How does all this work together – BW, BW on HANA, Suite on HANA, HANA Live….. Part 6

In the previous parts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) we focused mainly on customers without a complete DWH solution and in Part 5 we looked at the available options for customers that were looking at a custom DWH solution.

In this part we are looking at customers in landscape #6, which means we have a customer that has SAP and non-SAP applications on the OLTP layer and SAP NetWeaver BW as DWH layer. 

Figure 1: Customer with SAP NetWeaver BW

Figure 1 shows the scenario, where the customer created a DWH Layer using SAP NetWeaver BW (on RDBMS, not on SAP HANA) solution and all the data from the SAP and non-SAP systems is being loaded into SAP NetWeaver BW.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this blog series – this is not about comparing different technologies for creating your DWH – this is about showing how our customers in different situation could leverage SAP HANA or SAP HANA Live as part of their overall landscape.

So what are the options for a customer that already uses SAP NetWeaver BW to leverage SAP HANA (and in this part of the blog series the answer is not SAP BW on SAP HANA).

Figure 2: SAP HANA as Agile Platform

Figure 2 shows the first scenario where the customer uses SAP HANA as a side care implementation next to SAP NetWeaver BW with the focus on the flexibility in data modeling. In this scenario the custom loads data from the OLTP layer as well as other 3^rd party source (such as event driven data or data from social media channels) into SAP HANA. In this scenario SAP HANA is treated as an agile platform and data is being loaded into SAP HANA first and after the analytical workflows have been performed the data is loaded into SAP NetWeaver BW.

Figure 3: SAP HANA as Data Mart

Figure 3 shows a different scenario, where SAP HANA is treated more in a classic data mart scenario. So in this scenario all the data is being loaded into SAP NetWeaver BW first and data marts are being created in SAP HANA for specific purposes.

Figure 4: SAP HANA Live

So how could a customer using SAP NetWeaver BW leverage SAP HANA Live?

Figure 4 shows the first possible scenario where the customer uses SAP BusinessSuite on a classic RDBMS and uses SAP HANA Live in a side-car approach next to an existing deployment of the SAP BusinessSuite. In such a scenario SAP HANA Live provides a platform for operational reporting and the customer could use SAP HANA Live for real-time analytics from the OLTP layer. In addition to that the data would still be loaded into SAP NetWeaver BW.

Figure 5: SAP BusinessSuite on SAP HANA with SAP HANA Live

Figure 5 shows a customer that uses SAP BusinessSuite on SAP HANA with SAP NetWeaver BW on RDBMS. In such a scenario there is no need to replicate the data from the SAP BusinessSuite to SAP HANA (see Figure 4) as SAP BusinessSuite runs on SAP HANA. The customer can use SAP HANA Live – like in Figure 4 – for operational reporting and real-time analytics and the data from the SAP BusinessSuite would then be replicated / loaded into SAP NetWeaver BW.

In the next part of this series we will take a look how these scenarios are impacted when SAP NetWeaver BW runs on SAP HANA.