SAP VP Jeff Word on HANA

SAP VP Jeff Word travels the globe answering questions about SAP HANA.  Recently, ASUG News was able to interview Word and ask a few questions of their own about HANA and SAP BW, reasons to adopt HANA, and the future for SAP DBAs.

According to Jeff Word, the two most common questions he hears about SAP HANA are first, “What happens when the power goes out?”, and second, in the context of running BW and the Business Suite on HANA, “When can I cancel my database contracts?” Although he did not give an answer to the second question, he explained that there are backups for the data in HANA  in case of a power outage and that SAP is working with hardware vendors to provide an integrated solid state drive back-up solution for HANA.

And the benefits of that as an appliance: Those drives are physically attached to the same motherboard that has the RAM on it, so you have a lot less latency. If there is a failure, you lose a lot less things in the pipes between the machines. And SSD is hundreds and hundreds of times faster than disk I/O, so you get much faster recovery times. Plus, it’s the same administration console [SAP admins] already use for back-ups today for SAP.

BW on HANA

Word shared a few details about the BW on HANA ramp-up program, which began on November 9, 2011.  There are between 50 and 60 customers participating in the program who were chosen to represent a comprehensive range of use cases for the database. These customers were chosen from among those who were already running NetWeaver BW 7.3, a prerequisite to running BW on HANA.

According to Word, transitioning data from a traditional BW system to HANA only takes a weekend because no changes are necessary in the BW system.  When transitioning to BW on HANA, however, there is also an opportunity to drastically reduce the size of the database, since HANA can parse the raw data without all of the formatting applied in successive BW upgrades.

Word would not reveal how BW on HANA is priced, but shared that “it’s cheaper than most people think.”

Where and Why to Start with HANA?

Word advises “HANA-ized” transaction reports as the easiest place to start when adding HANA to an SAP system.  He acknowledges that there is an additional cost to adding HANA in this way, but argues that there is a great return on investment in satisfying a person who keeps harping on the glacial pace of a transaction or report.

It may be the head of that department. They haven’t been able to do something because of this constraint of the system. There’s something they can’t do or do very, very infrequently as a result of this constraint. The head of controlling might want to come in every morning and run X report. But now, they can only do it on Monday, because it has to run over the weekend. There’s an ROI associated with that.

HANA and SAP DBAs

HANA will change the role of SAP Database Administrators, according to Word. Performance tuning will no longer be needed since HANA’s speed will remain constant. Even though most of an SAP DBA’s work is tied to performance, Word thinks there will still be a need for people with core database skills, but that DBAs will have to learn new skills to remain relevant in a HANA world.

You will still need people with that deep, deep data architecture understanding. But they’re not going to be doing the tuning that they’re doing in SAP today; they’re going to be doing something much more value added. So they will have to reskill to become data modelers and data architects—but it’s a very easy thing to retrain someone in a day or two to do that, using the data modeler from HANA or the new information composer. We’re moving and skilling up higher value activities for those same resources. Because you can’t take a kid out of college and teach them all of the database stuff, and turn them into a data architect.

To read the entire interview at ASUG News, click here.