What Is SAP HANA and How Does It Work?
Infrastructure managers are struggling to meet the demands of big data while staying within budget. The rise of the internet of things (IoT) alone has burdened companies with continual streams of information from beacons and sensors. The report, The Internet of Things: Today and Tomorrow, predicts that 85% of companies will adopt IoT by 2019.
Not only are data volumes growing, but data analytics are becoming more sophisticated, requiring more advanced applications to gain profitable insights. According to Dan Vesset, an analyst at Framingham, Massachusetts-based IDC, “The more analytically oriented a company was, the more competitive they were in their industry.”
To meet these demands, IT leaders need to rethink their approach to data center architecture. Provisioning more storage only solves a small part of the complex problem. Better tools are needed for organizing, processing, and securing data. All of this must be done quickly so your business can gain actionable insights.
Simply adding storage capacity will not secure the full digital transformation needed for absolute efficiency. SAP HANA’s data processing environment provides a comprehensive solution that combines storage, data processing, advanced analytics, and application development capabilities.
Building a Better Data Center
SAP HANA is designed for big data. The environment combines transactional and analytic data processing. In-memory computing allows fast access to data without having to go to disk. Information can be drawn from internal databases in CRM and ERP systems or from external sources. Even streaming information from IoT sensors is a piece of cake for SAP HANA. Large volumes of data can be transferred through multi-core processing without latency or bottlenecks.
Built-in tools for data management ensure that your data will be stored efficiently. Tiered storage moves mission-critical data to higher performing, more costly storage, while archived data moves to slower, inexpensive storage. Take the middle road with SAP HANA. Multiple workloads can be consolidated on a single system to streamline workflows. The system also automatically reduces redundancy so data takes up less space.
Gaining Deeper Insights From Data
SAP HANA does more than store and manage data. The system equips your company with the right tools to gain crucial business intelligence. Built-in analytics algorithms enable both predictive analytics and machine learning.
Predictive analytics empowers your company to forecast trends so you can adapt to better serve customers and clients. By anticipating problems and examining what works well, your business will be able to develop new and better business processes.
With the machine learning capabilities of SAP HANA, both structured and unstructured data can be processed through a combination of textual and spatial analysis. Machine learning allows your company to absorb encyclopedic amounts of information that can then be used to draw logical conclusions.
Paving the Road to Innovation
With SAP HANA, your company isn’t limited to using outside analytics applications. The platform allows your developers to build real-time applications tailored to your company’s unique needs. For example, an insurance brokerage firm used SAP HANA to develop Vivaldi, an application that conducts weather risk assessments so farmers can choose the right policy.
SAP HANA supports a variety of programming languages so your developers can work to their strengths.
Exploring SAP HANA Deployment Options
Does SAP HANA sound like the perfect solution to your infrastructure woes? It gets better. SAP HANA presents a variety of options that help create a smaller footprint, including on-premises, public cloud, or hybrid cloud implementations.
For on-premises deployments, SAP HANA offers preconfigured hardware and preinstalled software. A preconfigured appliance means your company will enjoy the added value of the platform in no time. A Tailored Data Center Integration (TDI) gives you more flexibility to choose your hardware. You have the option of running SAP HANA on x86, but POWER8 gives you even higher performance and efficiency. Running SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems gives you 4X the performance of x86 servers. SAP HANA will take you through the sizing process to ensure that you provision the hardware necessary to meet your workload requirements.
If you decide to run SAP HANA in the cloud, you can choose between private cloud with managed services or infrastructure as a service (IaaS) with subscription options for public cloud.
Getting on Board With SAP HANA
Big data asks that infrastructure managers go beyond merely expanding storage capacity. IT environments need to enable your team to work smarter with data by managing information more efficiently and creating more opportunities for gaining real-time insights through advanced analytics.
Rethinking your infrastructure can be daunting, but SAP HANA experts have worked to make the implementation process less stressful for your company.
Originally published at convergeone.com on May 29, 2017.
