As of February 2013, you can get 30 days of free access to SAP HANA developer edition on CloudShare.
In less than 10 minutes you can sign-up and connect to your SAP HANA sandbox. All you need to get started is either an S-User or an SCN User. Enter your login credentials here: https://accounts.sap.com/saml2/idp/sso/accounts.sap.com. After filling in your personal information and accepting the terms and conditions you will be redirected to the registration page of CloudShare where HANA is hosted. Here you need to create your account for accessing your own SAP HANA System. Two virtual machines will be available - one for the database and the other for the SAP HANA Studio. The initial run can take a few minutes.
Now you are all set to start your HANA experience.
After opening the virtual machine you start the SAP HANA Studio. First, a new System has to be added. The necessary information is provided. Now you can start by setting up tables, views and whatever else you wish to try on SAP HANA.
We have created a short demo showing the steps get to your HANA System from the initial registration to creating a table: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22431053/HANA_Cloud_Demo.wmv. This can be done in roughly 8 minutes.
Have fun with SAP HANA!
For more information on SAP HANA we can recommend this free e-book by Jeff Word: http://www.amazon.com/SAP-HANA-Essentials-ebook/dp/B0089N7BHK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1365773998&sr=8...
Here you find further technical information about SAP HANA: http://www.saphana.com/docs/DOC-2171
If you are wondering where to use SAP HANA explore the SAP HANA Use Case Repository and try out the HANA Value Calculator:
http://www.saphana.com/community/implement/use-cases
Additional help is also available here: http://www.saphana.com/community/learn/content?filterID=content~objecttype~objecttype
