Author: Jens Gleichmann, Q-Partners

Some existing SAP customers have already been able to switch to Hana and are in the middle of the changeover or conversion to S/4. Now that the project phases have been completed and the systems have been put into operation, it is up to the SAP Basis team to operate them.

The trend in the use of SAP infrastructures is clearly moving towards hybrid operating models with on-premise and private cloud environments paired with public cloud services. SAP customers benefit from numerous profitable application scenarios, executed on the Google Cloud Platform.

SAP has finally seen sense and is changing the maintenance period for Hana 1.0 and 2.0. The software manufacturer is thus meeting the demands of customers and adapting somewhat to its market competitors in the database environment.

In March, user companies, SAP and partners met for the DSAG theme day "Hana in operation". During the presentation on release strategy, the short release cycles between maintenance and revision were the topic. For the old releases SPS10 and SPS11, it was a very short 37 and 32 days respectively.

From networks and storage to operating systems and databases, virtualization is not only on the rise, it is already a fundamental part of every IT infrastructure. But which platform is the right one for my company?

Since SAP generally released Hana to customers in 2011, there has been much speculation about the technology, architecture and usability. Since the development is progressing rapidly, the statements, documentation and information are constantly overtaking each other. The author would like to confront E-3 readers with some myths in this article and then ask: Would you have known?

SAP users don't have it easy. For years, they could choose between different databases and did so. Now, with the S/4 software generation, all roads lead to a single database, namely Hana - at least if the Walldorf-based company has its way.

Every SAP customer new to the Hana platform asks questions about the architecture concept, high availability, backup, maintenance & life cycles and know-how development.