SAP HANA Features & Advantages
In today’s competitive and data-intensive world requires expeditious access to information insights. Conventional data warehousing technologies may struggle with the vast and complex data sets. High Availability “(HA)” is an extremely important consideration for any enterprise-level IT architecture. A technology platform missing on critical HA features are not enterprise-ready. HANA has been proclaimed by SAP as the modern platform for real-time analytics and applications.
HANA ARCHITECTURAL OVERVIEW:
SAP adopted the term “SAP HANA” to label the SAP In-Memory Appliance which has been aimed at data analytics. It is a combination of hardware and software, and it is delivered as an enhanced or upgraded appliance in cooperation with SAP’s hardware service partners for SAP HANA.
Fig : SAP HANA Architecture
The Intrinsic Features of SAP HANA can be summarised as follows:
- Scalability – HANA is in-memory data Platform, which makes users to explore and analyse all transactional and analytical data in real time from various data source.
- Combination of source-agnostic data access & integration services allows accessing and indexing external data from across the entire organisation and adding them to existing analytical framework.
- Real-time analytical processing can be performed to analyse business operations in real-time using huge volumes of detailed information while business is happening.
- From many applications data can be aggregated and data sources without troubling in any way the on-going business transactions.
- Views of business information can be persisted in a Persistent Data Repository, and reconstituted in case of a crash.
- Real-time Replication Service can be used to access and replicate data from SAP ERP.
- Tight integration with SAP Business Objects BI solutions for insight and analytics.
- Unified information modelling and design environment. The great advantage here is that all data models are purely virtual, and calculate results based on the underlying detailed operational data.
- Reduced costs through amount of technology and manpower needed or simplification in hardware, maintenance and testing, etc.
- Simplifies the Operational process and Monitoring with the integration of basic HANA administration capabilities with the BW Admin Cockpit.
- HANA has multiple types of analysis (i) Data Warehousing, (ii) Text or Predictive analysis, (iii) Operational reporting. This provides decision makers the opportunity to make decision promptly.
What are the Advantages of SAP HANA?
The major advantage of SAP HANA is that because it is very speedy or work very quickly, you can build much simpler software that relies on one copy of information. Traditional software relies on layers of information which are copied at different levels of detail to present information the correct format.
With HANA, your information is stored once, and then the report or response that you requires is calculated on demand. This mean that a country-level P&L report is produced from the individual sales and costs in real-time, or that a forecast is produced based on the latest available information. This, in turn, leads to a massive simplification in software design and cost.
What are the capabilities of SAP HANA?
One of the cruxes of SAP HANA is that HANA permits the repurposing of information for many uses and layers.
The simplest layer of this is that HANA can be used for transactional systems, to record information. Once information has been recorded, then it can be used directly for reporting – without a separate reporting system like a Data Mart. Data Marts are a thing of the past with HANA.
In addition, it is easy to layer on the other capabilities of the HANA Platform – from predictive analysis to text search, to sentiment analysis and many other capabilities. All of these can be run against one information store and this dramatically simplifies building complex business applications.
Disclaimer
Facts and statements in this article are taken from SAP, Gartner and Oracle research and are publicly available information. Some of the statements are “forward-looking statements” and are subject to material risks and uncertainties. Figure courtesy by Oracle/SAP HANA database.
