SAP presented the new version of Hana

For many Hana enthusiasts in the SAP community, the Hana Enterprise Cloud (HEC) seems to be the only way to use the functions and applications of SAP's in-memory computing database.

Hana on premise is now a Herculean task if you want to use Hana as more than a simple foundation for BW (Business Warehouse). Even the latest service pack will not provide much help here.

Once again, the range of functions has been greatly expanded. As announced at Sapphire in Orlando, Hadoop has now taken over the role of Sybase ASE/IQ in SPS 9.

As a result, the terms Hana In-memory and Hana On-disk (Sybase/Hadoop) are increasingly being used in the community. It remains to be seen whether SAP will be successful in the scene with this lack of transparency.

"With Hana, our customers have an integrated platform for processing transaction and analysis data"

explains Quentin Clark, Chief Technology Officer at SAP.

"With the new functions of SAP Hana, data centers can be integrated, data can be synchronized with remote systems, high availability and disaster recovery of business data can be supported and complex analyses can be carried out. This means our customers are ideally equipped for the digitalization of the entire economy."

SAP is thus finally positioning the in-memory computing database as a platform that, according to the SAP CTO, can even integrate data centers - whatever that means - and now finally has synchronization options to external data sources (Extract, Transform, Load, ETL).

In previous announcements, however, SAP has often claimed the ETL function of Hana. The extent to which disaster recovery now relates to business data and not just the database also remains uncommented due to the SPS 10 announcement.

Company-wide connection to the Internet of Things: Based on Hana, new apps will support data synchronization between central company systems and remote locations.

The SAP SQL Anywhere database from Sybase can be used for this purpose. A 60-day trial version can be downloaded from the SAP Community Network (SCN). SQL Anywhere clients are available for Windows (x86 and x64), Linux, OS x, Solaris, HP-UX and IBM AIX.

Anywhere is an embeddable database (embedded system) that is already used by over 12 million users. This allows companies to securely capture and retrieve business data remotely, for example in stores or restaurants, and send it back to the central Hana system.

IoT data can also be collected and analyzed to perform important tasks in locations where broadband connections are not available or Internet access is only intermittent.

This applies, for example, to preventive maintenance work on ships and in pumping stations or mines. Offline use of this data is also possible. Extended data integration functions, with which Hana can be connected to the Hadoop distributions from Cloudera and Hortonworks, enable the use of big data.

The new service pack also offers additional enhancements such as faster data transfer with Spark SQL and a central user interface for managing Hana and Hadoop clusters using Apache Ambari.

When moving data between different storage levels, IT organizations can now define rules that are aligned with business requirements.

Such rules can be used, for example, to specify that an entire year's data is kept in the working memory (hot), while older data is moved to hard disks or Hadoop clusters Functions such as asynchronous 1:n replication, automatic host failover for dynamic tiering and incremental backups are intended to ensure even less system downtime and more stable business operations - a long-standing requirement of existing customers.

As Hana also supports the NUMA architecture (Non-Uniform Memory Access), users can also process large volumes of data faster by using large systems with more than 12 TB of RAM.

"High availability and disaster recovery are among the key requirements of companies that also operate data centers in their IT landscapes"

says Carl Olofson, Research Vice President for Application Development and Deployment at IDC.

"High reliability and the certainty that IT operations will continue even in the event of a serious error are particularly important. Hana provides the basis for business continuity throughout the company while minimizing the risk of security breaches."

Hana's text mining functions now also support SQL syntax. This makes it easier to develop applications. The new geodata processing helps with the processing of multidimensional objects and spatial representations in SAP Hana models or SQL Script.