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.
