Marketplace Update by Pund-IT, Inc.

1. Contact:
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Pund-IT, Inc.
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Marketplace Update
January 2015
 IBM: Empowering SAP HANA
Customers and Use Cases
By Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc.

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IBM: Empowering SAP HANA Customers and Use Cases
By Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc.
The growing interest in and market acceleration around big data and analytics is being
driven by numerous, often associated forces. First and foremost, the massive growth in
digital information that businesses create and capture continues unabated. It’s as if com-
panies already drowning in data are willingly choking down additional proverbial glasses of
water, with no life vest in sight.
But just as important, unleashing the power of that information by transforming it into ac-
tionable insights and business results is critical to organizations of every kind. Finally, IT
managers and staff are being required to deliver increasingly sumptuous results with little
or no increase in their emaciated budgets.
In essence, the focus on big data is resulting in both big opportunities and big challenges.
It’s hardly a surprise that SAP’s HANA in-memory database solution is eliciting enormous
interest among public and private sector organizations. But while the technical qualities
driving SAP HANA’s success are impressive, the remarkable flexibility of SAP’s strategy is
every bit as important.
In stark contrast to proprietary analytics platforms like Oracle’s Exadata and Exalytics ap-
pliances, SAP HANA is providing choice in the platforms and vendors that customers can
work with. That approach gained a notable new dimension in June 2014 when SAP an-
nounced a new Test and Evaluation Agreement (TEA) program for running SAP HANA on
IBM’s Power Systems, the first non-Intel platform to support SAP’s in-memory database
technologies.
As a result, organizations will have an innovative hardware platform to consider and com-
pare for their SAP HANA implementations. Plus, IBM customers will be able to use existing
POWER7+ and new POWER8 processor-based systems to support both existing SAP applica-
tions and new big data workloads. That should result in big benefits being available to and
captured by a growing number of organizations.
IBM Power Systems are optimized for big data workloads utilizing a higher number of
threads per core, more memory and more memory bandwidth to run more concurrent que-
ries in parallel with faster response. These systems are specifically optimized to deliver
scale-out or scale-up cloud economics and security.
SAP HANA will be able to take advantage of many of these capabilities. So SAP HANA on
IBM Power Systems is ideal for SAP Business Warehouse customers seeking to improve the
scalability and resiliency of their current HANA deployments or interested in adding SAP
HANA capabilities to their existing Power environments
Why SAP HANA?
What exactly is SAP HANA and how does it work? In essence, SAP HANA leverages an in-
memory database architecture and technologies to supercharge query performance. From a
hardware perspective, in-memory systems differ significantly from dedicated data ware-
houses where information can be accessed by various business applications and analytics

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tools. Instead, SAP HANA compresses data assets and stores them within the memory of a
system or cluster. Why? Because doing so eliminates physical bottlenecks, like network la-
tency and storage read/write limitations from the equation and speeds analytics perfor-
mance by an order of magnitude or more.
Other system components and design points also affect performance. For example, though
SAP HANA scales well in multi-processor/node environments, optimal results require sys-
tems with higher core counts, greater numbers of threads or hyper-threads and faster I/O
performance. In addition, enhanced memory bandwidth and capacity (in combination with
SAP’s data compression technologies) enables some systems to support far larger data
stores than others.
In most cases, SAP HANA delivers blisteringly fast query results and supports scenarios, in-
cluding real time analytics. That said, in-memory concepts aren’t unique, and virtually all of
SAPs direct competitors (along with many that aren’t so direct) are developing and deliver-
ing similar kinds of solutions. But from the beginning, SAP has pursued interesting, some-
times unusual efforts and strategies to help HANA capture market- and mind-share, includ-
ing:
 Though there are many specialized in-memory and analytics products available today,
SAP HANA can be used to support a wide variety of data resources and processes, in-
cluding row/column-based data, transactions, analytics, text analysis, predictive and
spatial processing, and real time analytics
 In addition, SAP is migrating its entire product portfolio to SAP HANA, allowing custom-
ers to capture massive improvements in business process performance and quality,
gaining greater value from their SAP applications and investments
 The company is also utilizing SAP HANA as the foundation for a variety of platform-as-a-
service (PaaS) offerings delivered via its own and other cloud infrastructures, including
HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC)
 SAP continues to evolve and improve HANA. At its recent SAP TechEd && d-code 2014
conference, SAP announced new features, including support for multi-tenancy, dynamic
tiering and support for streaming data for real-time analytics and integration of SAP
HANA with Hadoop data stores
 Finally, SAP makes its technologies available to virtually all hardware vendor partners so
long as HANA-based systems are built according to SAP guidelines designed to ensure
top level performance and reliability. In contrast, competing solutions like Oracle’s Exa-
lytics and Exadata appliances are based on the company’s own proprietary hardware
and software products, including Oracle Solaris
In our view, this last point is particularly important. Why so? Because SAP’s open, flexible
development strategy for HANA is both customer- and partner-friendly. The company’s ap-
proach allows businesses to gain the substantial benefits of in-memory analytics without
locking themselves into proprietary infrastructures. Additionally, customers can often lev-
erage their relationships with preferred vendors, and also utilize in-house IT skills. That al-
lows them to gain additional returns on IT investments and to continue working with the
vendors they trust.

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SAP’s HANA development model has also opened analytics and other markets that can
profit from in-memory technologies to numerous new vendors. That allows SAP’s system
partners to expand their solution portfolios, thus benefitting their existing customers and
allowing them to explore new big data opportunities. At the same time, SAP’s open devel-
opment strategy fosters healthy competition between vendors that ultimately benefits cus-
tomers by providing greater options and choices.
The Power Systems connection
The TEA program that aims to bring SAP HANA to IBM Power Systems solutions extends the
two companies’ decades of partnership. SAP’s Business Suite applications (ERP, CRM, SRM,
SCM and PLM) and other software solutions are critical to thousands of IBM customers. The
effort also leverages IBM’s deep experience with SAP HANA. The IBM System x platform
(recently acquired by Lenovo) has long been the reference platform for SAP HANA, resulting
in a level of understanding that few, if any, other vendors can meet.
While also migrating SAP’s innovations to an entirely new hardware architecture and sys-
tem offerings, the SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems effort is also in keeping with IBM’s
longstanding support of open source and open development models. That includes IBM’s
Linux on Power initiative and the OpenPOWER Foundation that have gained momentum
during the past year. Related to this is the fact that SAP HANA on Power Systems will run
on SUSE Linux SLES11 SP3. Plus, SAP is also evaluating support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
(RHEL).
The Power Systems difference
The two companies’ history makes the SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems program an entire-
ly natural development. But at the same time, IBM’s POWER architecture and other innova-
tions are technically well-suited to support SAP HANA implementations. How so? Consider
the following four points:
1. IBM has designed Power Systems solutions for big data and analytics workloads.
2. Power Systems solutions can typically provide more concurrent queries faster and in
parallel since POWER processors offer multiple cores with more threads per core than
comparable Intel-based solutions.
3. IBM Power Systems also offer increased memory bandwidth and faster I/O performance,
meaning that data can usually be ingested, moved and accessed faster than it can in
competing in-memory systems.
4. IBM’s new POWER8 processor-based solutions can support both common scale-out and
scale-up (enterprise) system models, which will further expand the options available to
SAP HANA customers.
How have these factors played out during the course of the SAP HANA on IBM Power TEA
program? Not surprisingly, early testing (on POWER7+ systems) suggests that SAP HANA
workloads should benefit significantly from IBM Power Systems’ features, including sup-
porting greater thread capacity, I/O bandwidth and higher memory capacity than x86-
based systems. Those benefits are expected to be even greater on POWER8-based solutions
which offer notable system enhancements and support higher performance than previous
generation offerings.

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That said, the benefits of running SAP HANA on Power Systems aren’t merely technical. IBM
has stated that it intends to be price competitive when the new solutions become available.
Plus, since SAP HANA licenses are priced according to memory size, customers will be free
to objectively choose the platform that makes the greatest sense for their needs, use cases
and organizations. Overall, IBM is confident that both existing Power Systems customers
and existing SAP HANA and SAP BI Accelerator clients will find that the new SAP HANA on
Power Systems solutions offer a compelling means to maximize performance and business
value.
Final analysis
Big data and analytics consumes the time and attention of every sort of business organiza-
tion. But as the IT industry and vendors progress further into the big data era, it is all too
easy for customers to be confused by the sheer number of available options. As a result,
we believe that it is critically important for organizations to recognize the difference be-
tween technologies that support and preserve customer choice and those designed to lock
businesses into proprietary platforms.
SAP’s HANA solution is a superb example of the former approach, offering big data- and
analytics-minded customers numerous options for the vendors and hardware platforms
they engage. IBM has been at the forefront of HANA development, both as a standout SAP
partner for many years, and through the intimate understanding of in-memory technolo-
gies the company has gained, in part, by providing the reference architecture for SAP HANA
development.
The companies’ Test and Evaluation Agreement to port SAP HANA to Power Systems offers
further evidence of their longstanding cooperation and collaborative innovation. Plus, it
highlights the importance of customer choice in SAP HANA’s continuing commercial suc-
cess.
Early results from the TEA program suggest that IBM POWER architecture and Power Sys-
tems features, including enhanced thread count, I/O throughput and memory capacity will
provide a fertile environment for SAP HANA workloads. As a result, companies seeking to
maximize analytics performance should capture notable price/performance benefits from
deploying SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems offerings.
Overall, we believe both existing IBM clients and prospective SAP HANA customers would
be wise to investigate and consider IBM’s new SAP HANA on Power Systems solutions.
© 2014 Pund-IT, Inc. All rights reserved.
About Pund-IT, Inc.
Pund-IT™ emphasizes understanding technology and product evolution and interpreting the effects
these changes will have on business customers and the greater IT marketplace. Though this report was
developed with the cooperation and support of IBM, the opinions expressed are those of the author and
do not necessarily represent the company’s position.