Since its inception, SAP HANA has provided real-time performance & agility, which has alleviated the need for SAP customers to separate transactional and analytical workloads, ultimately simplifying IT landscapes. Today, however, we live in a world of data sprawl. Data is increasingly created and stored in various systems and sources. According to a recent
study, the average enterprise uses 4 to 5 cloud platforms and services. There are multiple application silos, data lakes, data warehouses, live data streams from Internet of Things and machine learning applications relying on special-purpose data sets, and IT departments have to balance the management of all this information with their user’s wish lists and new initiatives.
Data is a key driver behind all decisions. It allows organizations to understand the impact of every action and engage customers, employees, and business ecosystems for higher productivity and efficiency. Being able to act on datasets in real-time creates valuable new inputs for decision making. Organizations cannot make decisions on yesterday’s data and need to analyze all their data assets — operational data, customer experience data, data from IoT sensors, etc. — in context to make the right decisions. Business leaders require real-time, situational awareness from all data to be confident that this data will steer their businesses to success.
But how do you cost effectively access and connect all of these different data sources, while providing trusted governance and security, scale up or down as needed, and sleep well at night?
The recent SAP HANA release builds on the strengths of SAP HANA’s agile, flexible data management platform with additional features that help ensure your data is relevant, timely, trusted, and secure, wherever it resides.
Universal data reach – Connect, don’t collect data
Real-time availability of data at large volumes is stressing older data management environments—all while new use cases, and data-driven analytics require new approaches to meet their needs. The foundation of today’s
intelligent enterprise is an expansive data management platform that can federate data from any source on premise or in the cloud into a harmonized view in real-time.
Instead of the hassle and expense of collecting, modeling, transforming, and harmonizing data within one data warehouse, SAP HANA allows your business to harness the power of data wherever it resides. It includes flexible and powerful integration capabilities that allow you to query data in remote data sources without moving it. It also lets you aggregate and process data in real-time when it makes sense. New enhancements in SAP HANA
smart data access (SDA) expand state-of-the-art data virtualization capabilities with support for federated access to high-availability Hadoop clusters and offers a next generic adapter framework to connect easily to more remote data sources.
Cost-effective Scale
The volumes of data that many enterprises must store and process are
non-trivial. SAP HANA allows you to use your resources cost-effectively. You have a variety of deployment options that enable you to strike the right balance between cost and performance to meet your business priorities.
As opposed to traditional database systems, SAP HANA implements an in-memory first architecture. It stores data in memory by default, and for large data sets, it intelligently determines which data elements are not commonly used and can be persisted out to lower cost storage by leveraging data tiering technology.
To improve scale and lower data storage costs, SAP HANA has added a new data tiering solution called
Native Storage Extensions for all data types and workloads. It lets you maintain the most commonly used data in-memory while less commonly accessed data elements are kept in warm storage and are automatically loaded in memory only when a query need to access them. An intelligent advisor guides administrators toward which data elements to place on disk or keep in memory.
SAP HANA’s architecture and data tiering capabilities allow customers that deal with large volumes of diverse data, to balance between cost and performance across storage tiers to effectively serve their business needs.
Furthermore, SAP partners have now brought to market certified hyper-converged infrastructure solutions that allow SAP HANA user to bring a cloud-like experience to their data centers. You can use software-controlled compute, storage and network resources to dynamically provision the hardware resources required to support your current applications and accelerate the development and deployment of new innovations.
Trusted and Secure Compliance
SAP HANA allows you to share and monetize your data assets without sacrificing privacy and in support of industry and global regulations. With SAP HANA, sensitive data can be anonymized so that it can’t be traced back to a specific individual or entity. Data can then be analyzed or shared without compromising privacy. SAP HANA is the first database to enable on-the-fly data anonymization with no need to duplicate data.
The newest SAP HANA release includes
data anonymization extensions and real-time algorithms. Key performance indicators can be assigned to help measure critical variables for risk that help balance protecting data privacy with ensuring that data remains useful to decision makers. New audit retention policies let you specify what recorded data is kept and for how long, with all changes tracked in the database. At the end of a specified period, audit log entries are automatically deleted, to both maintain compliance and free up database space.
Continuous & Highly Available Data Access
SAP HANA has enhanced its high availability and disaster recovery capabilities to further increase system availability, helping to protect enterprise-critical applications. SAP HANA system replication is traditionally deployed to support high availability and disaster recovery plans and supports a fast take-over to a secondary SAP HANA instance in the event the primary in unavailable due to a planned or unplanned event.
SAP HANA’s multi-target replication ability now supports read access on the secondary instances with the SAP HANA, active/active read-enabled option. Idle resources at the secondary tier put in place to support business continuity can be made productive for pure read operations, reporting, new dashboards etc., without impacting SLAs on the primary system. New topologies that support high availability and disaster recovery as well as regional data distribution for reporting can be created.
SAP HANA now enables a “follow the sun” model for operational matters, meaning the role of the primary SAP HANA instances can be reassigned to another for multi-target locations. This can bring additional agility and efficiency to the landscape and to support business requirements that span global business hours.
Learn More About New SAP HANA innovations
Efficient, agile, highly available, trustworthy, and secure. These are but a tiny sampling of how SAP HANA guides our customers to unlock the value of their data, let them act on the intelligence they gather, provide efficient and agile connections to all relevant datasets wherever they reside, and scale cost efficiently.
Learn more about
SAP HANA’s new release
