If you have been keeping a ear to the ground within the SAP world over the past 18 months, you would be blind to not have come across the term HANA. Here is a quick Q&A blog on Hana that will bring you up to date.
At the same time, there has also been a lot of talk about Cloud Based solutions and SAP have been involved with this with their ondemand service.
By joining these to technologies together (HANA in the cloud) is where I feel SAP are going to really step up to the plate and give their customers an environment where they can try out HANA in a Proof Of Concept (POC) sandpit type landscape.
Cost:
If you wanted to implement HANA within your own landscape you’re looking at a fairly large cash up front investment because HANA is best run as a “black box solution” from either HP, Dell or IBM (certified by SAP). As HANA is an In Memory Database (IMDB) application you are going to need a shed load of RAM in these servers to really see the value (a few million records in under a second) as well as some beefy CPU power, so running this on your local VM session or comodity based server, is not really going to give you the best POC for your business.
Cloud Solution:
A cloud based solution of HANA would be a great way for SAP to show their clients (and potential clients) how great SAP HANA could run in if correctly configured and running as an online solution.
More Information:
I’ve only touched the surface of what’s already being said out on the forums and blogs. Here are a few blog posts worth reading:
31/08/2011
Enterprise, SAP