Friday, May 10, 2013

HANA Enterprise Cloud

Did you know that SAP has another database product, besides SQL Anywhere?

Yeah, you're right,

but they don't count because they don't have much of a future.

There's also Sybase IQ and that does have a future, but it's not the one I'm thinking of either.

No, the other SAP database with a future is . . .


... called HANA, brand new, just out.

And it's available for free, for testing, in the cloud.

HANA in the Cloud


Back on May 7 SAP held a "press event" in Palo Alto to introduce something called the "SAP HANA® Enterprise Cloud"; you can watch the whole thing here, all 82 minutes of it:



Caution: This video works in IE 10 but apparently not in Chrome 26. There's another browser I used to use, Fire-something-or-other, I forget, dunno if that works.

But if you'd rather READ than WATCH . . .


... here are my rough notes, with a few comments added:
=====
Jonathan Becher
Chief Marketing Officer

10,000 viewers for the initial presentation

HANA is not limited to SAP applications

pronounced "haw-na"
...not "hanna". HANA is a name, but not a girl's name; HANA doesn't stand for anything. In particular, it does not stand for High Performance ANalytic Appliance, and it most definitely does not stand for HAsso's New Architecture. While we're at it, SAP is pronounced ess-a-pee, not sap, and junior SAP employees are not called saplings.
=====
Hasso Plattner
SAP Founder and Chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board

old-school paper notes

HANA is the redefinition of enterprise software

will lower TCO dramatically

advantages of cloud

1. elasticity

2. innovation - SAP has renovated, recreated

HANA system has a much smaller data footprint - needs on one fifth of the storage capacity 
through compression

response time goals: 8 seconds, 3 seconds, 1 second

3. people - much less DBA work - no indexes, no materialized aggregates - dynamic aggregation

4. harmonization of hardware and system software - 100% standard hardware

should keep 100% of hot data in memory so performance can be calculated

cold data can certainly be kept on disk

faster releases - utilities run 20 times faster

what can we do with a "HANA-based system in the cloud"

1. regain innovation

better performance leads to innovation

120 msec for worldwide data round-trip - communication

no more "programmer test data" - can use copy of production

standard application interfaces are available for HANA

can make SMP use of a 200 core computer

after 41 years of SAP software, this is the way it should have been

=====
Vishal Sikka 
Member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, Technology & Innovation

we call it the "HANA Enterprise Cloud"

using current generation Intel processors 

300 billion scans per second

without virtualization

=====
Wesley Mukai
Vice President of HANA Cloud Computing

data centers are complicated

SAP Cloud Frame Technology

SAP Cloud Frame Monitor - Management Home - Create New HANA Instance

100s of terabytes on in-memory computing

each frame contains physical servers - no virtualization

servers from multiple vendors

=====
Vishal Sikka 

create a 5 terabyte system in minutes

we have been working on this for quite some time

60 customers, some already live

=====
Don Whittington
Florida Crystals Vice President and CIO

What if SAP ran as fast as Excel?

=====
Vishal Sikka 

multiple hardware platforms

Hasso has always been a champion of speed and performance

=====
Andy Bechtolsheim
Founder and Chairman, Arista Networks

The future of networking...

Accepted wisdom was that enterprise systems will be the last thing that moves to the cloud

low latency and high bandwidth is key for the communication network within a cluster

system management has been integrated into the switch

the cloud needs near-zero-time network configuration, not weeks like in the old days

100 Gbit networking will eventually be available.

=====
Vishal Sikka 

The HANA Enterprise Cloud is here.

There are 50,000 enterprise networks out there.

=====
Jonathan Becher 

Peaked at #3 on twitter.

Questions for Hasso and Vishal...

=====
Hasso Plattner

We must educate people in what parallelism means.

HANA can use massive parallelism for a single query.

The more complex the query the more parallelism can be used.

The larger the data volume the more we can split it up and run it in parallel.

We get the parallelism effect automatically through HANA.

Myth: "If everything runs so fast we don't have to write good SQL any more."

It is just the opposite - we have to think more about good algorithms.

There can be a factor of 10,000 between the performance of good and lousy algorithms.

HANA automatically gives a factor of 2 to three improvement over current databases - to get 
real improvements you have to exploit parallelism.

We have to teach people how to write good SQL and not just simple SQL that works.

While people are doing this, they learn more and more about how things can be done differently.

After 40 years of fighting batch, there is no batch any more.

We wanted to kill batch 40 years ago, and it came back and came back.

Now everything will be transactional.

Everything will be on a human time frame even if it involves billions of records.

What is our biggest innovation in SAP?

We now have the capacity to redo the user interface.

We used to build UIs to cover the functionality and to perform well enough - we were always 
watching performance, most of the programming we did was to achieve performance.'

Now we get great performance, the programs are much smaller - we have more time to concentrate 
on the UI.

=====
Vishal Sikka 

HANA has native integration services.

Pricing: You bring your own HANA license and pay for the cloud services separately
It was around this point when the penny finally dropped: they're not just talking about HANA-the-database-product, they're talking about an existing implementation of HANA and all the requisite bits, on existing public cloud services like Amazon, that you can just use... yeah, I'm kinda slow.
HANA One has been running in the cloud for about 7 months.

Even though HANA makes it possible to eliminate current batch processing, you will always have larger amounts of data coming that require batch processing.

=====
Hasso Plattner

Collaboration between Hadoop and HANA is possible.

=====
Vishal Sikka 

What about private clouds?

First of all - the HANA Enterprise Cloud is for HANA only, other relational database products 
are not welcome.

Having said that - it doesn't matter where the pieces run, and the landscape can be heterogeneous.

HANA cloud frames can, and have been, run on private clouds in customer datacenters - but it's 
not part of today's announcement.

Several dozen big customers will move to the HANA cloud this year.

Early customer feedback has been positive.

=====
Hasso Plattner

This is the next hockey stick.
I'm guessing he's talking about the "hockey stick curve"; see point 3 in "What is a Hockey Stick Curve?"
Mobile response time must be 3 seconds or faster, and we can do this now.

There are no hassles when growing or shrinking the system, and it will be so much faster.

Hardware provisioning is done already, by SAP.

What is the bottleneck? We honestly don't know.

The private private clouds will come - the ones on client premises.

The elasticity and security problems have been solved.

=====
Vishal Sikka 

We are looking at redesigning the server platform.

=====
Hasso Plattner

The data has to be in memory, that is a prerequisite.

=====
Vishal Sikka 

The underlying infractructure for all SAP applications is moving to the HANA Enterprise Cloud.

=====
Hasso Plattner

Enterprise, mid-size, small companies... it doesn't matter. We allocate a whole client to one 
machine, or half a machine, or a quarter machine.

We don't share anything in data storage between customers.

=====
Vishal Sikka 

If a third-party SAP vendor wanted to use the HANA infracture, would we let them do that? 
Yes, we would absolutely love it. If they compete with us we would love it even more.

We currently have more than 400 startup companies running on HANA. Many of them compete 
with parts of the SAP portfolio.

Companies like salesforce.com would definitely benefit from running on the HANA infrastructure.

Our own CRM system has been running since the middle of March, extraordinarily well. 

We have it running on a 6 terabyte monster system from IBM - we are only using 1.25 terabytes - 

=====
Hasso Plattner

The usage of the system went significantly up - the users are doing more with the system - that 
is a positive sign.

=====
Vishal Sikka 

We have run 100 million SQL queries per hour on our own system.

The communication round-trip between Palo Alto and Beijing or between Palo Alto and Amsterdam 
is around 120 milliseconds today.

That means you still have 880 milliseconds still available to you, for 1 second response time.

=====
Hasso Plattner

With traditional on-premise provisioning, just the hardware acquisition delays every single 
project by eight weeks.

Now we can provision a system within one hour... that's a hockey stick.

=====
Jonathan Becher, Chief Marketing Officer

Today we launched HANA Enterprise Cloud which combines real-time in-memory with the cloud.

No more batch.

[end]

For the official story see the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud page.



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