HoP: Historical review and a success story
The idea of an in-memory database to serve as a single source of truth is more than ten years old and was and is the core project of SAP Supervisory Board Chairman Professor Hasso Plattner.
The entire SAP Group strategy is now geared towards this concept. With the commitment and the target of using Hana as a platform across the board by 2025, the company has de facto condemned itself to success and is putting everything on a single sheet of paper, i.e. the in-memory concept.
Appliance only
When Hana was first offered by SAP as a new technology in 2010, this database and development platform could only be operated on specific and permanently configured Intel computers.
SAP called this combination an "appliance", even though the infrastructure components and Hana came from different companies. This closed concept was intended to reduce complexity and facilitate implementation.
But soon after, some of the first existing SAP customers vehemently demanded another infrastructure platform as an additional hardware option and wanted greater flexibility and robustness of the entire system - and that's where IBM Power came in.
With the first Hana on Power version 1.0 SPS 08 in 2015, IBM and SAP placed particular emphasis on flexibility and simple integration. This was the first time that the strengths of the Power architecture were also used for SAP Hana.
In addition, this so-called TDI architecture (Tailored Data Center Integration) takes account of customer investment for the first time, as it allows individual components of the stack to be exchanged or retained at will.
Children's diseases
The very first customers of Hana on Power (HoP) already had several years of experience on the x86 Hana appliances. This knowledge of Hana's teething troubles initially made it much easier to compare the two implementations.
Not only the performance, but especially the robustness of the solution
on Power was immediately convincing. Some SAP Power customers even waited until
Hana was available on Power, only then to start the journey with Hana.
These two customer groups - former Hana on x86 and new Hana on Power existing customers - then led to one of the fastest roll-outs of a product combination. Even SAP was surprised by the high level of market acceptance.
Power and Linux
Today, this market success is leading to a third category of "new customers". Companies that were previously unfamiliar with IBM Power systems are opting for this IBM product family for the first time.
As the Hana platform is operated exclusively on both hardware architectures (IBM Power or Intel x86) with the Linux operating system, this makes it particularly easy for new Power customers to get started.
Then there is the latest trend: winback and competitive displacement. More and more customers who started with a Hana implementation on x86 due to supposed cost advantages or for strategic reasons are experiencing unstable and unprofitable systems that put their business at risk and are turning (back) to the Power platform.
This trend is particularly evident in the enterprise sector with its high availability and performance requirements. This has led to over 2000 Hana-on-Power customers worldwide within a very short space of time, after around three years. Of course, this includes installations operated by service providers.
This corresponds to a market share of around 18%, based on IDC and our own estimates. However, there is actually a lack of adequate benchmarking, e.g. Gartner still calculates in servers sold, which is completely appliance-heavy.
In extreme cases, there are up to 100 Intel servers per power server; an SAPS-based estimate would be more appropriate. HoP is therefore another success story in the SAP community.
