HANA: First adaption with NVM

Since Sapphire this year SAP and Intel have announced some new details regarding Skylake and NVM (non-volatile memory).

With the new processors it should be possible to gain ~60% more performance when running HANA workload on it. Additionally new DIMMs based on 3D XPoint technology (NVM) help overcome the traditional I/O bottlenecks that slow data flows and limit application capacity and performance.

Till now no there were no details about how SAP will use this new technology. You can use it as filesystem or as in-memory format.

Introducing the new SAP HANA capture and replay tool, available with SAP HANA SPS12

Testing challenges

Testing application workload can be a huge effort for users, developers and consultants alike. Also, things do not get easier on a large scale, especially for moving from one revision or SPS of SAP HANA to another.

The common approach to this is using customized scripts for database access or executing test scenarios in client applications. Of course, developing such scenarios and test cases is a large and therefore very costly development effort – all of it just to ensure the solution still works correctly with the new SAP HANA software.

For regression testing a new SAP HANA SPS across a whole system landscape with multiple application stacks the complexity increases even more since now the interoperation between SAP HANA and the various client applications or reporting tools needs to be tested. The outcome of all this effort are hand-crafted tests that may only resemble the actual workload to a certain degree.

What is SAP HANA?

SAP HANA is an in-memory data platform that is deployable as an on-premise appliance, or in the cloud.  It is a revolutionary platform that’s best suited for performing real-time analytics, and developing and deploying real-time applications. At the core of this real-time data platform is the SAP HANA database which is fundamentally different than any other database engine in the market today (figure 1).

Parallelization options with the SAP HANA and R-Integration

Why is parallelization relevant?

The R-Integration with SAP HANA aims at leveraging R’s rich set of powerful statistical, data mining capabilities, as well as its fast, high-level and built-in convenience operations for data manipulation (eg. Matrix multiplication, data sub setting etc.) in the context of a SAP HANA-based application. To benefit from the power of R, the R-integration framework requires a setup with two separate hosts for SAP HANA and the R/Rserve environment. A brief summary of how R processing from a SAP HANA application works is described in the following:

• SAP HANA triggers the creation of a dedicated R-process on the R-host machine, then
• R-code plus data (accessible from SAP HANA) are transferred via TCP/IP to the spawned R-process.
• Some computational tasks take place within the R-process, and
• the results are sent back from R to SAP HANA for consumption and further processing.

How to Plan for Disaster Recovery with SAP HANA

Abstract
As devices, systems, and networks become more complex, there are simply more things that can go wrong due either to man-made or natural disasters. See the options available with SAP HANA for disaster recovery that help organizations keep business running smoothly in such circumstances.

Key Concept
SAP HANA provides a single platform to extract and analyze massive amounts of structured and unstructured data in real time from multiple sources such as social media, blogs, online reviews, emails, and discussion forums. The analyzed information helps customer to answer specific questions, increase revenue, and make accurate and timely decisions. The analyzed information and the data that is accumulated over the years is the backbone for an organization. If something happens to the data due to natural or man-made disasters, business can come to a halt. Making use of the SAP HANA disaster recovery features can save companies from such an outcome.

Learning Objectives
By reading the article you will be able to:

• Understand the concept of disaster recovery
• Understand the disaster recovery options with SAP HANA

Nowadays most every company has its business continuity plan that helps during an unfortunate event such as flood or earthquake. A disaster recovery plan is part of business continuity plan focusing mainly on the restoration of IT infrastructure and operations after a crisis.

There are two important terms when it comes to a disaster recovery plan: recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO), as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Disaster recovery concepts

Steps to follow Disaster Recovery with SAP HANA

Abstract
As devices, systems, and networks become more complex, there are simply more things that can go wrong due either to man-made or natural disasters. See the options available with SAP HANA for disaster recovery that help organizations keep business running smoothly in such circumstances.

Key Concept
SAP HANA provides a single platform to extract and analyze massive amounts of structured and unstructured data in real time from multiple sources such as social media, blogs, online reviews, emails, and discussion forums. The analyzed information helps customer to answer specific questions, increase revenue, and make accurate and timely decisions. The analyzed information and the data that is accumulated over the years is the backbone for an organization. If something happens to the data due to natural or man-made disasters, business can come to a halt. Making use of the SAP HANA disaster recovery features can save companies from such an outcome.

Learning Objectives
By reading the article you will be able to:

• Understand the concept of disaster recovery
• Understand the disaster recovery options with SAP HANA

Nowadays most every company has its business continuity plan that helps during an unfortunate event such as flood or earthquake. A disaster recovery plan is part of business continuity plan focusing mainly on the restoration of IT infrastructure and operations after a crisis.