The purpose of this short article is primarily to introduce the brief terminology, and hopefully to bring the clear meaning of HANA and its origin.
SAP HANA,
which is a modern platform for real-time analytics and applications, enables
business operations with large volume in real time without delays.
The word HANA has originated from “High-speed
Analytical Appliance”. HANA is currently
getting a lot of attention from many major corporations across the world because
of its promise of fast and real-time process mode.
SAP HANA research
has in fact begun in 2006 by SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner while he was a
computer science professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany.
The goal was to develop a database that could operate with a near-zero response
time for transactional and analytical data processing.
The key
difference of HANA from traditional database system is the HANA's in-memory
computing database infrastructure.
Traditional database systems were designed to perform well on computer
systems with limited RAM (Random Access Memory) which also has slow disk I/O
with focus on optimizing disk access. Computer
architecture has since changed in recent years and it now have multiple Core CPUs
(multiple CPUs on one chip or in one package). This is becoming a standard now
with faster communication between processor cores enabling parallel
processing. In this architecture, main
memory is no longer limited resources, and modern servers can have 1 TB of
system memory which would allow entire database to reside in RAM. This will definitely improve performance
bottleneck from disk I/O to the data transfer between CPU cache and Main
Memory.
HANA’s columnar-based
data store is another unique difference from row-based data store of
traditional data base system. SAP HANA
stores data in memory in a columnar format. The columnar format enables the
product to deliver real-time or near-real-time transactions and analytics. The
columnar format offers better access to data and processing of data compared to
traditional, row-based memory.
SAP S/4HNA is a
new HANA product from SAP. SAP S/4HANA
is short for SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA, meaning that it is the SAP Business Suite 4th version, but designed to run only on SAP HANA. Moving to SAP S/4HANA would be very similar
to the transition from the previous ERP versions, SAP R/2 to SAP R/3.
The current trend of HANA is progressing
relatively fast, and many companies will soon face the situation to make
decision of transition to future HANA environment and investment on HANA. You will see many conferences and announcements
of product releases of HANA from SAP.
Please refer to SAP.COM site or techtarget.com site for
more information about SAP HANA.
Thanks.
