HANA technology and how to obtain the best businessvalue from this technology, we will present some innovative ways that customers have “put it alltogether.” The first example is a chemicals company that was able to improve compliancereporting by accelerating its standard SAP system. The second example involves a largeuniversity hospital that successfully implemented SAP HANA as the engine of a new customapplication, enabling it to dramatically increase the speed with which it analyzed medicalrecords. Finally, a financial services company used SAP HANA as a primary database for SAPBusiness Warehouse, with impressive results.

SAP Business Suite Accelerator at a Chemicals CompanyOur first example is a European consumer chemicals company that specializes in developingnew fragrances and flavors. Every one of its hundreds of new recipes — each with uniqueingredients and compositions — must be checked for compliance with legal regulations. As thedemand for these chemicals increased and their recipes became more complex, the companysimply became unable to scale its compliance checking. To resolve this problem, the companycollaborated with SAP to build an application that enables it to quickly check new recipes whilethey are still in development to ensure that they comply with a vast array of local legalregulations. Using SAP HANA to augment support of existing processes, we havedemonstrated how the new application can cut processing time from 20 minutes to less than 4seconds. This vastly improved performance enhances their scientists’ productivity whilesimultaneously driving down the costs of new product development.

Custom SAP HANA Application in Use at a University HospitalWith a mature analytics program in place, the biggest university hospital in Europe provides150,000 inpatient and 600,000 outpatient treatments every year. The hospital invested in SAPHANA to harness the big data associated with its vast inventory of patient data, medicalrecords, 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 examineinformation involving cancer patients, such as tumor types, gender, age, risk factors,treatments, and diagnoses. This information enables the hospital to quickly identify the bestcandidates for each clinical study. In the future, when DNA is added to the data set, theOncolyzer will analyze up to 500,000 data points per patient in real time. SAP HANA analyzesboth structured and unstructured data and greatly accelerates the identification process.

Primary Database for SAP Business Warehouse in Use at a Financial InstitutionA 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 andupgrading to SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, powered by SAP HANA. The result hasbeen a dramatic improvement in reporting runtimes in the data warehouse and businessintelligence environments. Data query speeds have increased on average 8-12 times, simplequeries run up to 450 times faster, and data store object activation is 19 times faster. Based onthese impressive results, the customer is re-architecting its entire reporting environment toleverage the power of SAP HANA.

Final Words of Wisdom on SAP HANA ImplementationWe’ve reviewed the importance of selecting the right SAP HANA services partner — one whocan help you plan and implement your solution and provide the right set of skill resources toensure your implementation delivers on the value of SAP HANA. We’ve also reviewed commonuse cases, including the agile data mart, SAP Business Suite accelerator, primary database forSAP Business Warehouse, and custom SAP HANA applications. SAP HANA implementationscenarios can vary depending on your business need — from custom development to SAPapplication development to rapid deployment solutions. Next we reviewed the importance oftaking a systematic approach to your implementation and the benefits of following amethodology built on education, use case identification, solution approach, modeling, QA andtesting, and go-live best practices. Prior to implementation, you’ll also need to identify yourtimeline, key activities, and skilled resources needed to implement SAP HANA. The key isplanning and ensuring you understand the entire scope of the implementation, while remainingflexible 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 asuccessful SAP HANA implementation:

1. Make certain that business requirements are completely understood and that the usecase complements the technical requirements. Remember, technology intelligencedoesn’t necessarily equal business intelligence!

2. Establish ROI metrics early in the scoping process. Build them into the project/solution toensure 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 acrossother functional areas of the business. Establishing a quick win helps with sponsorshipand 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 thateach term is understood by — and means the same thing to — IT, developers, businessusers, and executive sponsors. Small clarifications on such terms as “real-time” and

“self-serve” can go a long way toward preventing misunderstandings concerning both thefunctionality to be delivered and the value it brings.

7. Bonus Advice: Encourage everyone involved with the project (Technical & Business) todownload and read a copy of this book. It really helps get everyone “on the same page”and ensures you’re all speaking the same language.

For more information about SAP HANA services offerings, subscribe to SAPServices onTwitter band review the details on the SAP HANA services website.

Top Advice from SAP Mentors for SAP HANA ProjectsSAP Mentors are the most influential community participants in the SAP ecosystem. Theycomprise a super-smart and engaged global cohort of nearly 110 bloggers, consultants, andtechnical wizards nominated by SAP Community Network peers and selected by SAP. All SAPMentors 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 providetheir best tips and tricks for a successful SAP HANA project. Pay attention, these guys reallyknow their stuff!

Vijay VijayasankarAssociate PartnerIBM Global Business ServicesTwitter: @vijayasankarv

1. Find the best data modeler you can for your SAP HANA projects. That is the make-or-break issue for most SAP HANA projects.

2. Do not jump into a POC (Proof-of-Concept) just to prove loading/ reporting works fasterin a data mart. SAP or IBM can easily show you how quickly their systems can reportand load data.

3. Spend a lot of time refining your use case offline before you start the project. Animportant part of this step is to accurately define success up front. This helps reducewasteful scoping efforts during the project, and it will help the project team focus onspecific 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 boxesare 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 performancewhile heavy loads happen, while multiple people are working on system, logging on fromdifferent 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 SAPwill probably have seen your issues before, and they can advise you and help minimizetime spent “reinventing the wheel.”

8. If you are going to migrate to SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on SAP HANA, testas you go when migrating objects to their in-memory versions so that you can spotchallenges sooner. Definitely consider re-engineering the design of SAP BW to takeadvantage of SAP HANA and avoid doing only an en-masse migration and leaving it atthat.

9. SAP HANA security/administration is a specialized skill, and a good design is needed tomake 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 atyou in “lightning speed.” Garbage In/Garbage Out still applies. Profile the data, and fixthem at the source or as close to the source as possible before sending them to SAPHANA.

Harald ReiterSenior Manager — SAPDeloitte ConsultingTwitter: @hreiter

1. Rethink what is possiblea. 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, achievesuccess, 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 thebest answer (or question); you will be able to do the cycles faster, though. This allowsyou to change your assumptions, quickly run scenarios, and ask different questions touncover anomalies in your data.

b. Embed statistical models and predictive analysis into your daily operations to detectrisk, negative trending, and anomalies.

c. Make sure there is a measureable ROI5. Establish priorities

a. Define what you really want, and make certain your objectives have a positive impacton your organization

b. Don’t forget to look at unstructured data in your organization; these data can providea new perspective. Incorporating unstructured data and rapid processing enablesmeaningful and timely analysis to minimize risk, losses, or negative exposure.

c. Don’t underestimate the importance of data quality. Revisit your data quality initiativesusing SAP HANA to quickly identify issues that result from processing massive datasets in one pass. Correlation of results without complex partitioning and staging areascan 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 administrativestaff due to technology and implementation tools.

c. Resources can now be assigned real value-added tasks instead of time-consumingadministrative tasks just to obtain basic information.

7. Incorporate mobilitya. Continuous monitoring of key metrics is a reality using mobility and SAP HANA

8. Revisit your technology architecturea. Examine your overall landscape, and identify all areas that can benefit 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 righta. One size does not fit allb. 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 testinga. Don’t forget about SLAs (service-level agreements).b. Tuning and performance testing can make the fast even faster.c. Reveal bad data model designs.

Vitaliy RudnytskiyLead BI ArchitectHP Enterprise Information SolutionsTwitter: @Sygyzmundovych

1. Accept nothing less than excellence from your project team and partnersa. Technology makes things faster, better, and cheaper; but technology itself is still just

a tool. Make sure you assemble an excellent team: business, project team, partners,and SAP support.

2. Understand the technologya. If you are reading this book, you are already on the right track.

3. Think about details, but always consider them in the context of the big picturea. “The devil is in the details,” so think them through. At the same time, however, never

lose sight of the complete picture of where all the details fit into.4. Open your mind to the “New World”

a. Question your old habits; forget about your “15 years of technical/project experienceunder the belt.” Old techniques do not necessarily work well or at all with newparadigms.

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 constanttransition. Build for the long run.

Ranjeet PanickerPractice ManagerSAP Next Generation ServicesHANA/In-Memory Center of Excellence

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) & Return on Investment (ROI) AnalysisDo not limit analysis of TCO and ROI to technical, IT, or infrastructure savings. Too often, whencustomers generate a business case to justify the acquisition of SAP HANA, they apply onlythose 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 meanssomething to the business. Apply metrics to these savings. Engage SAP Value Engineeringteams 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. Ifyou don’t identify, track, and ensure the ongoing value of a project, you’re unlikely to achieve its financial andoperational objectives. Learn more about how strategy management helps you track and realize the full value ofyour organizational objectives by reading this article: http://scn.sap.com/community/services/blog/2012/08/23/the-value-in-value-management

Cutting-edge TechnologySAP HANA represents a paradigm shift in how we know and use an RDBMS. It is also a newdatabase technology – one that is evolving as SAP customers find new ways to challenge thespeed and performance of the database. The SAP HANA platform is evolving very quickly, andSAP continuously adds new and innovative functionality. To enable customers to takeadvantage of this new functionality quickly and efficiently, SAP has made the process ofupgrading very simple.

HANA Should Not Be Only an IT ProjectRecognize the business drivers which catalyzed the decision to make SAP HANA the platformfor your business. Although switching the database underneath BW is part of the formula forsuccess with SAP HANA, the full value of a BW powered by SAP HANA solution is realizedthrough additional activities such as optimizing in-memory objects and examining processes tore-architect the information layers. Such activities will help you save not only on themaintenance of these objects, but also on storage, resources, and memory. Ultimately they willenable your business to report more quickly and efficiently.

Executive SponsorshipBuy-in at the highest level brings the authority and credibility that can mean the differencebetween success and failure for your SAP HANA project. Executive sponsorship helps drive thevision for SAP HANA in your organization, and it facilitates the change management that isrequired when you adopt a new technology. To secure and maintain this sponsorship, includethe 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 SAPHANA appliance. Instead, analyze ways to reduce redundant data before loading/migrating intoSAP HANA. Examine solutions like near-line storage (NLS) that may help mitigate rapid datagrowth in SAP HANA. Invest in hardware that can be scaled instead of being replaced. Adoptrealistic goals on sharing an SAP HANA appliance between applications. Finally, look into itemssuch as backup and restore, patching, and performance when you are considering sharing asingle 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

S

The rest of the story….

ince the SAP HANA Essentials book is being written in “real time”, it will be continuouslyupdated 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 whennew 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 fromthe information in this book as well.

J

About the Author

Jeffrey Word, Ph.D.Follow Jeff on : @jeff_word

effrey is responsible for creating and communicating thought leadership on SAP’s In-Memorydatabase 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, IntegratedBusiness Processes with ERP Systems (2011), Essentials of Business Processes andInformation Systems (2009), Business Network Transformation: Strategies toReconfigure Your Business Relationships for Competitive Advantage (2009) and SAPNetWeaver for Dummies (2004).

Jeffrey has more than 18 years experience in IT strategy and business consulting workingwith Fortune 1000 companies. Over the last 13 years at SAP, he has worked on technologystrategy with focus on corporate innovation initiatives and enterprise architecture design. Priorto joining SAP, he worked in the high tech industry for several hardware and software vendorsthroughout the Americas and Europe in a variety of leadership roles.

Dr. Word earned his PhD in Information Systems at Manchester Business School inEngland. His research focus was on event-driven business process design and next-generationenterprise architecture. He also earned an MBA in International Management from theThunderbird School of Global Management and a BA in European Studies/Spanish from theUniversity of Oklahoma.