Business Trends
Persistent Memory: The Keystone to Fast Data Access at Scale with a Lower TCO
This week, Intel has announced the market availability of Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory, the first new memory category in 25 years. This breakthrough innovation opens the door to managing larger amounts of data at in-memory speed in a cost-efficient way.
SAP HANA is the first major database to be optimized for the full potential of this technology. We believe the combination of SAP HANA and Intel Optane DC persistent memory can be transformational for our customers who increasingly depend on real-time insights from growing data sets to steer their business to success.
I had the pleasure of being a guest of Navin Shenoy, EVP General Manager Data Center Group, in the keynote presentation at Intel’s Data-Centric Innovation Day to celebrate the launch.
Watch the replay and learn more
Innovation for Tangible Business Outcomes
At SAP, we have worked closely with Intel for many years to ensure our customers can leverage new innovations for positive business outcomes. Our co-innovation on persistent memory continues this tradition.
Let’s take the example of Geberit, a leading Swiss-German provider of sanitary technology. To plan for the future, Geberit needed the flexibility to use SAP HANA for integrating and analyzing larger data sets more efficiently.
“We evaluated the new persistent memory technology from Intel with two of our existing SAP HANA systems and experienced greater than 400% improvement in data load times at startup, which will really help maintain business continuity for planned maintenance, etc.” said Daniel Rothmund, IT Manager, SAP Development and Innovation, Geberit. “When we moved our data warehouse and SAP ERP system from Oracle to SAP HANA we experienced performance increases, greater cost savings, and a 72% reduction in database volume. SAP HANA’s continued innovation guarantees we have the most intelligent digital platform to make more timely, informed decisions for our customers.”
Persistent memory offers higher capacity at a lower cost than DRAM with comparable performance. While exact sizing depends on specific hardware configurations, we can expect memory capacity to increase from today’s 1.5TB to 4.6TB per socket – combining traditional DRAM and persistent memory.
With the ability to store more data in memory, companies such asGeberit will be able to derive real-time insights from larger data sets and plan with confidence for their future.
Furthermore, as the name implies, persistent memory is non-volatile, and data stored in it survives system restarts. When using Intel Optane DC persistent memory, SAP HANA customers can experience significantlyfaster data loading at startup since the data is already in memory.
In a recent PoC, Geberit has experienced a 4.2x improvement in data loads at database restart.
Once again, SAP and Intel have brought to market breakthrough innovations that deliver tangible business value. But there is more.
Cost-efficient Innovation Ready for Business
We are also committed to helping organizations achieve cost-efficient innovation. We have optimized SAP HANA to run on Intel Optane DC persistent memory to ensure our customers can take advantage of the increased memory capacity and enhanced business continuity at a lower TCO.
For example, businesses that rely on SAP HANA can take advantage of persistent memory without having to modify their existing applications. SAP HANA’s unique in-memory architecture made it easy to optimize for near-DRAM performance and persistency using Intel’s App Direct Mode. SAP HANA takes care of allocating memory and distributing workloads across DRAM and persistent memory to deliver more data in real-time at a lower TCO without compromising performance.
Learn more on how SAP HANA is optimized for persistent memory
Having access to larger memory capacity also clears the way for new efficiencies by lowering the reliance on data-tiering, simplifying IT landscapes and reducing latency. Moreover, with more data readily available in memory, it becomes easier to apply advanced data processing such as machine learning and advanced analytics to large data sets, enabling more confident decisions and unleashing innovation.
To learn more about SAP HANA and Intel Optane DC persistent memory:
Cool. I was wondering if we will be utilizing this tech.
Does GCP / AWS though? How will products that move to public cloud benefit from this tech and other similar hardware innovations?
Hi Adam,
This is available in Alpha on Google Cloud platform today. There are a number of customers already running PoCs on this technology today at sizes up to 7TB.
From a public cloud perspective we will continue to work to bring technology innovations such as Intel Optane DC persistent memory to market first, and ensure that customers are able to take advantage of this technology out the gate.
Hello,
It has been mentioned that with PMEM, 4.6 TB/Socket memory is supported for HANA. But in "SAP HANA 2.0- What’s New? Mission Critical Data Center Operations" webiner, it was shown as an example that in 2 Socket system, memory configuration with largest DRAM and largest PMEM can go up to 7.5 TB which seems valid as per my understanding.
I think new 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor which support Optane memory has 6 memory channel per processor and each memory channel has 2 memory slot.
So in 2 CPU server, we have 2 x 6 x 2 = 24 memory slot
12 x 512 GB PMEM = 6 TB
12 x 128 GB DRAM = 1.5 TB
So in total it support 7.5 TB for 2 sockets server. So I'm trying to understand how can it support 4.6 TB/socket?
Hello Dennis,
Yes, your analsys is correct as of today. But as you might know 256 GB DDR4 DIMM are at the horizont and that will finally bring the option of 4.5 TB per socket.