ERP architecture

Professor Hasso Plattner has chosen the wrong friends when it comes to the Hana in-memory computing database: Together with Intel, a concept for in-memory-based databases was developed at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam. Eight years later, it turns out that almost all the concepts were right - just not the hardware basis and the concept of the appliances.

The mistake is obvious today: SAP and the researchers at HPI had a CPU-centric view. Based on the outstanding performance features of an Intel Xeon processor, the database designers focused on the data sheet of this CPU.

What they overlooked was the fact that a database needs a perfect platform consisting of CPU, cache, memory, I/O, disk etc.. A more powerful processor is important and the friendship between SAP and Intel weighs heavily, but a database like Hana needs more, namely a perfect operating system and hardware architecture.

With Linux the decision was perfect, with Intel there was "only" one processor - with IBM there is an architecture model and an entire server with Power.

For experts, it was already clear shortly after the first installations of Hana on the Intel architecture that performance, scaling and virtualization could only be implemented inadequately here.

But Intel was unwilling or unable to make improvements. Perhaps Intel also succumbed to the fallacy that the connection with SAP was beyond any doubt. And indeed: Professor Hasso Plattner and the then SAP Chief Technology Officer Vishal Sikka resisted porting the Hana database to the IBM Power architecture for a long time.

Although everyone in the industry already knew that HoP, Hana on Power, was the much better answer, SAP refused to grant Hana certification to its partner IBM for a long time.

On the Intel platform, on the other hand, the Hana problems were getting bigger by the day. The appliance sizes did not meet the expectations of existing SAP customers.

On the other hand, the entire SAP community knew that the Hana operating system Suse Linux was also available for the IBM Power architecture and that a change would therefore be possible without any problems.

SAP finally gave in and IBM was able to officially prove that Power's computer architecture is far superior to an Intel processor when it comes to Hana.

Of course, IBM has also stopped going for the appliance model with T-shirt sizes and has started providing Hana servers right away according to the ideas of SAP's existing customers.

Power acceptance at HPI

The attitude of SAP and HPI towards IBM Power has finally changed: The Hasso Plattner Institute launched an online course on the future of computing on May 1 of last year. It lasted four weeks and is offered free of charge on the IT learning platform openHPI: "Future of Computing - IBM Power 9 and beyond".

HPI Professor Andreas Polze, Head of the Department of Operating Systems and Middleware, organized the course together with Hildegard Gerhardy from the IBM Academic Initiative Europe and Wolfgang Maier, Director of IBM Hardware Development in Böblingen.

"We will present participants with different approaches to meet the challenges of digitization, especially the exponential growth of data"

explained Polze, professor of computer science.

Reliability, high availability and serviceability of systems require sophisticated, sophisticated hardware, operating systems and application-neutral programs to be able to process transactions on a large scale. A focus of the course on the future of computing was shown on technologies around IBM Power Systems.

In its Open Power initiative, IBM cooperates with more than 300 member companies, including Google, Samsung and Nvidia, to create a wide range of innovations from software to hardware.

At his 2019 Sapphire keynote in Orlando, Professor Plattner also emphasized the enormous growth in data and the need to find answers quickly with suitable computer architectures and databases.

According to his presentation, the switch to Hana within the SAP community should have taken place in about three years. Now the "database version change" is already taking a bit longer, which is probably also due to the inadequate Intel platform in the first years of Hana.

The Hana development at the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam was coordinated with Intel and focused on the x86 architecture of the Xeon processors. But IBM's Power architecture proved to be the better foundation.

All SQL, right?

The in-memory computing database Hana has many great advantages over classic SQL databases - not because SAP is better, but because Professor Hasso Plattner had the courage to make a new start:

Hana was created on the drawing boards in Potsdam at the Hasso Plattner Institute and in Walldorf at SAP headquarters without any legacy issues or compatibility requirements. In Potsdam, Professor Plattner's students researched and programmed together with Alexander Zeier.

Hana was brought to operational maturity by mathematician and ex-SAP Chief Technology Officer Vishal Sikka in Palo Alto, California. It can be assumed that all three - Plattner, Zeier and Sikka - were not only first-class experts in Intel processor architecture, but also firmly believed that this general-purpose processor was best suited for their Hana database - a mistake, as it officially turned out in 2014.

"Power 8 and Power 9 have each been newly and specifically developed for processing large amounts of data, with large memory bandwidth - four times greater than Intel x86, more cache, five times more cache than x86 and high performance, a factor of two per core in the benchmark, up to a factor of four in real customer workloads, as well as greater flexibility with PowerVM, high reliability through redundancy, especially with the Power Enterprise Servers."

confirms Andreas Klaus Span, Director and Business Unit Executive for SAP Hana on Power, in an interview with E-3.

However, in Andreas Span's opinion, the argument that Intel x86 comes from the commercial sector with the "good enough" approach and that Power has always had to meet the requirements of the enterprise world and has therefore developed a completely different architecture model is generally convincing.

Differentiation factor: Power

IDC market researchers believe that Power systems are a compelling differentiator for Hana and S/4. Power is designed for highly data-intensive workloads like Hana and includes powerful integrated virtualization that is SAP-certified, as well as numerous features to improve reliability. Andreas Span:

"Added to this is the exponential growth of Hana databases and data in general, which is crying out for a flexibly adaptable TCO approach. Measured against this, Power is not only the higher quality, more stable platform, but also the cheaper one."

The flexibility of IBM Power systems allows multiple environments to run simultaneously. For example, you can use unused capacity from the production environment for development or user acceptance testing.

Compared to most other architectures, IBM Power therefore achieves greater efficiency from shared resources. As always, it depends on the size:

"However, there may well be areas characterized by small databases and a manageable number of applications where Intel pays off. But mostly only in the TDI approach (Tailored Datacenter Integration) recently also recommended by SAP - not as an appliance!"

The entire power platform is certified for Hana.

"Once and for all"

explains Andreas Span.

"This means that we don't have to approve each server individually and have them re-approved for the slightest change, as is the case with appliances. When new releases come onto the market, they are tested together during the development phase, and if everything goes well, the SAP documentation status is uploaded promptly - the famous SAP Notes."