What is SAP HANA? Why Do You Need It?
SAP HANA is more than a fast database. It’s better described by its full-length name – High-Performance Analytic Appliance. It has become a platform to provide real-time data for ERP systems and data analysis while leveraging new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT).
SAP HANA loads the entire dataset into the server’s RAM (think hundreds of gigabytes) to process the hundreds of thousands of transactions that a large organization’s ERP solution will generate each day. It also exponentially speeds up business analytics, delivering insights in near real-time, giving you a competitive advantage.
What is more, it is a tried-and-true solution. SAP’s forward-looking vision led them to develop a real-time information system in the late 2000s, and thus HANA was born in 2010. Now some 13 years later, it has solidified its dominance as one of the best solutions on the market.
How is SAP HANA Deployed?
This powerful platform has been designed from the ground up to run on Linux servers. In this way, HANA can take advantage of the granular control, rock-solid stability, and broad popularity of the most trusted server operating system – the same one that drives almost every supercomputer in the world.
You can deploy HANA on-premises if you have the right hardware. However, more companies are seeing the significant benefits that come from cloud deployment, including greater availability, higher security, and reduced maintenance costs. Thus, you have options to deploy HANA to a variety of public and private cloud options, including more well-known ones like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
What Are Some of SAP HANA’s Latest Improvements?
As with any enterprise software, it is constantly improving and being expanded for new use cases. Here are a few general areas where HANA has been enhanced:
- Critical Data Protection. While HANA has always been a well-designed solution, more effort has been put into ensuring complete recovery from catastrophic server failure. HANA now has High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) features to protect your critical applications through data replication. It also includes privacy enhancements, allowing you to build analytical solutions that respect data privacy and anonymity laws.
- Data Architecture. SAP has introduced a new spatial data type to allow users to process and analyze geospatial data. Additionally, enhancements have been made to data integration, modeling, and multi-tier storage features.
- Analytics. The SAP HANA Predictive Analytics Library (PAL) has been improved with new text, graph, and geospatial features. Machine Learning enhancements are also in the mix, giving your data science team plenty of new tools to accomplish their work.
- Development Tooling. Interfaces are available for several programming languages, allowing developers to create solutions more easily and with minimal performance impact. As an example, the SQL Plan Stability option enhances performance for complex queries.
Why Migrate to SAP HANA?
Data analysis is becoming an essential part of every business strategy. Adopting an analytics platform now will position your enterprise for future growth and keep you ahead of the competition. SAP HANA lays a high-performance foundation for data analytics applications, as well as SAP’s fully-integrated ERP solution, S/4HANA.
Are you looking for a partner to help you implement SAP HANA, S/4HANA, SAP Analytics Cloud, or any other part of the SAP ecosystem? You’ll be well served by the professionals at CogentNext who will help you plan the implementation, migration, or upgrade your organization needs to achieve tomorrow’s business goals today. Contact us
By Chandra Subramanian | CogentNext Technologies