SAP TechEd 2015 Las Vegas – ITM228 – SAP HANA: Overview of On-Premise Deployment Options

Few months back I was offered opportunity to speak at SAP TechEd 2015 in Las Vegas. First thing that crossed my mind was the question on what is the right subject to cover. Since I did not want to present just for sake of presenting there I had to find some topic that will not be redundant to the presentations from SAP, that will address area that is not completely clear to everyone (where I can bring additional value), that will be within the scope of my expertise and that will be seen as attractive by SAP and AGUS sponsoring the event.

I was lucky to have opportunity to get my hands on SAP HANA technology no more than just few weeks after SAP HANA was released to the market in general availability. After initial period where I was experimenting with different job roles around SAP HANA (being responsible for installation and configuration, designing security concept, configuring data provisioning, doing modeling, etc.) I decided to settle down on subject that is probably closest to my heart – SAP HANA architecture, infrastructure and deployment options – and this is the topic that I selected for my presentation this year – to talk about on-premise deployment options for SAP HANA.

You might wonder if on-premise discussion is still relevant when we are able to host SAP HANA in cloud. Answer is yes. First reason is simple fact that there are still customers that are not yet fully embracing cloud and they are still looking at options how to deploy SAP HANA in their own data centers. Second reason is that cloud vendors need to follow same rules as everyone else to ensure that result will be SAP certified – this means that their cloud solutions are based on similar principles as on-premise deployment. Understanding advantages and disadvantages of individual on-premise deployment options can help you to understand the limitations of individual cloud offerings.

Topic of SAP HANA deployment options is already covered quite well by SAP – is there anything new to offer? I believe that yes. SAP is doing great job by opening SAP HANA options by introducing topics like TDI (Tailored Datacenter Integration) and virtualization – but since they do not wish to give up on their commitment to deliver only the best performance they always release new set of regulatory rules prescribing configuration details. Result is that today there are many different options how SAP HANA could be deployed – appliances, TDI, virtualization, application stacking (MCOD, MCOS, MDC) – but it is incredibly difficult to stay clear on what are the regulations (and limitations) and which options can be combined together.

And this is where I decided to approach the subject from different angle. SAP is typically focusing on individual options in detail usually covering one option at a time – looking at simplistic examples to illustrate the approach. Here I intend to do exactly the opposite – first to briefly look on individual options from extreme point of view (how far we could potentially go) and then to outline how all these options could be combined together.

As you can see the subject is quite huge – and since I was given only 1 hour (which is the standard time allocated for ASUG sessions) I had to make tough selection on what will be presented and what not. Therefore I decided to move SAP HANA Business Continuity to a separate session (EXP27127) and also to leave some topics like SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering for another time.

So what will be covered in the ITM228 session? We will start by looking at situation with appliances – providing basic overview on different models across all hardware vendors, then we will look at SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) with all phases and approved options, we will review SAP HANA virtualization options with focus on VMware, then we will mention ways how to stack data from multiple applications on single SAP HANA server or virtual machine (MCOD, MCOS, MDC) and at the end we will look on ways how to combine all these options together – what everything is supported versus what combinations should be avoided.

In SAP HANA Business Continuity session (EXP27127) we will take a closer look on two most typical options – SAP HANA Host Auto-Failover and SAP HANA System Replication. I prepared animation illustrating how the options are designed to work and how SAP HANA is behaving during take-over. At the end of the session we will outline most typical deployment scenarios for SAP HANA Business Continuity.

On the screenshots below you can find example of the content that will be presented during the sessions. By this I would like to invite you to my sessions (ITM228 and EXP27127) and I am looking forward to meet you in person at SAP TechEd 2015 Las Vegas. Have a safe travel.

     Example 1: [ITM228] Overview of available appliance models and their usage.

     Example 2: [ITM228] Visualization of SAP HANA stacking options and their approved usage for production.

     Example 3: [EXP27127] Overview of typical single-node SAP HANA Business Continuity deployment options.

I would like to express big thanks to Jan Teichmann (SAP), Ralf Czekalla (SAP), Erik Rieger (VMware), John Appleby (Bluefin) for reviewing the slide deck and providing suggestions for improvement.