How HANA is Impacting SAP Hosting Services
From race cars to ERP landscapes, high performance always requires careful and regular maintenance. And as a system built from the ground up around performance, SAP HANA is no exception. However, as the HANA and S/4HANA ecosystem has developed, vendors have found ways to make maintenance easier, hosting less costly and S/4HANA landscapes even more powerful and flexible. Here are three of the most important impacts HANA has had on SAP hosting services — and the cloud.
Meeting SAP HANA Resource Needs in the Cloud
HANA’s resource requirement initially challenged cloud vendors. Previous generations of relational databases required large amounts of auxiliary memory (hard disks or flash drives), but only a small amount of main memory (RAM). This imposed a performance bottleneck, since auxiliary memory is much slower than main memory
SAP HANA is different. All data is stored in main memory, and auxiliary memory is only used as a backup, eliminating the bottleneck.
To support HANA production, SAP hosting services had to build instances with higher memory and greater throughput. This has opened the benefits of the public cloud up to SAP HANA, S/4HANA and other demanding workloads
Automation and Orchestration
The complex administrative needs of HANA helped fuel the drive towards greater automation and orchestration. When routine tasks like provisioning resources and imposing security controls are handled manually, the result is high admin costs and low efficiency.
To help eliminate these bottlenecks and simplify administration, SAP hosting services have developed built-in tools to automate tasks like:
- Spinning up and down resources to address demand spikes
- Provisioning developers in accordance with internal controls
- Simplifying integration across platforms
This has made SAP administration easier and less costly, and helped organizations more fully realize S/4ANA benefits like real-time visibility.
Bringing HANA Management into the Cloud Age
The public cloud has been largely responsible for changing the status of servers from pets to cattle. Before the cloud, each server was hand-installed, and individually cared for like a pet. This care was required, because if a server (or server pair) went down, it could cause major problems like prolonged downtime or data loss.
Cloud servers are treated more like cattle, in that no individual server is irreplaceable. If a server goes down, it won’t affect the user — workloads will just shift to other hardware. That’s one of the main factors that enables the public cloud to offer benefits like low cost and unlimited scalability.
HANA servers were originally the ultimate pets. Companies would invest in expensive HANA appliances, or purpose-built server clusters, which had to be carefully maintained throughout their lifecycle. But over time, demand led SAP hosting services to develop better virtualized solutions that could provide the same performance in a less costly, more scalable cloud. As a result, customers can now achieve the performance of purpose-built HANA machines on public cloud hardware, freeing them from the high cost of private data centers.
HANA Beyond the Limits
The demands of SAP HANA users continue to challenge the industry to build more powerful, flexible and automated solutions. The right partner can keep you on the cutting edge, giving you the technological boost you need to lead your industry.
Whether your organization is looking for a new SAP hosting partner to power your S/4HANA landscape, or just starting the journey to HANA, contact us to learn how Protera can help.