Flexible deployment of HANA Landscapes- learnings from #TechEd

This week SAP TechEd time in Amsterdam took place and I looked forward to this exciting get together of SAP Techies already months before. As like any other TechEd, there were way more interesting sessions available than one could go to so I decided to focus on HANA deployment and architecture related lectures and networking sessions.

Let me share some key takeaways that I took home from Amsterdam.

In the Session RDP102 “SAP HANA Deployment Options and impact on System Landscape Recommendations” Stefan Elfner gave a 2 hour presentation about different HANA deployment options. Even though it was one of the last session of the day and ran from 5 – 7 PM, the room was packed with interested people.

Stefan explained which different options of deploying HANA exists today:

Multiple Components on one System (MCOS)

Customer are allowed to install several HANA Databases (SID’s) on one HANA with one OS. This is currently supported for all kinds of non-production system. Basically MCOS allows you to share one HANA box among several system without losing the capability of maintaining (e.g. starting/stopping, patching) the databases individually.

Multiple Components on one Database (MCOD)

You might remember MCOD for other databases from the older days. In fact, it has been around and released by SAP quite a while ago. Now MCOD is having its revival with HANA. MCOD allows to share the same HANA database with multiple applications – even in production. It is available for all applications that are on a certain “whitelist”. With MCOD only one database has to be maintained and you can even do reporting across the multiple schemas. On the other side an update of the HANA revision or backup/restore would always impact both instances.

Virtualization

With Virtualization, multiple virtual machines can be deployed on a single HANA system with a separate HANA Database SID in each vm. Virtualization still has some restrictions. For example you can only use it for non-production systems on single node HANA systems up to 1 TB.

Another – and I believe significant way – of reducing complexity and data center costs of HANA deployments is the usage of the Tailored Data Center Integration – tDCi. In TechEd Session TEC202 “SAP HANA Roadmap” as well as in ITM101 “Integrating SAP HANA into Your Landscape”, DCi was covered in detail. With tDCi you don’t have to purchase full HANA appliances from hardware vendors. Instead you can acquire certified servers and implement it in a much more flexible way with your own network and your own enterprise storage in your data center. You can find a lot of details about Tailored Data Center Integration in Adolf Brosig’s Blog.

SAP has piloted this program over the last couple of months and made it generally available during Teched Amsterdam.

I spoke with a global HANA customer during Teched who has started using MCOS and TDCI in their landscape. Both, MCOD and tDCi are leading to significant reduction of HANA costs as well as reduction of complexity on data center management.

As an outlook it seems SAP is working on offering additional deployment options. But these were discussions off the records so we’ll have to wait for official announcements next year 🙂

The sessions and links above should provide you most of the information you will need to put together your own HANA deployment strategy. If you need help from SAP, there are also services like the “Strategy and Technical Design Service for SAP HANA”.