What is SAP HANA?
Deployable on premise or in the cloud, SAP HANA is an in-memory data platform that lets you accelerate business processes, deliver more business intelligence, and simplify your IT environment. By providing the foundation for all your data needs, SAP HANA removes the burden of maintaining separate legacy systems and siloed data, so you can run live and make better business decisions in the new digital economy.
In summary, your company will be able to simplify its IT with one platform for trans-analytic applications. This means that you will be able to analyze live data to support real-time business while at the same time reduce data redundancy, hardware and IT operations. You will also be able to modernize your data centre with flexible SAP HANA deployment options, be it public or private cloud. With SAP HANA, some companies are seeing 575% five-year ROI by increasing innovation and decreasing data management costs.
If SAP HANA is so beneficial, why is it not a standard?
Even with all the business benefits that SAP HANA can provide, it is still placed on a company’s wish list rather than their next purchase. Why you may ask? Price. The expense for an initial migration project for SAP HANA can cost the company over $2 million when things such as deployment, staff, hardware and licensing are considered. Even with all its benefits, it is very hard to justify anything with that kind of cost behind it. However, it is projected that by 2025 that SAP HANA will be a must have business solution, whether or not the company can justify the expense. You must also take into consideration that just because your company is not getting SAP HANA that your competition will not.
Here is where SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering on an all-flash infrastructure comes in. Be able to migrate to SAP HANA and gain the benefits of its real-time insights almost immediately without paying the potentially limiting upfront and ongoing costs.
S AP HANA Dynamic Tiering is an add-on for the SAP HANA database. It allows less frequently used data (warm data) to be moved from the main
in-memory SAP HANA database into extended storage. Using extended storage can dramatically reduce costs by decreasing the size of the SAP HANA database – thereby lowering maintenance, hardware, and software/licensing costs. When the extended storage is an all-flash infrastructure, performance loss can be minimized compared to keeping all date in SAP HANA itself.
Pure Storage tested the cost and performance impacts of running SAP HANA with SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering on their Pure Storage FlashStack converged-infrastructure solution to see if it was possible to save organizations millions of dollars while still being able to realize all of its benefits. The results? Organizations that run SAP HANA with SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering on Pure Storage’s all-flash infrastructure were able to quickly and easily start using SAP HANA at a lower cost (up to 75% lower) while still obtaining performance on par as if running SAP HANA on its own. As a bonus, with Pure Storage all-flash solution and Pure Storage’s collaboration with SAP, organizations will be ready and able to reduce the overall in-memory data footprint and offload less frequently used war data on to all-flash technology while still obtaining high performance with future SAP HANA capabilities, be it the capabilities of SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering or something else.
To learn more about the Pure Storage test, please read this article for a more in-depth study. If you want to learn more about Pure Storage, you can visit our product page or call us at 893-9515.