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SAPINSIDER SPECIAL REPORT | TAKING THE NEXT STEP WITH SAP HANA
Reproduced from the Apr n May n Jun 2015 issue of SAPinsider with permission from its publisher, WIS Publishing | SAPinsiderOnline.com
This winter, when SAP Co-Founder and Chairman Hasso Plattner introduced SAP
Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA) to the world, he began by offering a
glimpse into SAP HANA’s nascent beginnings. Realizing that his students at the Hasso
Plattner Institute were bored by lectures on stodgy enterprise systems, Plattner cor-
ralled a small team and set out to develop rules and requirements that captured his
vision for the future of enterprise software. Rule number one, Plattner said, was to create
a database with zero response time.
Today, that vision is behind everything SAP is doing to help our customers
run their businesses smarter, faster, and simpler. Organizations all over the world are
asking the same questions Plattner posed to himself, even putting technology aside for a
moment: What if we didn’t have to wait for anything? What if we didn’t have to wait for
information to process, or for reports to run? What if running the entire business in real
time was just the natural order of how things worked?
Just the act of posing these questions is a springboard to innovation because the answers
help a company reimagine its business processes. Present CFOs with the scenario of not
having to wait a week for the books to close and they’ll reel off an extensive list of the
various ways they could use a real-time cash position to drive profit and reduce costs.
And while SAP HANA can help solve such business challenges, it’s so much more than
that. The purpose behind SAP HANA is not just to run one application or line of business,
but to use it to reimagine the business as a whole, from bringing new, innovative products
and services to market, to innovating in the cloud. Four years after its general release, SAP
HANA now represents a fabric, if you will, that can radically simplify how an organization
runs its business applications, runs in the cloud, and capitalizes on macro-trends such as big
data, Internet of Things (IoT), and Industry 4.0.
Blanketed in SuccessOf course, just as fabric is woven into something of higher value, so too can SAP HANA
create further value by being more than a unifying enterprise platform. Customers ulti-
mately care about use cases — how can SAP HANA help them get the most out of the
Steve LucasPresident SAP Platform Solutions
INSIDE THIS SPECIAL REPORT
S-3 IBM: Taking SAP HANA to the Cloud
S-7 Rolta IP Solutions: Maximize Plant and Product Performance with Enterprise-Wide Business Intelligence
S-9 Fujitsu and NetApp: Balance Credibility and Costs
S-11 PwC: Analytics Transformation Starts Within
S-13 Red Hat, Inc. and CITO Research: How to Handle Today’s SAP Workloads
S-15 Worksoft Inc.: Ensuring SAP HANA Delivers: The Need for Functional and Performance Validation
S-17 SanDisk: Optimize Your SAP HANA Deployment with Scalable, Flash-Based Storage
S-19 Lenovo: Maximize Your SAP Deployments with Large Memory Capacity and a Common Server Infrastructure
S-21 SGI: A Seamlessly Scalable Single-Node Infrastructure
S-23 Deloitte: The Next Revolution in Analytics: SAP S/4HANA
S-24 Dolphin Enterprise Solutions Corporation: Harness the Potential of Unlimited Data Storage
S-25 Delaware Consulting: SAP HANA Innovations Touch All Aspects of an Organization
S-26 Capgemini: From Business Enablers to Business Catalysts: CFOs Are Empowered by SAP Simple Finance
View this special report at SAPinsiderOnline.com
The Fabric for Success: SAP HANA Spins Up Innovation
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TAKING THE NEXT STEP WITH SAP HANA | SAPINSIDER SPECIAL REPORT
Reproduced from the Apr n May n Jun 2015 issue of SAPinsider with permission from its publisher, WIS Publishing | SAPinsiderOnline.com
applications that they want to use? This is the premise
behind SAP S/4HANA, as the natural evolution pro-
gressing from using SAP HANA as the underlying plat-
form to actually building a game-changing application
on top of it.
SAP S/4HANA delivers on the promise of Plattner’s
first rule of thumb for the future of enterprise software:
to run a business with a response time of zero.
Understanding and accepting the fact that SAP HANA
is the underlying fabric, SAP S/4HANA leverages
this concept for the core business suite, for cloud
applications, for all of the macro-trends, and provides
organizations with the ability to achieve that new and
reimagined business model in which latency is a thing
of the past.
Re-Engineered for SimplicityTo understand SAP S/4HANA, it helps to look at it
not so much as a singular product, but rather as the
sum of its parts. To use an analogy, applications such
as SAP Simple Finance and SAP Simple Logistics are
to SAP S/4HANA what Microsoft Excel or Word are to
the Microsoft Office suite. For the back-office end
user, this means ease of use (powered by SAP Fiori)
and simplicity. From a technical perspective, every
application that runs on SAP S/4HANA is predicated
on SAP HANA, promoting simplicity on the backend.
For a truly reimagined business and to put latency
permanently in the rearview mirror, SAP had to look
at changing how applications that run on top of SAP
HANA store data and ultimately discover ways to
increase profit and reduce costs within that data.
SAP S/4HANA was engineered with the intention of
significantly reducing complexity in the data model.
With SAP Simple Finance, for example, thousands of
tables and views were reduced to four or fewer. This
is huge, because the basis for re-engineering the busi-
ness suite is that complex data models produce com-
plex business processes. If the core operational data for
a business is simple to store, manage, and understand,
then the business processes that support it will be
equally simple to work with.
Stitching Together InnovationAnother key to simplification is SAP HANA Cloud
Platform, the in-memory platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
offering that extends the value of SAP HANA to allow
customers to customize the look and feel of their busi-
ness applications. An organization running a mix of on-
premise and cloud solutions can use SAP HANA Cloud
Platform to spin up a custom application on top of,
say, SAP ERP Financials and SuccessFactors data in a
matter of hours. This is just one example of the radical
simplification that SAP HANA is starting to drive, and
not just on the backend as mentioned previously.
SAP HANA Cloud Platform crystallizes this concept
that the fabric is in place to give organizations the tools
they need when they answer the key question, “What
would happen if I run this business process with a zero
response time?” SAP S/4HANA is of course a large part
of helping to make this a reality, but it’s important to
remember that while this builds on SAP HANA as the
foundational fabric, it’s not the only important thread.
SAP has enabled organizations to have a complete end-
to-end, cloud-based business as well as a dramatically
simplified business suite.
The SAP “Run Simple” message is two-fold. On one
hand, it represents SAP’s commitment to create radi-
cally simplified solutions that are easier to adopt and
run. On the other, it is a vision that customers will be
able to leverage this simplified solution set to deliver
new products, innovations, and services to their cus-
tomers. Of course, both aspects depend greatly on
SAP’s trusted and valued partner community; both in
helping customers understand the real business ben-
efits from SAP HANA, as well as leveraging SAP HANA
Cloud Platform to help strengthen the fabric. Simplified
enterprise software also trickles down to the partner
community; now, rather than focusing on integration,
they can be part of the push to innovate with SAP
HANA to drive value.
SAP has put the fabric of innovation in place — we
look forward to seeing the finished products that arise
as a result.
The SAP “Run Simple” message is
two-fold: It represents SAP’s com-
mitment to create radically simplified
solutions, and a vision that customers
will be able to leverage this simplified
solution set to deliver innovations to
their customers.
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Taking SAP HANA to the Cloud How Customers New and Old Can Benefit from SAP’s Latest Innovations
Charles (Chuck) KichlerGlobal SAP Practice CTO and IBM Distinguished
Engineer IBM
Rick FricchionePartner and CTO,
SAP Practice Service Area Leader,
Technology, Infrastructure, and Development
IBM
A primary goal among CEOs today is to run a real-
time business — and this goal is quickly becom-
ing a requirement for organizations that wish to drive
runaway innovation and challenge the status quo. Most
C-level executives recognize that standing pat is not an
option. In the latest IBM CEO report, more than 40%
of CEOs said that they expect their next competitive
threat to come from an organization outside of their
own industry.1 New and unexpected competition is up-
ending entire industries; by running a real-time busi-
ness, a company can redefine how it creates value for
its customers, thus staying one step — or many steps
— ahead of new threats.
For SAP customers, driving innovation with a focus
on running a real-time enterprise often means explor-
ing how SAP HANA can help move the needle. And,
with SAP Simple Finance as the first module in the
new SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA),
finance organizations now have a new solution to
assess when devising strategies for using technology
to innovate.
Over time, SAP S/4HANA will pull in the common
features of the line-of-business on-premise applications
such as supplier relationship management, product
lifecycle management, and supply chain management,
and provide hybrid cloud extensions to SAP and other
software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, all in line with
the overall SAP message touting simplification, innova-
tion, and transformation. SAP S/4HANA is available
on premise, in a private cloud, and on SAP HANA
Enterprise Cloud.
SAP Simple Finance functions and capabilities are
clearly in line with SAP’s intent to deliver a product
that offers the ability to run a real-time finance organi-
zation. By providing a read-only view of data stored in
an SAP HANA database, a user will be able to instantly
create aggregates to discover trends and changes, and
all pre-final close tasks will collapse into a series of rapid
1 IBM, “Leading Through Connections” (2012; www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/c-suite/ceostudy2012).
pre-close tasks allowing the finance team to instantly
jump to make corrections in the SAP ERP system. SAP
Simple Finance can allow CFOs and finance teams to
close books in a day, centralize finance functions, plan
dynamically, and take the steps toward transforming
finance as a strategic partner to the business.
While on-premise is an SAP Simple Finance deploy-
ment option, many customers have turned to SAP
HANA in the cloud because it offers additional flexibil-
ity and efficiency as well as the potential for real-time
analytics that can turn ideas into action.
Going to the Cloud with SAP HANAIBM cloud offerings for SAP HANA deployments ad-
here to the SAP message of simplify, innovate, and
transform. For both new and existing SAP customers,
IBM has offerings that can help organizations in any
industry reach the objective of having a real-time, inno-
vative platform (see Figure 1 on the next page).
Before looking at specific IBM offerings, it’s worth-
while to develop an understanding of how and where
SAP HANA adds value, because the answer to that
question often depends on the type of organization, its
industry, what it is looking to accomplish, and where it
stands in its overall SAP footprint. A net-new SAP cus-
tomer, for example, is more likely to look at SAP HANA
from the platform perspective, as the foundational
database from which everything else is built.
Existing SAP accounts, specifically global multina-
tionals, are more likely to isolate SAP HANA to attack
innovation in a single area. Starting on the edges in this
manner to accelerate or explore improvements for a
single business process is in line with leveraging SAP
HANA as a sidecar accelerator. Moving line-of-business
applications to the SAP HANA environment, however,
entails much more of a transition. And with the release
of SAP S/4HANA as the successor to SAP ERP, organiza-
tions now have to more carefully weigh when it’s the
right time to make this next transformation for run-
ning the business suite. From an analytics perspective,
most customers by now know that SAP HANA provides
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quantifiable advantages. For many organizations, then,
the question isn’t if SAP HANA can help simplify, inno-
vate, and transform, it’s when is the best time, and what
is the proper deployment option?
Running SAP HANA in the cloud combines real-time
analytics that drive business decisions with the flexibil-
ity and efficiency of the cloud. As a cloud and hosting
partner, IBM stands out for the depth and breadth of its
offerings, the level of management, performance levels,
and delivery of service level agreements (SLAs) of IBM
Cloud Services. IBM Cloud Managed Services for SAP
applications provides full-stack ITIL-compliant man-
aged services with SLAs at the operating system (OS)
level. Additionally, IBM offers unmanaged SAP HANA
One, SAP HANA, and SAP applications available on the
cloud platform from SoftLayer, which is part of IBM
Cloud Services.
IBM Cloud Managed Services is unique in its deliv-
ery model as the only hardware and cloud vendor to
guarantee sub-second SLAs in performance and avail-
ability through the application layer of their enter-
prise applications, including SAP ERP, SAP Customer
Relationship Management (SAP CRM), SAP Business
Warehouse (SAP BW), and SAP HANA.
IBM Cloud Managed Services has transitioned from
the infrastructure and support model of a traditional
hosting model into a cloud model, mirroring in many
ways how a client would run its existing SAP landscape
in its own data center, only in the IBM Cloud. This
allows for clients to maintain choice and control while
providing both security and availability across a multi-
tude of data centers.
Customer ChoiceFor both new and existing SAP HANA customers,
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud offers a low-cost entry
into an enterprise-class platform in the cloud. Last
fall, IBM and SAP announced IBM’s new status as a
premier strategic partner for cloud infrastructure
services to optimize opportunities for customers.2
This certification gives customers the assurance that
their SAP HANA cloud solutions can run production
workloads through a specialized deployment support-
2 See www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/45049.wss.
Without cloud computing
Workload A
• Software • Hardware • Storage • Networking
Service management
Workload B
• Software • Hardware • Storage • Networking
Service management
With cloud computing
• Virtualized SAP resources
• Automated service management
• Standardized services
• Location independent
• Rapid scalability • Self-service portal
Workload A Workload B Workload C
• Software • Hardware
• Storage • Networking
Service management
FIGURE 1 Moving SAP applications to the cloud can transform your traditional SAP environment
For many organizations, the ques-
tion isn’t if SAP HANA can help
simplify, innovate, and transform, it’s
when is the best time, and what is
the proper deployment option?
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SAPINSIDER SPECIAL REPORT | TAKING THE NEXT STEP WITH SAP HANA
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ing all SAP HANA use cases. One option for running
applications using IBM Cloud Managed Services is
a PaaS deployment of SAP HANA, where IBM provides
the dedicated appliance, hosting, and administrative
services.
Another option is for the customer to send its exist-
ing SAP HANA appliance to an IBM Cloud data cen-
ter where it will be managed and hosted. The benefit
here is that the supporting architecture is the same at
every IBM Cloud data center, meaning running SAP
S/4HANA in the US, for example, would be the same as
running it anywhere in the world because it would be
managed by the same hardware, software, and global
service delivery organization. Figure 2 provides a map
of IBM data centers around the world.
Organizations that wish to run SAP HANA without
purchasing a license can run SAP HANA One in the
IBM Cloud as a PaaS option through SoftLayer with
SLAs available at the infrastructure level. With this op-
tion, companies can conduct a proof of concept for SAP
HANA, build and deploy SAP HANA applications for pro-
duction, or even get started with in-memory applications.
SAP S/4HANA’s Place in the CloudSAP S/4HANA has arrived at a time when resistance
to the cloud has significantly waned. Hybrid
Singapore
India Hong Kong
China Tokyo
Melbourne Sydney
London Amsterdam
Brazil
Seattle
San Jose Los Angeles
Mexico City Houston Denver Chicago Montreal
New York City Washington, DC
Atlanta Miami
Dallas Toronto
Ehningen
Raleigh
Winterthur
Lisbon
Boulder
Barcelona Montpelier
SoftLayer data centers Network point of presence
IBM Cloud Managed Services for SAP applications data centers
FIGURE 2 A map of IBM’s data centers around the world
With the sheer number of technology changes and integration challenges
involved in a hybrid model of this size, an integrator and cloud provider with
IBM’s experience is a key component to ensure reduced complexity.
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deployments are ubiquitous; most companies have
dozens of SaaS products they’re utilizing already, so
they’re familiar with working across multiple data
centers. This is the new reality, and moving a company’s
SAP landscape to a cloud environment is just a part of
this larger picture.
What we’re learning about the SAP S/4HANA road-
map as the product matures will influence how IBM
helps to take its customers to that next generation of
SAP products. The technology is certainly ready; the
initial hesitance to embrace the cloud has instead been
replaced by questions about what it means for an IT
department as organizations start to work with mul-
tiple cloud service providers and multiple data centers,
and whether those providers can work independently
or need to work together to keep an organization’s
applications running.
SAP S/4HANA as a consolidated platform in the
cloud will certainly evolve as SAP fine-tunes its migra-
tion path. One possibility is that existing SAP customers
that implemented SAP systems a decade ago or longer
will use SAP S/4HANA as a consolidation platform
to make that leap to the cloud and rid themselves of
the complexity that stems from a mix of on-premise
systems. New accounts that are now exploring SAP
Business Suite powered by SAP HANA in the cloud
can migrate to SAP S/4HANA to achieve the same
reduced complexity.
IBM is currently working on delivering SAP
S/4HANA through SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud,
and discussions are under way with SAP over how
to provide additional options for customers in the
cloud, which will be ironed out over time as the road-
map develops.
Regardless of the roadmap, though, companies will
have to take the necessary steps, whether the migra-
tion is within or outside their data center. IBM’s expe-
rienced, time-tested methodology and tools help to do
the heavy lifting, so there’s no question that IBM will
be ready from an integration standpoint.
From deployments in cloud solutions such as
Ariba, SuccessFactors, and SAP Cloud for Customer,
the experience of the IBM migration teams is
directly transferable into SAP S/4HANA migration
questions. Additionally, SAP S/4HANA may be a step
toward lowering the barrier for migrating to the
cloud because it will be easily integrated with SAP
Landscape Transformation, which will likely eliminate
many technical migration problems because of the
replication cycle.
A Guiding HandWhen the transition to SAP S/4HANA really begins,
one path toward adoption may mirror what IBM is
doing with one multinational client, a large profes-
sional services company that is currently deploying
SAP Cloud for Customer and on-premise SAP CRM,
SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SAP SRM),
and mobility solutions with an SAP Fiori-based UI.
This hybrid model will likely be very similar in the SAP
S/4HANA deployment model as organizations wrestle
with architectural changes and deal with issues such as
network security, identity management, and segrega-
tion of duties (SoD).
With the sheer number of technology changes and
integration challenges involved in a hybrid model of
this size, an integrator and cloud provider with IBM’s
experience is a key component to ensure reduced
complexity. The question companies must answer is
whether they want to change the way they’ve con-
ducted business over the past few decades to capitalize
on the transformational opportunities and to meet the
threats that are upending entire industries.
If the answer to that question is yes, they are going
to need a partner with the breadth and depth of IBM’s
expertise and offerings to steer them through the tech-
nology, business, and organizational challenges and
deliver the unique experience that will get them to
where they need to be.
For more information, visit www.ibm.com/
solutions/sap/us/en.
SAP S/4HANA may be a step
toward lowering the barrier for
migrating to the cloud because it
will be easily integrated with SAP
Landscape Transformation, which
will likely eliminate many technical
migration problems because of the
replication cycle.
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Maximize Plant and Product Performance with Enterprise-Wide Business Intelligence Satinath Sarkar
EVP Rolta IP Solutions
To compete effectively, business leaders today need
to analyze operational and back-office data across
myriad sources to make more informed decisions. In
asset-intensive industries, visibility into asset perfor-
mance and product quality, for example, can help an or-
ganization reduce its overall production cost per pound
and even create additional capacity and reduce capital
outlay. Coupled with predictive capabilities, companies
can often reduce their overall cost structure, mainte-
nance spend, and avoid unnecessary downtime.
The path to market leadership, however, goes be-
yond the decision-making capabilities in software. Com-
panies must control the quality and cost of every factor
of production — including the use and care of produc-
tion facilities and the logistics involved in acquiring raw
materials and distributing output. Analytics-based ap-
plications focused on asset utilization can alert every-
one — from individual contributors to line managers
to corporate executives — to what’s working and what
isn’t. Even more importantly, predictive analytics can
tell you what soon won’t work and what you should
do about it. Companies at the forefront of business
intelligence (BI) for operational integrity can reduce
procurement and maintenance costs by leveraging BI
integration with asset management.
Data-based decision making improves day-to-day
operations and drives substantial benefits for asset-
intensive organizations. For example, risk identifica-
tion and mitigation can directly impact the bottom
line. You can only perform risk analysis as fast as you
can get information on asset performance. When
deviations occur but are not reported, an opportunity
to fix the piece of equipment and optimize perfor-
mance is missed.
Predictive analytics provides the ability to proac-
tively manage asset maintenance and improve work-
force management by exploiting patterns found in
historical, transactional, and real-time data to identify
opportunities, mitigate risks, and enable preemptive
capacity planning. It eliminates poor asset utilization,
low maintenance efficiency, and high maintenance
costs, and can also decrease the risk of environmental,
health, and safety incidents.
To achieve performance improvements across the
enterprise, organizations must pursue a strategy that
combines an enterprise-wide approach to BI along with
the proper technology to power this approach.
A Single-Window Approach to BI ExcellenceCompanies should adopt a single-window approach to
BI that incorporates comprehensive, industry-specific
analytics along with necessary IT transformation
solutions. Without a single view of relevant data and a
consistent, enterprise-wide understanding of its mean-
ing, different groups or systems may produce different
answers to the same questions.
The first step of the single-window approach is to
establish the information model. This defines a
comprehensive BI strategy that will positively affect
enterprise performance. The strategy to implement this
model and approach needs to identify the following:
■ The needs of people who enable, produce, and
consume information
■ Various contextual processes, including information
governance processes, analytical processes, and
decision processes
■ The platform capabilities required to deliver real-
time BI insights
Next, you must define the information landscape
that relates to the business model of an organization.
Data silos often spring up organically — different busi-
ness units may implement their own projects indepen-
dently, or could have been acquired via a merger. Either
way, organizations of all sizes must combat the prolif-
eration of data silos. The content, quality, structure, and
definitions of the data in these silos are as variable as
the silos themselves.
The final step is to implement a BI and big data
analytics solution that simplifies the complexity of the
To achieve perfor-
mance improvements
across the enterprise,
organizations must
pursue a strategy
that combines an
enterprise-wide
approach to BI along
with the proper
technology.
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information landscape and enables the organization to
achieve operational excellence by providing role-based,
actionable intelligence.
Rolta OneView Enterprise SuiteRolta OneView exploits the cutting-edge features of
SAP HANA to deliver an advanced BI and analytics
platform (see Figure 1). Backed by the power of SAP
HANA, the solution handles big data to provide light-
ning-fast real-time operational analytics, predictive
analytics for maintenance, reliability and risk manage-
ment, as well as spatial analytics for asset management.
Rolta OneView delivers a precise, holistic view of
an operation’s overall effectiveness and efficiency, in-
cluding the real-time production data that operations
managers need to achieve improvements. It brings
unique business value to all levels of management
through role-based, actionable insights and correlated
real-time operational and business key performance
indicators (KPIs). It breaks down the fundamental bar-
riers to achieving operational and business excellence,
such as silos across operational networks for business,
safety, and sustainability. Rolta OneView provides a 360-
degree view of the enterprise and touches the nerve
center of all critical functions.
This innovative solution simplifies information com-
plexity in the enterprise by providing loosely coupled
yet comprehensive integration across operations and
business systems. Solution modules cover a wide spec-
trum of cross-functional areas, from operations and
maintenance to human resources and finance.
Rolta OneView allows companies to achieve the
following benefits:
■ Accurately understand overall equipment effec-
tiveness. The Rolta OneView connector framework
provides the ability to combine various data sources
that are required to identify areas that contribute to
the loss of production or plant efficiency and poor
utilization at the asset level.
■ Identify gaps in processes by reconciling data
among multiple source systems. This enables a
plant’s management team to make changes to rel-
evant areas and fosters an environment for a cross-
functional team approach.
■ Proactively plan and control operations by bring-
ing in data in real time. This allows users to drill
down to find root causes when falling short of reach-
ing business goals.
■ Minimize quality deviations and eliminate bad
actors. Rolta OneView KPIs provide the framework
to stack-rank risk and compare it to the mean time to
repair to ensure efficient and effective management
of assets.
■ Improve safety performance and regulatory com-
pliance. Rolta OneView helps organizations adhere
to regulatory standards in health, safety, and envi-
ronment. By monitoring data from around the enter-
prise, managers are better aware of any issues that
could lead to regulatory non-compliance and can
address them before they become a catastrophe.
■ Reduce cost of products. The solution provides
actionable information that allows you to improve
quality on both a product and plant basis.
Learn MoreRolta OneView for SAP solutions provides quick and
accurate data analysis in dashboard format, making it
possible to visualize business trends and make decisions
based on current and predictive scenarios. It enables
organizations to streamline business processes, minimize
risk, better predict work load, and enhance business
strategy. Rolta, a global SAP partner, is a strategic origi-
nal equipment manufacturer (OEM) vendor, integrating
its numerous industry solutions with platform technol-
ogy from SAP. Rolta is the 2014 SAP Pinnacle Award
recipient for OEM Partner of the Year, recognized out of
21,000 partners for the most strategic level of innovation
and the fastest new product introductions. For more
information, visit www.rolta.com/oneview-sap.
FIGURE 1 The Rolta
OneView Executive
Dashboard
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Balance Credibility and CostsIntelligent Combination of Disaster-Resilient Solutions and Development Environments Drives Business Innovation
Andrea VoigtSenior Product Marketing
Manager Global Marketing Services
and Solutions Fujitsu
Paul ManteyGlobal Technology
Lead, Fujitsu NetApp
S ince its introduction, SAP HANA has evolved from a
side-by-side analytics and reporting tool to become
the core of successful enterprises around the globe. As
business executives continue to exploit the competitive
advantages that in-memory computing delivers, avail-
ability of the platform becomes essential.
Many companies implement SAP Business Suite
or SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) powered by
SAP HANA to manage business-critical processes
that require high performance and availability —
trading with perishable goods, for instance. Such
implementations need close collaboration between IT
and the business to define a disaster recovery strategy
based on serious risk assessment and business impact
analysis. When it comes to putting that strategy into
practice, IT departments first need to balance two
major factors:
■ Credibility — Assure business owners that IT is
capable of implementing and executing a service
that guarantees continuation of essential business
processes during disaster events.
■ Costs — Design the most effective approach toward
high system availability, including the profitable use
of failover site systems.
High-availability and disaster-resilient solutions
are not “off-the-shelf” commodities. Beyond redun-
dant components, they require orchestration, auto-
mation, and communication systems that ultimately
culminate in multisite implementations. As such,
they must be tailored for each individual organiza-
tion and even for each individual system within a
comprehensive IT landscape. To accomplish this,
IT often turns to external partners to provide the
appropriate technology and to help choose, plan, and
implement the right approach.
Fujitsu and NetApp’s unique solutions and capa-
bilities ensure appropriate availability for SAP HANA
implementations while keeping efficiency in mind.
Let’s take a closer look at some of these solutions.
Avoid Unnecessary DowntimeWhile many companies already have development
systems that are secured by solid components within
server and storage systems, they often experience
downtimes from several hours to even several days. By
contrast, a productive SAP Business Suite powered by
SAP HANA system, which is used to manage mission-
critical processes, generally has a maximum down-
time of a few minutes or less. The key differentiator is
implementing a remotely located failover system that
ensures business process continuity without incurring
unacceptable data loss or downtime.
Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX Solutions
Fujitsu and NetApp jointly provide the required
expertise and pre-tested solutions that ensure the
adequate level of availability for each organization,
each SAP HANA system, or each application server.
With proper setup and operational processes,
customers can leverage our technology to ensure that
failover systems are effectively used during normal
operations, yet be prepared to immediately take over
and continue essential business processes in the case
of a disaster.
Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX for SAP HANA is a pre-defined
and pre-tested infrastructure solution based on SAP-
certified components that enables simplified, fast,
and secure implementation and operation of the SAP
HANA platform. This solution can be seamlessly inte-
grated with Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX for SAP landscapes,
which provides a unique operational concept for
effectively running SAP applications and databases in
businesses of all sizes and in all types of industries. The
end-to-end virtualization of servers, storage, networks,
and application services creates a straightforward,
flexible environment for managing resources and
workloads. By properly orchestrating and automating
failover processes, Fujitsu’s FlexFrame Orchestrator
software, a core component of PRIMEFLEX for SAP
landscapes, provides the basis for effective high
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availability and disaster recovery (DR) (see Figure 1).
In fact, the DR process does not consist of special pro-
cedures. It contains only typical day-to-day operations,
such as starting an SAP system using infrastructure
resources.
PRIMEFLEX for SAP HANA and PRIMEFLEX for SAP
landscapes are pre-configured and pre-tested combina-
tions of Fujitsu Server PRIMERGY systems, NetApp
FAS storage, and network connectivity and software.
This optimized and ready-to-run approach rounded off
by industrialized services significantly reduces deploy-
ment time, providing a fast track to business value.
Based on PRIMEFLEX for SAP landscapes, the same
simple DR process is applied for multiple productive
SAP HANA systems, which are automatically restarted
after a system breakdown according to their priority.
NetApp FlexClone Environments
With FlexClone, NetApp provides a near real-time,
zero-space technology for creating SAP system
copies that enables IT organizations to deliver signifi-
cant business impact. Application development teams
can create as many full production copy development
environments as they want, and can refresh those envi-
ronments to reflect the current production state in less
time than it takes to get a cup of coffee. Organizations
implementing SAP environments on top of this high-
performance, agile development environment typically
see implementation times reduced by 20%-30%, with
fewer defects and integration problems incurred during
quality assurance (QA) testing. For example, a leading
global cosmetic company reported a 70% reduction in
project delivery time and a 425% increase in the num-
ber of IT projects delivered.
This high-performance application development
environment carries an additional benefit: IT is able
to constantly test and operate in the DR environment
in support of developing and delivering new features
and enhancements to the business. Some clients have
become profitably creative using these DR systems in a de-
ployment similar to the configuration shown in Figure 1;
they have identified and corrected data errors that are cor-
rupting data warehouses or causing key processes to fail.
Always Up and RunningBy deploying SAP HANA with Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX so-
lutions, customers can address the two key inhibitors
of DR implementations: cost and credibility. Effectively
using DR systems as flexible application development
environments enables IT organizations to deliver a
return on investment far in excess of the hurdle rates
expected by the business. Delivering new features and
functions ahead of schedule, with fewer defects and
smoother rollouts, ensures that the business will look
confidently to IT to keep the business running, even
during the most difficult times.
To learn more, visit www.fujitsu.com/fts/sap.
FIGURE 1 Example
of a disaster-resilient
setup of a productive
SAP HANA systemFujitsu
PRIMEFLEX for SAP HANA
(PRD)
Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX for
SAP HANA (PRD)
PRD
SAP HANA
Apps
Data Migration
NetApp Snap Mirror/MetroCluster, SAP System Replication
PRIMEFLEX (DEV 1)
DEV (1)
SAP HANA
Apps
PRIMEFLEX (DEV N)
DEV (N)
SAP HANA
Apps
PRIMEFLEX (QA 1)
QA (1)
SAP HANA
Apps
PRIMEFLEX (QA N)
QA (N)
SAP HANA
Apps
PRIMEFLEX (Training 1)
Training (1)
SAP HANA
Apps
PRIMEFLEX (Training N)
Training (N)
SAP HANA
Apps
DR
SAP HANA
Apps
Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX for SAP Landscapes
Multisite Orchestration
Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX for SAP Landscapes
AppDev Orchestration
System Copies
NetApp FlexClones
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Analytics Transformation Starts WithinHow Organizations Can Achieve Greater Analytics Agility
Frank RinaldiDirector and SAP
Information Management Practice Lead
PwCFor many organizations seeking to transform and
enhance their analytics landscape, deciding on the
right tools is of secondary importance to a more press-
ing need in today’s rapidly changing business climate:
agility. Companies today handle analytics in two differ-
ent groups. One is a group focused on the exploration
of large volumes of structured and unstructured data
to provide insights and predictive analytics, but these
groups are not prevalent in all industries, and vary from
company to company. Instead, I want to focus on the
group that may not always get the glory, but is crucial
to giving organizations visibility to their performance:
the traditional BI group in a business’s IT organization.
Unlike large e-commerce enterprises that are deal-
ing with petabytes of customer data, the traditional
enterprise is instead most apt to develop a BI strategy
with the primary purpose of supporting traditional pro-
cesses around areas such as finance, sales, supply chain,
and human resources. To these companies, where per-
formance of their front-office and back-office functions
is of top concern, agility is paramount to adapt to the
changing needs of the business as far as how it deliv-
ers information. This is a pressing challenge that is be-
coming even more vexing in the wake of an increasing
volume of actionable data.
Agility isn’t unearthed based solely on the tools se-
lected. A sturdy foundation must come first, one that al-
lows an organization to assess its resources and current
processes, and then fine-tune its BI strategy to focus on
what is really important. Incremental changes without a
holistic accounting of how each process affects how the
business is run and which metrics are most effective often
can result in backward progress; companies might have
the means to compartmentalize and analyze more data,
but that doesn’t mean they know how to make sense of it.
Strategy FoundationCompanies must first decide how they are going to
use analytics to improve overall business effectiveness.
Many organizations today are in reactive mode with
BI, using metric roadmaps that are old and obsolete.
BI teams are focusing too much time on servicing pro-
duction support or ad hoc report requests rather than
building a defined metrics roadmap.
A first step to transforming analytics is to have an hon-
est discussion at the C-level about what metrics drive the
company, and how much ad hoc analytics capacity will
be required on a regular basis to deal with fluctuations
in a company’s business model. A rapidly growing or
diversifying company typically needs a much larger ad
hoc analytics capability than a company with a steady
product portfolio and customer base. Additionally, many
companies do not have any one set of metrics they can
point to as the “holy grail.” Instead, there is often a prolif-
eration of metrics, many with the same title but display-
ing different results depending on the line of business
producing the metric. At PwC, we typically jumpstart
these conversations with industry-specific metrics maps.
This gives our clients a baseline to compare their current
metrics mix, helps clients envision what their ultimate
metrics maturity goals should be, and ultimately forms
the bases for a BI strategy and roadmap.
A More Credible BI OrganizationEven with a strong BI strategy, delivering credibly on a
BI roadmap is not simple. BI projects often fail to meet
their primary objectives in the time frame and budget
originally envisioned for a number of reasons. First,
many teams forget that new BI initiatives are inherently
iterative, and require a more incremental project meth-
odology. Second, the availability and quality of data to
feed a metric is often assumed to be much higher than it
is in reality. Last but not least, the volume and complexity
of the data are often underappreciated.
To overcome these challenges, BI delivery organiza-
tions need to be more agile. Typically one of the most
important exercises PwC helps our clients with is base-
lining their BI organization and identifying how it can be
strengthened. Many times, training and reorganizing a
BI organization can lead to large efficiency gains without
large BI software or hardware purchases. Successful BI
teams work to realize broad metric roadmap initiatives
Agility isn’t
unearthed based
solely on the tools
selected; a sturdy
foundation must
come first.
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by adopting a more agile approach to project delivery,
providing value and reviewing results with the business
on a monthly basis, and setting expectations with BI
program stakeholders that additional initiatives
such as process re-engineering, data cleansing, or the
acquisition of more powerful BI technologies may be
required to meet the roadmap as more is discovered
about the underlying data. Additionally, the extended BI
organization should be thought of as a combination of
the business, functional owners of key source data
systems, and the core BI technical team, and all be made
equally accountable for the success of a BI initiative.
BI Organization Skill MixAnother critical factor in developing a successful BI de-
livery organization is the skill mix within the core BI
team. One thing we’re finding with our clients is that
the business analysts who understand the systems and
the data are really the ones who understand the lim-
its of what the information can and cannot be used
for. Developing senior analysts who have this business
knowledge is a sound strategy for companies that wish
to become more mature in their analytics function,
and certainly for those companies with an end game of
completing a full analytics transformation.
Another way to think of it is that the BI team should
be split between analytics and technical profession-
als. Analytics professionals focus on articulating what
metrics should drive the business and the overall
effectiveness, while technical professionals focus on
fulfilling metrics requests.
While this is not a new issue, the rapid pace of
advancements in technology and the diverse array of
options in the marketplace are bringing it to the fore-
front and are making analysts even more valuable to
the business. Combined with an increased interest in
self-service BI, focusing on improving the BI team skill
mix gives many organizations a strong starting point
for an analytics transformation.
Technology Architecture and Governance PoliciesOne of the more interesting developments in the last
five years is the explosion of new BI tools, both at the
database and visualization layers. While this is great
for BI software companies, it has been confusing for
BI teams that have to sift through and integrate these
often disparate technologies. As companies look at
these new platforms, they should consider:
1. How well do the technologies integrate so that the
number of necessary BI technical skill sets in an
organization can be minimized?
2. How can the architecture and a series of policies be
developed so that development and iteration with
metric owners can be as efficient as possible without
sacrificing the quality and performance of the data
and corresponding reports?
Take SAP’s BI and database landscape as an example.
In the last seven years, it has gone from using primar-
ily SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) for data ware-
housing and reporting to now combining SAP BW with
SAP HANA and Sybase for data warehousing and using
a host of solutions, including SAP BusinessObjects BI
solutions, SAP Lumira, and SAP Predictive Analytics,
for reporting. As the technology improves, integration
is a challenge.
One way PwC has helped our clients is to baseline
their existing BI capabilities and help build two-to-
three-month proofs of concept (POCs) for new analytics
architectures. We then help the client make an honest
assessment of the improvements the new architecture
brings compared to their baseline BI capabilities, be-
fore deciding on whether to invest in new technology.
We also help companies understand the costs of train-
ing their team members and of re-developing and sup-
porting the old BI architecture until it can be retired. We
then ultimately help our clients develop a business case
for change (or not) based on these results.
Another way companies can accelerate delivery of the
BI roadmap is by revamping their governance policies.
Companies often underestimate the effect that restrictive
governance policies have on the speed at which BI teams
can iterate through metrics development. The same poli-
cies for changes to a data warehouse that are in place for
a transactional system can result in wait times of days or
weeks for simple changes to reports to be approved.
Fulfilling the Analytics VisionAnalytics is a never-ending organization for companies.
However, developing a strong underpinning strategy
and effective BI delivery organizational strategies will
help companies understand what metrics and ad hoc ca-
pabilities are most important, and what the right invest-
ment level needs to be in their internal BI capabilities. To
learn how PwC can help you realize your analytics vision,
visit www.pwc.com/us/en/increasing-it-effectiveness/
information-management.jhtml.
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How to Handle Today’s SAP WorkloadsDistributed Architecture and Open-Source Software Power Modern Organizations
Christine PuccioDirector, Global SAP
Alliance Red Hat, Inc.
Dan WoodsCTO and Founder
CITO Research
From its beginning, SAP has been innovating to help
the business world become more efficient. While
today SAP produces software innovations that help
companies across an array of business processes and
industries and is a leader in modernizing architecture,
the company has in fact been ready for the modern
distributed architecture since the birth of SAP R/3.
When it was first creating SAP R/3, SAP began run-
ning it natively on Unix, which provided a more flexi-
ble alternative to the mainframes that businesses were
used to, and this decision resulted in a boom in SAP
R/3 deployments. Years later, SAP would then see the
benefits of open-source operating systems and begin
to leverage Linux, again anticipating a trend among
its customers.
The story of SAP R/3’s progress illustrates SAP’s lead-
ership in driving the market and bringing customers to
new levels of innovation, with the latest chapter in this
story being SAP HANA. Through the journey from the
mainframe to Unix, and ultimately to Linux, SAP en-
terprise customers have found a permanent home on
Linux that features both distributed architecture and
open-source operating systems.
Ahead of Its TimeSAP pursued distributed architecture before it had
even caught on as a concept by embracing a client/
server model. This not only moved some of the user in-
terface processing to PCs, but also separated the server
computers into tiers, typically several application serv-
ers and one database server. This, coupled with the high
cost of Unix hardware and primitive networking tech-
nologies, meant that SAP solutions ran on a very small
number of computers.
But SAP’s software architecture was capable of even
greater distribution. SAP engineers have long isolated
internal systems from one another, a key to the soft-
ware’s timeless appeal — SAP R/3 could run on 10 Unix
computers, with each maintaining a separate piece of
the solution, although costs and load times made this
unrealistic at the time.
Fast forward to today: The fundamental principles
of SAP R/3 are still with us. SAP’s business applications
run on virtual machines with code written in ABAP or
Java. The applications have multiple tiers and special-
ized systems handle the complexities of the modern
world, such as mobility, in-memory computing, the
Internet of Things, big data, and so on.
Today, we find a computing landscape dominated
by large numbers of small, relatively inexpensive com-
puters working together, using incredibly powerful
networking based on open-source software. The high
speed and low cost of this network has created the
cloud, which allows servers to be located and accessed
from virtually anywhere.
All of the applications and ecosystems that have
grown up in this era — Google, Amazon, Facebook,
and SuccessFactors — use a distributed processing
architecture. It is not a stretch to say that SAP’s busi-
ness applications are far closer to these distributed
applications than they are to traditional mainframe
applications.
But hardware is not the only innovation driving
advances in computing — open-source software is the
second of the twin technologies powering distributed
architectures.
Distributed Architecture and Open SourceOpen-source operating systems power computing
grids for today’s leading companies. Many enterprises
— including 90% of the Fortune 5001 — use Red Hat
Enterprise Linux to achieve this same manner of
productization, providing the missing elements and
services needed to achieve the full security, scalabil-
ity, support, and administration required for enter-
prise computing. In addition, Red Hat supports a
large portfolio of open-source solutions for develop-
ment, integration, storage, and management of cloud
infrastructure.
1 Red Hat client data and Fortune 500 listing, 2014.
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Regardless of an open-source operating system’s
“ownership,” updates, patches, and hardened, reliable
code remain critical to deployment success, not to men-
tion certifications that ensure compatibility with key
applications and infrastructure. At one point, this was
a job that most companies had to do for themselves if
they were going to use Linux or any other open-source
operating system.
Red Hat, however, has created a massive ecosystem
that fosters innovation for developers through JBoss
and OpenShift and supports private and hybrid cloud
environments through OpenStack, taking this burden
off of the enterprise so it can focus on what matters to
its core business success.
The success of SAP follows a natural progression
— beginning with the mainframe, SAP saw a distinct
enterprise need with Unix, with mass Unix adoption
following the company’s support of the technology. As
Unix waned due to issues of cost and scale, SAP saw
the potential in commodity hardware running Linux-
based platforms, opening up the world of distributed
computing for which its software was so well suited
(see Figure 1). Today, Linux is the de facto choice for
running SAP applications; look no further than SAP
HANA, the leading edge of SAP engineering, which
runs only on Linux.
The Linux Legacy From the mainframe to Unix to Linux, SAP enter-
prise customers have found a permanent home with
the twinned innovations of distributed architecture
and open-source software. SAP software is a perfect
fit for the commoditized nature of modern enterprise
hardware, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides the
platform to reliably and securely run even the most
extreme SAP workloads.2
To learn more about running SAP systems on
Red Hat Enterprise Linux, visit www.redhat.com/en/
resources/cito-research-why-you-should-put-red-hat-
under-your-sap-systems.
2 For example, in 2014, SAP chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run the world’s largest data warehouse, setting a new Guinness World Record. See www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-data-warehouse.
FIGURE 1 The advantages of running SAP applications on Linux
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SAP HANA holds enormous promise and offers
a big data strategy that effectively addresses the
“three Vs” of big data: volume, variety, and velocity. To
get there, companies need to embark on a transforma-
tion journey that affects many IT projects and a lot of
technology across many business units — but without
disrupting existing business processes.
Success in an enterprise SAP HANA deployment
means your team will need to complete two very
important phases:
1. Functional validation: Make sure that every
business process functions correctly both before
and after the SAP HANA implementation.
2. Performance validation: Verify that business users
will experience all the speed and responsiveness
promised by SAP HANA.
Both of these phases require a considerable
amount of work from both IT and business teams.
However, automated validation can significantly
reduce the burden and accelerate SAP HANA deploy-
ment and adoption.
Phase 1. Functional ValidationUnlike most other SAP projects, implementing SAP
HANA primarily affects the underlying database. As a
result, these projects can involve relatively little con-
figuration and end-user training. However, SAP HANA
Ensuring SAP HANA Delivers: The Need for Functional and Performance Validation
Shoeb JavedCTO
Worksoft Inc.
projects require extensive functional testing — which
can represent up to 80% of the total project effort,
based on our project experience. This functional vali-
dation ensures quality in two major areas: business
processes and data (see Figure 1 on the next page).
Business Process Quality
As you move to SAP HANA, your team will need to vali-
date that every critical business process works before,
during, and after the implementation. Typically, compa-
nies begin by building their test automation portfolio
on the existing SAP system. Once that is completed suc-
cessfully, the company then runs that same automation
on the applications and data using SAP HANA.
With automation in place, this can be accomplished
in a matter of minutes for each test cycle — compared
to days when using a manual approach. Worksoft auto-
mated business process validation shortens overall proj-
ect timelines and doesn’t require special programming
skills because business users can engage directly.
Data Quality
Data quality is paramount in an SAP HANA migration
because successful adoption requires business users to
have high confidence in their new system, and assur-
ance that business processes still function correctly.
Automated business process validation helps you un-
cover any data transfer problems and system issues
before they affect your production systems and users.
This is accomplished because automated validation
detects any data discrepancies between business intel-
ligence (BI) systems and source ERP systems, providing
a mechanism for you to identify any data quality or
reporting issues.
It’s not just about performing these validations once
and moving on. With all the changes happening to
your environment, you need to check the integrity of
your business processes and data regularly. After the
implementation, regularly validating data transfers
across the various enterprise systems that feed SAP
HANA will remain important to ensure that every
With the pace of change in big data,
you can no longer afford to rely on
manual effort to ensure quality and
performance. Automation is the
new standard for functional and
performance validation.
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business process functions properly. With the speed of
big data, you may find that your validation frequency
will increase.
For example, if you have new analytics capabilities
that speed up your reporting from monthly to daily,
you need to change your validation from monthly to
daily to ensure your data is accurate. Without automa-
tion, this would be an extremely resource-intensive and
time-consuming process.
Phase 2. Performance ValidationThe best way to ensure that your SAP HANA imple-
mentation will deliver the performance, speed, and
user experience that you need is to test it on a typical
maximum workload, analyze the results, identify the
bottlenecks, and optimize the hardware, systems, and
network infrastructure, if needed.
Here’s how one leading company approached per-
formance and load testing of SAP HANA. Using three
analytics systems, the company tracked its computing,
network, and storage tiers specifically for SAP HANA
— all while monitoring the performance of a virtual
SAP HANA system while applying a large production
workload.
The company applied Worksoft Performance
software for performance and load testing, using SAP
financial month-end closing processes as a benchmark.
The workload simulated more than a thousand simul-
taneous users placing orders, viewing stock availability,
performing shipments, and conducting other functions.
This all happened while resource-intensive MRP jobs
were running in the background for consolidation, and
creating tens of gigabytes of SAP HANA logs for data
replication at remote sites. The company’s hybrid cloud
capabilities were also tested.
After conducting these tests, the company was able
to confirm that the deployment would perform as
planned, and see in advance what effect a wide variety
of business activities would have on SAP HANA per-
formance. With automation, the company was able to
do so in a quick, cost-effective manner that would help
them establish confidence in the new system before
going live.
Automate for SAP HANA Project SuccessWith the pace of change in big data, you can no longer
afford to rely on manual effort to ensure quality and
performance. Automation is the new standard for func-
tional and performance validation.
For SAP HANA projects, automation will help your
company avoid business disruption, ensure data qual-
ity and deliver faster, better technology deployment.
Companies can accelerate SAP HANA projects and
ensure performance across every end-to-end business
process touched by SAP HANA. For more information,
visit us at www.worksoft.com.
Functional testing
Performancetesting
SAP HANAquality
assurance
Business processes
Dat
a vo
lum
es
FIGURE 1 Achieve business process quality for SAP HANA
with functional and performance validation
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Dan BaigentSenior Director
SanDisk Global Technology Ecosystem
Optimize Your SAP HANA Deployment with Scalable, Flash-Based StorageHow Flash Technology Is Transforming SAP HANA Economics and Performance
Enterprises are increasingly considering flash tech-
nology as a way to improve their data centers.
SanDisk has been helping customers transform their
data centers by flash-enabling databases and other
transactional workloads to create greater levels of tech-
nical and cost efficiencies and drive higher application
performance and densities. Adding the right flash in the
right places is key to optimizing not just performance,
but also reliability and scale. This is good news for
SAP HANA environments, which are ripe for this type
of optimization.
Working with SAP, SanDisk has created a portfolio
of products that help enable enterprise customers to
deploy high-performance infrastructure for SAP appli-
cations and scalable systems. A primary focus for this
partnership has been the SanDisk ION Accelerator ap-
pliance, an SAP-certified all-flash appliance that provides
unique capabilities for deploying highly scalable, high-
performance SAP HANA deployments as part of the
SAP HANA tailored data center integration offering. The
SanDisk ION Accelerator appliance allows enterprises to
use storage area network (SAN) architectures for SAP
HANA for centralized data management processes such
as data center backup and disaster recovery. Shared stor-
age is useful to consider as a way to move log and data
volumes off of individual SAP HANA appliance nodes as
a shared resource. Let’s look at SAP HANA tailored data
center integration in more detail, and what it means for
your infrastructure options.
What Is SAP HANA Tailored Data Center Integration?SAP HANA began as a clustered appliance model that
required that the server, software, networking, and stor-
age were all contained within an SAP HANA node.
These nodes could then be scaled across multiple ap-
pliances as the SAP HANA database capacity require-
ments increased, with data shared across the cluster.
With SAP HANA tailored data center integration,
SAP HANA software can now be deployed across mul-
tiple SAP HANA nodes while moving the persistent
storage to an external set of certified storage solutions.
This architecture allows customers to tailor their SAP
HANA infrastructure to use existing and new SAN
infrastructure and introduces flexible deployment op-
tions for SAP HANA infrastructure. With more choice
and flexibility, companies are no longer limited to a
small set of options.
Provided that the server and storage systems are SAP
certified, SAP HANA tailored data center integration
enables customers to meet their deployment require-
ments in a more flexible manner than was previously
thought possible.
While this flexibility can increase the complexity of
the overall installation, deployment, and management
of SAP HANA infrastructure, it can also simplify data
management processes by taking advantage of shared
storage resources and existing data management poli-
cies. Companies deploying SanDisk ION Accelerator
appliances with SAP HANA tailored data center integra-
tion can dramatically reduce the per-node storage costs
while also ensuring high transactional performance.
A single pair of SanDisk ION Accelerator appliances
deployed in a high availability configuration, each using
as few as four units of rack space, can meet the required
performance for up to 32 SAP HANA nodes. The precise
number of SanDisk ION Accelerator appliances required
to support a given SAP HANA configuration is a func-
tion of the memory size of each SAP HANA node and the
number of such nodes deployed in an SAP HANA cluster,
Provided that the server and storage systems
are SAP certified, SAP HANA tailored data
center integration enables customers to
meet their deployment requirements in a
more flexible manner than was previously
thought possible.
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but with up to 32 nodes supported on one high availabil-
ity pair, deployments of multiple terabytes of SAP HANA
database can easily be achieved with plenty of room for
growth — and without additional cost (see Figure 1).
Speed and ReliabilityThe all-flash SanDisk ION Accelerator appliance has
been designed from the ground up to focus on high-
performance, efficiency, and highly scalable shared stor-
age. It offers up to:
■ 1.7 million input/output operations per second (IOPS)
■ 56 microsecond access latency
■ 23 gigabits per second of bandwidth for OLTP
(transactional) and OLAP (analytics) workload
acceleration
This makes the SanDisk ION Accelerator appliance one
of the fastest options for SAP HANA tailored data center
integration deployments and ensures maximum perfor-
mance for SAP HANA data management, including trans-
action logs that can be a bottleneck for performance.
Depending on the configuration, a SanDisk ION
Accelerator appliance can contain up to 51.2 terabytes of
flash storage, controlled by four storage processors and
optimized for throughput, bandwidth, and ultra-low
latency. The SanDisk ION Accelerator appliance can be
deployed in a high availability clustered pair, providing
additional data integrity and protection with redun-
dancy at the component, appliance, and software levels.
ScalabilityWith the SAP HANA enterprise storage certifica-
tion, the SanDisk ION Accelerator appliance is one
of the fastest, most reliable, and most scalable shared
storage platforms for SAP HANA databases.1 Support-
ing up to 32 SAP HANA nodes on a single SanDisk ION
Accelerator appliance high availability pair, it is possible
to deploy multiple terabytes of SAP HANA database
capacity and leverage the performance of the SanDisk
ION Accelerator appliance for all data snapshots, trans-
action logs, and shared file system resources.
This means you can deploy your current SAP HANA
workloads on a minimal number of SanDisk ION Accel-
erator appliance pairs and even have room to scale your
SAP HANA compute nodes without having to deploy addi-
tional shared storage. The SanDisk ION Accelerator appli-
ance provides fast overall transaction speeds, especially for
write-intensive transactional workloads, fast recovery from
SAP HANA node failures, while maintaining overall per-
formance and reliability for your SAP HANA environment.
Learn MoreEnterprises can deploy SAP HANA infrastructure in a
number of ways, but need to balance cost, complexity,
and performance to determine which solution is right
for their SAP HANA use case. As their SAP HANA capac-
ity requirements increase, they need an architecture that
can keep up with their growing needs while also main-
taining cost-effective transaction performance. For those
that want to consider deploying SAP HANA on a shared
storage architecture, the SanDisk ION Accelerator appli-
ance is a simple, cost-effective, and blazingly fast option.
To learn more about the all-flash SanDisk ION
Accelerator appliance and the potential for transforming
your SAP HANA environment, visit http://bigdataflash.
sandisk.com/ion-accelerator.
1 See http://global.sap.com/community/ebook/2014-09-02-hana-hardware/enEN/enterprise-storage.html.
SAP HANA Nodes (n+1)Data and log volumes con�gured for each node
Linear scaling: Add pairs for additional performance or capacity
LUN 0LUN 0
LUN 1LUN 1
SanDisk IONAccelerator
403b
SanDisk IONAccelerator
FIGURE 1 The SanDisk ION Accelerator appliance deployed with SAP HANA tailored data center integration reduces per-node stor-
age costs and ensures high transactional performance
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Tag RobertsonSenior Product and Alliance Manager
Lenovo
Maximize Your SAP Deployments with Large Memory Capacity and a Common Server Infrastructure
The SAP HANA database easily integrates online
transaction and analytics processing, offering the
potential for many new business use cases. Whether
it’s the new reporting capabilities with SAP Business
Warehouse (SAP BW) and SAP Business Planning and
Consolidation, or new transactional capabilities with
SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA), com-
panies need to ensure that their server infrastructure is
dependable so that they can achieve these capabilities.
The server infrastructure must integrate into the exist-
ing SAP application landscape, needs to be scalable as
data requirements grow, and must incorporate critical
IT management processes such as high availability,
disaster recovery, and data backup.
While Lenovo may be a new brand in the enterprise
server marketplace, the acquisition of the System x
server division from IBM — which includes server and
services solutions for SAP HANA — brings with it a
legacy of enterprise innovation. System x has a strong
heritage of SAP HANA deployments and has shipped
over 3,600 servers to SAP HANA customers.
Scaling SAP BW and SAP Business Planning and ConsolidationDepending on the type of SAP application you are
planning to deploy, you may have different scaling and
availability requirements. The table structures in the
application dictate the type of scaling required. SAP
BW and SAP Business Planning and Consolidation are
structured with row and columnar formatted data. The
row data is stored in a master server node and deter-
mines the minimum memory sizing requirements
for all server nodes in the cluster. The columnar data
can be split across multiple server nodes in a cluster
configuration. Single as well as multi-node cluster
implementations are possible depending on your sizing
requirements.
The minimum SAP HANA scale-out cluster con-
figuration consists of three server nodes: one master
server node for row store and two worker server nodes
for columnar data. This configuration is not fault tol-
erant. Most IT organizations avoid unplanned outages
by implementing an additional standby node for fully
automated failover and high availability.
The Lenovo System x certified configurations for
SAP HANA use the IBM General Parallel File System
(GPFS) and offer the significant scaling and high avail-
ability capabilities needed for new business-critical
applications, including:
■ Scaling up to two terabytes per node
■ Scaling out to 112 terabytes
■ Integrated high availability and failover
■ Choice of synchronous disaster recovery using GPFS
or SAP HANA system replication
When evaluating server infrastructure options for
SAP BW or SAP Business Planning and Consolidation,
you need to consider several key factors, such as memory
scalability, high availability, and failover functionality.
Because the sizing of the master node can determine the
sizing for each server node in the cluster, it is important
to be able to scale up the memory of the master node.
SAP determines the server sizing and memory re-
quirements of its applications based on a number of
factors, including memory per processor core ratios.
Based on the current ratios, the maximum memory ca-
pacity for each node in the eight-socket Lenovo System
x3950 X6 server based on Intel Xeon Processor E7v2 is
two terabytes.
Server infrastructure must integrate into the
existing SAP application landscape, needs
to be scalable as data requirements grow,
and must incorporate critical IT management
processes such as high availability, disaster
recovery, and data backup.
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With GPFS, you can scale out to 112 terabytes of SAP
HANA memory capacity. In addition, you can set up high
availability nodes that handle auto host failover if a server
node in the cluster goes down. Large cluster configura-
tions can implement failure groups that allow the cluster
to be segmented into groups of nodes. A standby node can
then be assigned to a specific segment in the cluster.
There are still some SAP BW customers that may
not be ready to make the move to SAP HANA because
they cannot migrate to SAP BW 7.3, a prerequisite for
moving to SAP HANA. For these customers, the only
option for real-time analytics is SAP BW Accelerator.
Lenovo offers the latest server configurations for SAP
BW Accelerator, enabling customers to access real-time
analytics in their current environment. The latest con-
figurations are based on the Lenovo Flex System x240
compute node and IBM System Storage v3700. These
configurations are delivered as an integrated solution
and can quickly be inserted into existing SAP BW en-
vironments. There is also an option for a single server
configuration based on Lenovo System x3850 X6.
Scaling SAP S/4HANAThe scaling requirements for SAP S/4HANA are differ-
ent from those for SAP BW and SAP Business Planning
and Consolidation because SAP S/4HANA has very
large tables and requires a large, contiguous memory
space. As a result, these applications require a large
symmetric multi-processing capability with large mem-
ory capacity. As the database grows, it is critical to have
the ability to scale up the server infrastructure to keep
pace with data growth.
Lenovo System x and Flex System servers have the
ability to support eight processors with 15 cores in each
Intel Xeon E7v2 processor, providing up to six terabytes
of memory for SAP HANA applications in production
environments and up to eight processors and 12 tera-
bytes of memory for non-production environments.
Operational ConsiderationsIn addition to having a server with large memory
capacity, it is important to have common server infra-
structure for development, test, quality assurance, and
production environments. To simplify management
and reduce operational costs, organizations should
standardize around a platform that can both scale up
and scale out memory, so that common system man-
agement practices can be established to maintain and
update business-critical systems for SAP HANA.
Choosing server infrastructure that can seamlessly
scale from single-server configurations to multi-server
cluster configurations provides investment protection
by allowing you to deploy the same server platform in
development, test, and production environments. This
further enables a common software stack and server
management policy.
The Lenovo System x configurations with GPFS can
support multiple generations of SAP HANA server
technology in a single cluster. In addition, if your IT or-
ganization is resource constrained, Lenovo Enterprise
Solution Services can help you manage and maintain
your SAP HANA server infrastructure.
The Lenovo System x solution for SAP HANA can
also help customers that have strict data security and
management requirements. The native cryptographic
capabilities of the advanced version of GPFS include
the secure deletion of data. This ensures data confi-
dentiality in a multisite disaster recovery implementa-
tion because all at-rest and in-flight data between data
centers is encrypted, and because only encrypted SAP
HANA data leaves the data center.
This is ideal for installations using shared leased lines
or public internet connections for their high availabil-
ity and disaster recovery setup. It also helps prevent
data leakage when SAP HANA servers are improperly
decommissioned.
Learn MoreApplications such as SAP BW powered by SAP HANA
and SAP Business Planning and Consolidation require
a scale-out architecture to support large memory re-
quirements, while SAP S/4HANA typically requires a
large scale-up memory architecture. Choosing server
infrastructure that can seamlessly scale from single-
server configurations to multi-server cluster configura-
tions provides investment protection by allowing you
to deploy the same server platform in development,
test, and production environments for SAP BW or SAP
S/4HANA, enabling you to have a common server plat-
form, software stack, and server management policy
across all of your SAP application environments.
Lenovo’s System x enterprise heritage and experi-
ence in installing and managing SAP HANA systems
can help you speed your SAP HANA deployment and
realize the business potential that new SAP HANA
applications enable. For more information, visit
www.lenovo.com/servers.
Choosing server
infrastructure that
can seamlessly scale
from single-server
configurations to
multi-server cluster
configurations
provides investment
protection by allow-
ing you to deploy
the same server
platform in develop-
ment, test, and
production environ-
ments for SAP BW
or SAP S/4HANA.
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A Seamlessly Scalable Single-Node InfrastructureBoosting Your Underlying Technology to Keep Up with Today’s Data Needs
Brian FreedVice President, In-Memory
ArchitectureSGI
W ith SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP
S/4HANA), SAP has doubled down on its
mission of becoming the cloud company powered
by SAP HANA. The SAP Simple Finance solution
demonstrates unequivocally that SAP S/4HANA will
be the company’s unifying technology platform
moving forward.
One of the drivers behind this effort is the desire to
reduce business process complexity for organizations as
they engineer their underlying infrastructures. And, to
help further this goal, just as SAP HANA has evolved
from a database and sidecar accelerator into the default
platform for all SAP solutions, so too have its options
for orchestrating an infrastructure to support scalabil-
ity, growth, and operational simplicity.
Consider SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) pow-
ered by SAP HANA, a popular SAP HANA use case
that, because of its analytical nature, can be supported
with a scale-out network cluster. Conversely, the more
transaction-based SAP Business Suite powered by SAP
HANA and SAP S/4HANA have fewer options for a
cluster deployment. For an enterprise that plays with
many terabytes of data, a single-node, scale-up deploy-
ment is the logical choice to support transactional
coherence in the stack as well as to simplify technology
at the architecture level.
Simplicity Behind the ScenesAt its core, SAP HANA is a unifying platform intended
to reduce complexity and drive innovation. It stands to
reason, then, that an organization that leverages this
technology — especially one that uses SAP S/4HANA
to run the entire business in real time — also leverage
an SAP-certified hardware vendor with expertise in re-
ducing complexity, and one that has used this extensive
experience to engineer a purpose-built architecture
specifically for SAP HANA.
This is what sets SGI apart from other SAP-certified
appliance and hardware vendors that deliver general-
purpose solutions applicable to SAP HANA. SGI UV
for SAP HANA leverages SGI’s heritage in building
and providing large, scale-up, single-node systems, and
it was built from the ground up specifically to support
large and growing SAP HANA software environments.
A new offering in the SGI UV server line built for SAP
HANA, SGI UV for SAP HANA provides four distinct
advantages.
1. Seamless Scalability
Most general-purpose scale-up systems are limited to
a maximum of an eight-socket single-node solution,
which requires the adoption of a scale-out cluster to sup-
port further growth. SGI UV for SAP HANA, however,
scales quickly and seamlessly in four-socket increments
far beyond the eight-socket limitation of other systems.
A four-socket SGI appliance, for example, can scale up
as a single node to eight sockets in roughly 90 minutes,
and this seamless scalability continues all the way to 32
sockets. SGI UV for SAP HANA is currently certified for
four- and eight-socket configurations, with certification
pending for scalability up to 32 sockets. This means that
an enterprise can confidently limit capital expenditures
(CAPEX) to an appliance that meets the current busi-
ness requirements without fear that future growth will
require excessive downtime or forklift upgrades.
2. Operational Simplicity
By delivering this scale-up capability in a single-node
deployment, operational simplicity is unparalleled.
Cluster management is known for its proliferation of
network interconnects, a massive storage area network,
cumbersome upgrades, and complex day-to-day admin-
istration. A growing level of complexity when scaling
out in a cluster is just part of the deal. Scaling up in a
A single-node, scale-up deployment is the logical choice to
support transactional coherence in the stack as well as to
simplify technology at the architecture level.
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single node allows for exponential operational capacity
without that complexity, and with far lower total cost of
ownership after the initial capital expense.
3. Future-Proof Architecture
From a hardware component perspective, SGI UV for
SAP HANA is socket compatible across the next three
generations of Intel chip sets, so enterprises can be
confident that today’s in-memory investment can be
maintained and leveraged and can support upgrades
throughout the life of the system.
Additionally, SGI UV for SAP HANA all but guaran-
tees a future-proof architecture to meet an enterprise’s
planned and unplanned needs. If an organization sees
its database expanding at a pace that will outgrow its
infrastructure, it doesn’t have to buy the system that
will support where the business will be three to five
years down the road. Instead, it will know that it can
scale as needed, in four-socket increments, so it does
not have to pay for unused capacity. Likewise, the abil-
ity to scale up to, pending certification, 32 sockets in
a single node provides a safety net for growth in the
event of an unexpected acquisition or surprise merger.
4. Enterprise-Class RAS
SGI UV for SAP HANA provides enterprise-class reli-
ability, availability, and serviceability (RAS). Its Linux
x86 environment carries over the features and func-
tionality typical of a Unix deployment in a database
environment, such as hot swappable components and
software tools to enable proactive monitoring and
predictive failure analysis.
An Interruption-Free FutureOne of the proprietary technologies included with
SGI UV for SAP HANA is SGI Memlog, a fully auto-
mated functionality that, combined with SGI’s remote
monitoring and support, aids seamless operations.
While errors in memory are a foregone conclusion,
allowing them to disrupt operations doesn’t have to be.
Addressing the resilience of a known architecture fail-
ure is the SGI Memlog differentiator. In the case of a
single-bit or other minor error, those are immediately
corrected. What sets apart SGI Memlog, however, is how
it can identify at a granular level the specific error occur-
rence. The system then migrates all of that block’s data
to a new block and permanently retires it, with the sys-
tem fully up and running. This is seamless to the appli-
cation and prevents double-bit memory errors that are
uncorrectable and can lead to system failures. In addition,
memlog events are tracked by SGI’s remote monitoring
and support software to deliver predictive analysis.
Through this and other embedded tools, the mean
time to failure in the SGI single-node architecture has
been improved by more than three and a half times
over the past few years. This was important function-
ality to carry over for SGI UV for SAP HANA, where
uptime becomes much more critical.
Unlimited PotentialThe prospect of unlimited potential was one of the
primary considerations that led SGI to move into the
SAP ecosystem. While SAP is a new partnership for SGI
— we delivered our first SAP-certified system about
six months ago1 — SGI is no stranger to large-scale in-
memory systems, having delivered seven generations of
single-node scale-up systems to hundreds of customers
in industries spanning manufacturing to life sciences.
When SAP HANA became generally available about
four years ago, the symbiotic relationship between the
technology and how it played to our core competency
became apparent rather quickly, and we were pre-
sented with the opportunity to expand our footprint
beyond the traditional technical computing space in
which we’d been operating. As more and more com-
panies adopt SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA, and as
working with live data becomes the norm, the need
for enhanced RAS and seamless growth seems inevi-
table. While we expect there will come a time when a
16-socket, 12-terabyte system will be mainstream, SGI
RAS and scalability features are native to every SGI
appliance from our four-socket entry-level solutions to
the certification-pending 32-socket appliance.
Learn more about SGI UV for SAP HANA at
www.sgi.com/saphana. For more information about
the SGI UV for SAP HANA Try and Buy program,
please contact [email protected].
1 See www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2014/october/sap_hana.html.
As more and more companies adopt SAP HANA and
SAP S/4HANA, and as working with live data becomes
the norm, the need for enhanced RAS and seamless
growth seems inevitable.
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The Next Revolution in Analytics: SAP S/4HANAReshape Business Processes On the Fly with Real-Time Insight
Jagadish BandlaPrincipal
US SAP HANA Analytics Leader
Deloitte Consulting LLP
Krishnankant (KK) Dave
Principal US SAP Cloud Services
Leader Deloitte Consulting LLP
The word “analytics” often conjures images of after-
the-fact investigations — big-picture analyses that
can provide insight for strategic planning and smarter
decision making in the future. Many people view
analytics as a tool that makes them wiser in a holistic
way, but don’t see how it can be applied to routine,
daily tasks. With the right solutions and applications,
however, analytics capabilities can provide insights
instantly during specific but commonplace business
processes — whether it’s something like producing a
sales quote or making everyday procurement decisions.
The challenge lies with today’s complex business
processes. When many connected business processes
culminate in an important event or interaction, the
employees guiding the process steps or activities may
not have access to all the information needed to make
truly informed decisions.
But new tools such as SAP Business Suite 4 SAP
HANA (SAP S/4HANA) can push data-driven insights
to people at the right moment, in an intuitive manner
that can make it easier to assess information and make
quick decisions while executing business processes.
Let’s look at a specific example of how SAP S/4HANA
can help improve a daily task.
Critical Sales Data at Your FingertipsThe sales cycle is a powerful example of the opportuni-
ties made possible through process analytics. Think of
all the opportunities that surround the sales-order entry
process — one of the simplest and most common pro-
cesses taking place every day within many companies.
When taking an order, a good sales representative can
upsell, cross-sell, bundle, and lay the groundwork for the
next sale — if they have instant access to the right data.
Which products are available? Where are they located?
How quickly could they get to the customer? How much
did the customer buy last time? Based on run rates,
when will they exhaust their current supply?
SAP S/4HANA allows sales representatives to use
search-engine capabilities in a system to begin looking
for products or materials as the customer is speaking.
For example, sales reps can type in a part description or
part number, and options instantly appear in a browser
in the same manner as an online search. Once the prod-
uct is located, representatives can identify availability
across locations, making smarter decisions based on
inventories and other data points.
This same type of functionality can give the repre-
sentative access to customer-specific information: What
were the last three orders sold to this customer? What
margin was earned on those sales? What are the top
10 products purchased by the customer? These are the
types of questions sales representatives have asked for
years, but only now are they truly able to have instant
access to the answers. And that can make a huge differ-
ence when it comes to the customer experience, com-
pany efficiency, and revenue.
Uncover Actionable InsightSales-order entry is just one realm in which SAP
S/4HANA-driven process analytics can provide instant
insight. Each business process across an organization
represents an additional opportunity for acting instantly
on real-time insight.
To learn how Deloitte is helping companies signifi-
cantly improve business processes using SAP S/4HANA-
enabled analytics capabilities, visit www.deloitte.com/
sap or email us at [email protected] and kdave@
deloitte.com. New tools such as SAP S/4HANA can
push data-driven insights to people at the
right moment.As used in this document, “Deloitte” means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.
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Harness the Potential of Unlimited Data Storage
Dr. Werner HopfCEO
Dolphin Enterprise Solutions Corporation
The pace of technology innovation is accelerating
rapidly. The cloud, mobile technology, and the
Internet of Things (IoT) have gone from buzzwords to
reality for many organizations, as companies quickly
adopt these new technologies to transform traditional
businesses into digital enterprises.
For organizations running SAP HANA, in-memory
computing is an essential part of moving into this new
digital business age. It enables companies to manage the
increasing amount of data that these new technologies
generate and provides the real-time information that
managers need to make critical business decisions.
Yet, with so many technology options available and
IT costs growing rapidly, organizations must invest
wisely to ensure that they keep the cost of innovation
in line with its value to the business.
Innovation Challenge: Managing Data GrowthHistorically, when businesses collected large amounts
of transactional data, they would quickly dispose of
the details and only keep aggregated information. It
was simply too expensive to store every bit of data.
With SAP HANA, however, many companies are
now choosing to keep all of this valuable data. Retail
companies, for example, can leverage transactional data
from customer receipts to streamline financial audits
and internal fraud investigations, or to develop new
business models and pricing algorithms.
However, with many high-volume retailers report-
ing a monthly data growth rate of more than two
terabytes (see Figure 1) and retention periods of
seven years or more, the cost of keeping this level
of transactional detail often remains too high for
many companies.
A Strategy for Controlling CostsOrganizations can lower the cost of innovation by ar-
chiving static data and storing it in the most appro-
priate and cost-effective location: using SAP HANA,
using nearline storage, or in the cloud.
This way, the company can retain a virtually unlim-
ited amount of data at a fraction of the cost. That data
can then be used to answer compelling business ques-
tions that were previously unanswerable — in the case
of retail companies, questions such as “How effective
was last week’s promotion?” or “Is a loss leader really
generating additional revenue for the company?”
Learn MoreWhile many organizations can’t answer these types of
questions now, the power and flexibility of SAP HANA
— combined with the wealth of data available from new
technologies — makes it a possibility in the near future.
Innovation cannot come at any price, however. For
companies that plan to invest in digital business initia-
tives, controlling data growth with an innovation strat-
egy can keep the cost of progress under control today
and in the future.
For more information on how Dolphin can help
you develop an innovation strategy for SAP HANA,
go to www.dolphin-corp.com or email contact@
dolphin-corp.com. FIGURE 1 Typical data storage needs of a large retailer
when merging data from a point-of-sale (POS) system
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SAP HANA Innovations Touch All Aspects of an OrganizationSAP S/4HANA Is the Latest in a Long Line of Releases
Philippe DendievelPartner
Delaware Consulting
The speed of innovation at SAP is fast, and it only
shows signs of accelerating. The consistent evolu-
tion of the SAP HANA platform most recently pro-
duced its newest iteration: SAP Business Suite 4 SAP
HANA (SAP S/4HANA).
SAP S/4HANA builds upon SAP HANA-based in-
novations, with a simplified database (no materialized
aggregates) and rewritten, optimized code. It fully
leverages SAP HANA’s transactional and real-time
analytics capabilities through SAP HANA Live and
delivers an improved end-user interface based on SAP
Fiori. SAP S/4HANA is available on premise and in the
cloud on a multitenant SAP HANA database.
SAP’s innovation spreads across all facets of the en-
terprise, from the finance department to operations,
supply chain, and the warehouse. These innovations
allow companies to gain real-time business insights, run
smarter apps built for specific roles in the enterprise,
and deliver unprecedented user experience while main-
taining a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
A Wave of New Features, Flexibility, and FunctionalityOne prominent place of innovation for SAP solutions is
finance. SAP Simple Finance delivers the new genera-
tion of accounting, cash management, and integrated
business planning capabilities with higher agility, simu-
lation, and real-time insights.
In business intelligence, SAP Business Warehouse (SAP
BW) customers now have more agility and self-service
ability. With new Eclipse-based modeling, real-time op-
tions, self-service with SAP Lumira, solutions for nearline
storage, and dynamic tiering to store data, companies can
publish SAP BW objects into SAP HANA views that de-
liver self-service capabilities at a stunning performance.
SAP HANA Live brings more than 1,000 views on
SAP ERP, enabling real-time operational reporting and
dashboards. In fact, they can be combined with SAP BW
powered by SAP HANA views, enabling you to combine
operational reporting with historical data based on the
data warehouse.
Multitenancy, available in SAP HANA service pack
9, supports multitenant database containers. This up-
grade is vital in enabling multiple SAP applications to
run on a single SAP HANA system, which optimizes
investments in hardware and results in a lower TCO.
Additional innovations include expansion in the area of
virtualization, SAP HANA tailored data center integra-
tion options for reusing storage networks, and support
for less expensive central processing units.
But there is more than just the database. SAP HANA
allows the seamless integration of any data in SAP Busi-
ness Suite, such as point-of-sale (POS) data. SAP for
Retail is being enhanced with SAP Customer Activity
Repository and SAP hybris Marketing. SAP Customer
Activity Repository includes key performance indicator
dashboards on consumer views and product views.
SAP hybris Marketing embeds advanced analytics with
SAP Audience Discovery and Targeting. This enables
the segmentation of customers as well as information
gleaned from recommendation engines that make use
of SAP HANA’s predictive analysis library. SAP
Customer Activity Repository and SAP hybris Marketing
currently integrate with SAP Cloud for Customer.
Learn MoreDelaware Consulting specializes in SAP HANA imple-
mentations, including SAP Business Suite powered
by SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA, SAP Fiori, and more.
We are the proud recipients of the 2015 EMEA Partner
Excellence Award for SAP Business Suite powered by
SAP HANA.1
Delaware Consulting is a global business consulting
leader offering advanced solutions and services to orga-
nizations striving for a sustainable competitive advan-
tage. As a certified partner of SAP, OpenText, Microsoft,
and Sitecore, Delaware Consulting helps organizations
reach the next level of customer experience, operational
excellence, or business insights. For more information,
visit www.delawareconsulting.com.
1 See www.delawareconsulting.com/company/news.aspx?Title= Delaware_Consulting_receives_EMEA_Award_for_SAP_HANA.
SAP S/4HANA
builds upon
SAP HANA-based
innovations,
with a simplified
database and
rewritten,
optimized code.
S-26
TAKING THE NEXT STEP WITH SAP HANA | SAPINSIDER SPECIAL REPORT
Reproduced from the Apr n May n Jun 2015 issue of SAPinsider with permission from its publisher, WIS Publishing | SAPinsiderOnline.com
From Business Enablers to Business Catalysts: CFOs Are Empowered by SAP Simple Finance
Ken ToddNorth America SAP
Finance Leader Capgemini
Juan Carlos Martinez-Gil
SAP HANA Leader, Continental Europe
Capgemini
With businesses becoming increasingly digital,
the role of finance departments is changing
dramatically, and CFOs have an unprecedented
opportunity to become business catalysts within their
organizations. Finance departments are now expected
to go beyond their traditional governance roles to
actually engage in strategic decision making, and
CFOs everywhere are looking for new ways to unlock
innovation and growth.
However, many CFOs’ transformation agendas are
held back by their companies’ complex technology
landscapes and disparate ERP systems, which often ren-
der efficient closing and reporting impossible within ex-
pected business timelines. These cumbersome systems
hamper the management of working capital and make
it difficult for finance departments to get instantaneous
and reliable figures about profit and loss or actual ver-
sus forecasted budgets. Moreover, they impede finance
departments’ flexibility to innovate in a world in which
on-demand reporting is now a requirement.
Real-Time Insights and User-Friendly AnalyticsSAP Simple Finance and Capgemini’s digital and
finance transformation expertise offer a solution to
these problems. SAP Simple Finance provides finance
departments with access to real-time insights and user-
friendly analytics from a variety of data sources. Part of
SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP
S/4HANA), SAP Simple Finance is easy
to use and simple to adopt, enabling
intuitive reporting via a user-friendly,
mobile-ready interface. SAP Simple
Finance’s instant insight modernizes
and automates processes, drives more
robust data models using real-time
information, and allows for more stra-
tegic decision making to put the CFO
firmly in the driver’s seat when it comes
to organizational transformation.
Making Finance EasierAs its name indicates, SAP Simple Finance is designed
to be headache-free, and Capgemini’s Financials EDGE
and industry-specific SAP solutions are designed to make
the move to SAP Simple Finance even easier, in any
industry. Pre-configured and SAP-certified, Capgemini’s
Financials EDGE and sector-specific SAP offerings
accelerate the move to SAP Simple Finance by leveraging
configuration templates based on finance and industry
best practices. They draw on Capgemini’s industry and
financial expertise to reduce the complexity inherent
in moving to any new technology, and because they’re
accelerators, they offer significant cost savings.
Whether your organization is a retail or utilities com-
pany, and whether you’re present in one country or
around the world, Capgemini can help you maximize
the value of SAP Simple Finance. No matter where you
are in your journey to empower your finance teams,
Capgemini can assist at all stages of the process, in-
cluding developing a strong business case, devising a
strategy that will create long-term business value, or
managing technical aspects such as application ratio-
nalization, harmonization, and consolidation.
Delivering SAP HANA GloballySince launching initiatives in 2011 as a first mover in
the SAP HANA space, Capgemini has led the way in
delivering innovative SAP HANA projects for companies
in a variety of industries around the world. Capgemini
has supported these deliveries with global delivery
capability enabled by an SAP HANA Center of
Excellence and a worldwide force of SAP HANA ex-
perts. Capgemini was also the first company to develop
solutions specifically for SAP HANA and won the 2014
SAP Pinnacle Award for SAP HANA Adoption Partner
of the Year.1 To begin the journey to intuitive, mod-
ern finance, consider SAP Simple Finance. For more
information, visit www.capgemini.com/sap-hana.
1 See the article “Top SAP Partners Help Customers Run Simpler” by Steve Graham in the October-December 2014 issue of SAPinsider (SAPinsiderOnline.com).
Cumbersome systems
hamper the management
of working capital and
make it difficult for
finance departments to
get instantaneous and
reliable data.