Preparing for SAP HANA

I attended an ASUG Webcast last week “SAP HANA Landscape and Operations” by Serge Muts, Chief Architect for CSA (Customer Solution Adoption) at SAP Labs, LLC.  The webcast covered how to prepare your landscape for HANA and what technologies and scenarios are available today.  This blog will cover suggestions on how to get started with SAP HANA.

One of the first things to do will be to determine which Hardware Partner to use.  SAP HANA can only be installed on validated (certified) hardware (detailed information in OSS note 1642937).  The HANA installer will perform a specific hardware check to ensure appropriate hardware is being used.  If the hardware check fails, HANA will not install.

The current SAP HANA certified partners are:

• Cisco
• Dell
• Fujitsu
• Hitachi
• HP
• IBM
• NEC

The Hardware Partner will also assist in sizing (check out OSS Notes 1514966 and 1637145) and will perform the installation of HANA as well as the installation and configuration of the Operating System (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.1).  The appliance is then shipped to the customer.

The Installation Guides and other key information can be found out on https://service.sap.com/hana :

Once the appliance has been delivered, the SAP HANA on-site configuration tool is used to make customer specific changes.  As part of the initial setup, SAP also recommends to connect the HANA appliance to the Solution Manager system (as of Solution Manager 7.1 SP04) with a remote service connection via SAP Router.

Some additional OSS Notes to review:

• 1514967:  SAP HANA Central Note
• 1523337:  SAP HANA Database Central Note
• 1597355:  Swap-space recommendation for Linux
• 1642937:  New features supported with SAP HANA SPS 03

For SAP HANA Landscape information, be sure to review the following OSS Notes:

• 1661202:  Support for multiple applications on SAP HANA
• 1666670:  BW on SAP HANA landscape deployment planning
• 1681092:  Support for multiple SAP HANA databases on one HANA appliance (currently, multiple HANA databases are not supported on 1 appliance, but, SAP is working on it, so keep an eye on this note which will be updated if/when it is supported)

For Release Restrictions for SAP HANA 1.0, check out OSS Note 1513496.

If preparing for SAP BW on HANA, make sure to look at OSS Note 1702409 for specific scale out recommendations.

There is also the SAP HANA Knowledge Center out in the SAP Help Portal http://help.sap.com/hana

To “test drive” SAP HANA, go to http://experiencesaphana.com

And, be sure to “follow” the In-Memory Business Data Management and SAP HANA place out in SCN:

http://scn.sap.com/community/in-memory-business-data-management

I hope this information helps you get started with SAP HANA.  I hear there “may” be some new information on this topic shared next week at the 2012 SAPPHIRENOW and ASUG Conference ;-).