Newsbyte: SAP HANA® Offers Multi-Node Capabilities to Help Customers Scale Out

ORLANDO, Fla., May 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- A company's ability to grow with its data is critical. Increasingly, organizations are challenged to draw deeper insights from larger data sets in shrinking windows of time. To empower customers in this regard, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) offers scale-out capabilities with the SAP HANA® platform so that customers can grow their deployments to multiple nodes, supporting multi-terabyte data sets to provide real-time insights on big data. More than 50 percent of the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that offer x86 servers now deliver servers certified to run SAP HANA in a scale-out environment, including leading SAP technology partners Fujitsu, HP and IBM. In addition, SAP and Intel have collaborated to optimize SAP HANA to run optimally on Intel processors, enabling greater business agility and innovative usage models that let customers respond to changing conditions in real time. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® NOW, being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012.

"Our ongoing, joint engineering collaboration allowed SAP HANA to take full advantage of the powerful performance, reliability and availability features of the Intel Xeon processor E7 family," said Diane Bryant, vice president and general manager of Intel's Datacenter and Connected Systems Group. "The optimization of SAP HANA for Intel processors allows customers to achieve much more efficient results, increasing their record-breaking performance and scalability for mission-critical applications for increased business value."

SAP HANA delivers scale-up and scale-out solutions for clients to run big data, growth-oriented applications and analytics — including high-volume instances of the SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse application — by rapidly scaling to many nodes in high-performance and high-availability configurations. Other key benefits include:

• Ability to handle large volumes of data: In addition to compression of data that fundamentally reduces the amount of memory required, SAP HANA grows with the number of data volumes across multiple nodes. SAP has validated 16 nodes and has not seen limitations on a large number of nodes now certified on demand for partners and customers.
• Better failover and high availability: High availability enables the failover of a node within a distributed SAP HANA database. With cluster configurations, failover uses a cold standby node and gets triggered automatically. If a node fails, the database on a standby server can be cold-started and returns to its last consistent state by replaying the log since the last save point from shared storage. Distributed processing of data allows systems to scale beyond one server and can remove the single point of failure.
• End-to-end improvement in performance: Increasing nodes of SAP HANA clusters enables distribution of data loading and analysis utilizing massively parallel processing (MPP) capabilities.

"With the scale out of SAP HANA, we see almost linear improvement in performance with additional computing nodes," said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology & Innovation. "Recently, in our research labs, we have assembled the largest SAP HANA system that scales to 100 nodes, 4000 computing cores and 100 TB in DRAM. Now CIOs can adopt in-memory databases for large deployments with peace of mind that it can grow with their data and provide breakthrough improvement in end-to-end performance."

The business value of SAP HANA was demonstrated recently through scalability testing performed by SAP on SAP HANA with a 16-node server cluster. During the testing, SAP HANA allowed SAP NetWeaver BW-like queries to be executed on 100 billion rows of sales and distribution data with sub-second performance results, without any indexing or tuning required. The results of this testing highlights the ability of SAP HANA to enable customers to perform real-time analytics directly on raw transactional data without going through traditional extract, transform and load (ETL) processes and building of aggregates or materialized views. Details on the testing can be found in a recently released SAP HANA performance white paper.

For additional information regarding SAP HANA and in-memory computing technology, visit the Experience SAP HANA website. For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW, visit the Events Newsroom.

SAPPHIRE® NOW
With SAPPHIRE® NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. To be held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the Events Newsroom at www.events.news-sap.com.

Media Contacts:
Samantha Finnegan, +1 (650) 276-9350, [email protected], PDT
Cindy McKendry, +1 (503) 231-7274, [email protected], PDT

During SAPPHIRE NOW (from May 14 to 16), to speak with press contacts on site, please dial the SAP press room: +1 (610) 661-0469.

SOURCE SAP AG