Does Hana need Flash?

Low latencies and fast access times of flash technology generally have a positive impact on the entire application landscape, even if the transaction speed of databases is already accelerated with in-memory technology. What is often forgotten about flash, however, are economic arguments.

As part of Hana Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI), enterprise storage must be certified for TDI operation. If you compare the number of drives required to operate a Hana node according to the SAP TDI specifications, only about one-third of flash drives are needed compared to conventional SAS drives. This therefore saves investment costs and reduces the expenditure for energy and air conditioning.

Furthermore, the functions integrated in flash systems, such as deduplication and compression, can contribute quite significantly to optimizing the storage infrastructure. This is even more successful with flash than with hard disk-based systems.

The low latency as well as the high data throughput make it possible to apply much more aggressive data reduction methods, such as very granular deduplication with inline compression.

Measurements for Hana show a data reduction achieved by about 40 percent. Depending on the type of data, a data reduction of up to 10:1 can be achieved - and without burdening the server infrastructure.

A special feature of NetApp storage technology is the integration of storage snapshots for backing up Hana databases, which is available especially for Hana customers. Instead of copying large amounts of data to backup storage, which places a significant load on the server, network, and storage, the integrated "Snap Creator Hana Plugin" solution does this in just a few seconds.

Here, the complete data is not copied, but only the blocks used by Hana are "frozen" and only the changed blocks since the last backup are transferred. This is done entirely without putting a load on the Hana infrastructure. This solution is also available for NetApp's flash-based AFF storage systems.

So it's all in the big picture: Flash in the data center is about more than just improving access times and transfer speeds. It's about optimizing storage costs in the data center, and that also has a positive impact on the Hana infrastructure.