Introducing the Latest Distinguished Engineer: Lloyd Palfrey

I am proud to introduce one of our first round of HANA Distinguished Engineers, Lloyd Palfrey, of Bluefin Solutions in the United Kingdom. Bluefin is an SAP partner, and has been implementing customer solutions based on HANA since the very beginning. I was honored to work with Lloyd on the SAP HANA Real-Time Race at SAP TechEd in Las Vegas recently, and I was genuinely impressed by his knowledge, not only of how to perform standard tasks in HANA, but of HANA internals as well. (of course, those that watched my discussion with Lloyd’s colleague, Tristan Colgate, will know the secret to Lloyd’s HANA mastery!)

I sat down with Lloyd recently and had a chat about his background.

What is your role at Bluefin Solutions?

My current job title is Senior Technical Architect. I get involved with a lot of the technical activities at Bluefin such as landscape design, architecture design, technical implementations, performance tuning, upgrades and migrations. I’m also increasingly involved with strategy work such as defining virtualization or global data centre strategy.

Can you give me a synopsis of your background?

I started my career at a hospital as a technical architect. Over a seven year period I was introduced to lots of new technology and really enjoyed working on the difficult projects. Eventually it was time to move on and I decided to join a small IT consultancy company in London. Here I got my first real introduction to SAP. I’ll be honest; at first I tried to resist it. The idea of spending many hours a day in that terrible GUI frightened me. About 2 weeks after declaring ‘I will never work with that!’ I was an absolute SAP addict. Not long after that I was SAP contracting, troubleshooting BASIS installs and providing architectural support for SAP projects. 2 years later in January 2010 I joined Bluefin as a Senior Technical Architect.

How long have you been working with SAP HANA?

For just over a year now. I didn’t really start to get involved until BW on HANA was in beta. I was lucky enough to do one of the first ever BW on HANA migrations outside of the SAP labs. The product has come such a long way in 1 year!

And what was your role prior to working with HANA?

It was a very similar role but with a focus on BI 4.0 and BPC 7~. I still focus on these products today but my main focus is HANA.

Tell me a bit about your last HANA project.

My last HANA project was a BW on HANA review. The customer was an early ramp up customer and back then the documentation wasn’t anywhere near as good as it is now. As a result there were some technical issues with their landscape. The engagement involved reviewing the system then creating and executing a body of work to bring the system in line with SAP best practices.

In addition, Lloyd got on a webcast with me recently, to show how to perform some tasks in HANA. Some of them may be fairly straight forward, but Lloyd offers some pointers based on experience to help smooth out any pitfalls. In addition, the last one offers a tip you probably haven’t seen before!

Downloading Patches:

Installing Patches:

How to change the HANA system password, with one HANA Studio tied behind your back: