The Journey Continues - Episode 7 of 10
Is SAP HANA ready for your data center? How are you going to architect it so that it fits in? These are questions for Enterprise Architects that were answered in this installment of the webcast series SAP HANA for Enterprise Architects. The webcast speaker was Ralf Czekalla, Product Manager SAP, who delivered a very detailed presentation on just some of the data center readiness story.
WARNING: This is a deep dive presentation so you may need your acronym dictionary as we cover topics like HA and DR, RPO/RTO, VM, TDI etc.
In past webcasts we have had speakers talk about SAP HANA Cloud Platform and HANA Cloud integration. This presentation was mainly about running SAP HANA on premises. I know there are many customers out there with SAP HANA appliances that are three years old or older. What new options are there out there for backup and recovery? There are many more options for you to consider when it comes time to renew the hardware that powers your SAP HANA implementation. SAP has come a long way!
** As a side note, this webinar comes with one of the most extensive slide decks I have every seen. You will definitely want to download the presentation materials, as we did not have near enough time to cover the depth of material.
In approaching the topic of Data Center Readiness, Ralf, divided it up into the following areas:
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I will attempt to highlight some of the things that I found interesting in the presentation.
Through out the webcast, Ralf spoke to some of the historical points in the development of SAP HANA as well as the roadmap and options going forward. You will see copious references to SAP Technical Notes throughout the presentation to give you links to the source documents for reference. This is a point in time presentation and many of the slides focus on the SPS 10 release of SAP HANA.
As groundwork for the presentation, Ralf covered some of the existing deployment methods of SAP HANA. This set the stage for talking about many of the aspects of design and setup like multi-tenancy, performance criteria and single instance vs. scale out architectures.
From the webcast, I think one of the under utilized solutions for SAP HANA is the Tailored Data Center Integration (TDI). Many organizations have bought into high-end converged infrastructure and now find that it is underutilized. Running SAP HANA on your existing data center hardware is a way of cutting costs and using what you have. Your hardware still needs to meet the specifications that SAP sets, but in these challenging economic times, it is another option.
An early-perceived weakness of SAP HANA was the backup and recovery options that were available at launch. It was great to see that the internal capabilities have been updated as well as support for many vendor tools to handle this task. There are many options that Enterprise Architects can include that take into account their existing backup tools or environment.
One of the many gems in the presentation was the discussion around virtualization using VMware. Ralf had a great slide that spoke to the pros and cons of using VMware vs. bare metal.
From the slide we see that there are performance impacts across different SAP HANA tasks. You really need to know what your application is doing in SAP HANA to determine if VMware is the right fit.
Further into the presentation it was obvious that there was not enough time to cover all of the agenda and so details on topics like Monitoring & Administration and Security & Auditing were left for a future webcast.
Ralf included lots of links to external content that you should check out in the slide deck. Here is one on backups and recovery:
I think some of the highlights that I took away from the presentation were that SAP HANA has matured over the last few years. Initially it was very weak in deployment, disaster recovery and back options. Now there are many different solution possibilities based on you performance, availability and management needs.
This webcast was a whirlwind tour of SAP HANA in the data center. The speaker discussed many different aspects that you need to consider as you build out solutions. Review the slide deck for more information; the content is all there.
To view the webcast:
http://event.on24.com/wcc/r/1019533/CC631232C76CC955D8A2F540AF299AF5
The PDF file of the presentation with over 190 slides is found here: https://www.asug.com/discussions/docs/DOC-42296
A few of the webcast attendee key takeaway comments:
- zero-downtime maintenance - very impressive!
- DR, Backup and Recovery, High availability
- TDI enabling External/Corp Storage.
- Key considerations or HA, DR and backups.
- SAP is continuously updating their strategy and product capability
In the next webcast scheduled for September 29th, the speaker will be covering “Why SAP HANA, Why Now and How?”
Complete Webcast Series Details https://www.asug.com/hana-for-ea
All webcasts occur at 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. ET on the days below. Click on the links to see the abstracts and register for each individual webcast.
September 29, 2015: Why SAP HANA, Why Now and How?
October 6, 2015: Implications of Introducing SAP HANA Into Your Environment
October 13, 2015: Internet of Things and SAP HANA for Business
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