SAP HANA, S/4 and IoT - why you should care

These are the most challenging times most SAP customers and service providers have lived in the last 20 years, since SAP transitioned from the mainframe world to the client-server world through the evolution from R/2 to the next generation of software announced in 1992 that was the R/3 system!

And the challenge comes associated with the fact that with the announcement from SAP that the future SAP ERP will be called S/4 and will only run on HANA, customers get faced with the fact that, wanting to keep using SAP Software for the long run, the adoption of SAP HANA is no longer a matter of “if” but rather a matter of how and when.

Also the emergence of Cloud and the multiple of options it entails, pushed by very different and sometimes conflicting messages from all the providers in the market, further adds to the challenge of making decisions on what is the best IT strategy and architecture to serve the business needs for the future.

Mix these with a very complex economic environment, with an increasingly de-regulated economy, where the easiness of movement of information, capital, people and goods across the globe is unprecedented, demanding for organizations to step up their business models to survive, in a way that they become prepared either to build and shape markets or to rapidly adapt to fast changing market conditions. In such an environment Information Technologies are more than ever a critical component of competitiveness.

No business organization can live today without information.

IT organizations need to make sense of all the “noise” happening in the market to find what is the most appropriate choice for their particular situation - today and for the future.

Through this post, I’ll share my understanding on a number of changes happening, in a way that IT leaders can leverage them for a pragmatic and business wise decision process.

This is the first part of a series, being this part focused on starting to reflect on SAP HANA, S/4 and IoT, why they matter and their architecture implications.

This blog aims to demystify these concepts to those readers not yet familiar with this topic.

          SAP HANA, S/4 and the Internet of Things

In fact, it’s this reality of increased competitiveness that is driving for the emergence of new paradigms like “real time” and “automated machine-managed” business decision making.

As information, and the knowledge derived from that information, become increasingly critical for organizations, the next frontier is to be able to set rules for a business that – based on real-time data – makes it possible to steer decisions towards what is happening now or even what are the most likely future business conditions, and not only based on the information of what happened in the past.

Multiple events over the last decades have demonstrated that in just a few days, the business environment may observe changes so dramatic, that what might be a good decision based on the information of just 1 week ago, may now lead you to the abyss.

Also, the evolution of technology that enables today most devices to have communication capabilities and to generate data on their status and activity, associated with the increased availability of “public relevant business information”, like online exchange rates and whether conditions, makes that the volumes of data available for the organizations to analyze and decide upon, are exploding. In this space the buzz words of the moment are:

• Internet Of Things (IoT): referring to availability of “data generating devices” connected online and generating information to be processed by business systems;
• Social: referring for example to data on users activity on the internet, that represent as well massive volumes and variety of data;
• Big Data: that refers to the massive volumes of data, its massive variety and different value, which organizations need today to tackle with generated by all of the above.

All of this comes tied in to the massive growth of “mobile”, another buzz word that highlights the fact that today business users want – like private users – to have access in real time at their fingertips about what is happening with their businesses, where waiting hours or even minutes for the information to show up on the screen is not acceptable.

S/4 is SAP’s response to this need for organizations to operate in real time and to manage in an integrated way, not only the structured data that business systems have managed for the last two decades, but also the big data generated by Social and IoT. And S/4 is only powered by SAP HANA, as traditional databases are not able today to provide the capabilities to respond to this new reality.

It is no longer enough for business managers to know what happened in the past. Today is fundamental to know what is happening now – in real time – and based on trends and the inter-relation between multiple variables – internal and external – to forecast what the future may be, enabling a “what if & future looking” decision making.

It was because of this reality that SAP has come up with SAP HANA, a platform that merges transaction processing, operational reporting, and prospective analysis – all mobile enabled – on the same platform.

As you know, SAP HANA is way more than a database; it is indeed a data management platform architected for the current business environment of “uncertainty and fast pace of chance”.

To be able to tackle with this business reality, SAP broke with HANA a quite some long time computing paradigms:

• In-memory computing: store large volumes of business data in-memory for faster processing and “second grade” response times for mobile apps;
• Merge OLAP and OLTP: do transaction processing and analytics on the same platform enabling real-time prospective analysis upon current transactional data;
• Social and IoT: Integrated processing of structured and unstructured data, merging information from machine, social and the existing business structured data, to drive new business models and faster “time to action”.

Not wanting to cover all these in detail, as they have been widely communicated by SAP and each of these three aspects bring new variables to the table that SAP Architects haven’t faced until now, let us just spend some paragraphs on it, to explain their implications.

          In-memory computing

In-memory computing has been the most communicated characteristic of SAP HANA, as the basis for “faster data processing”.

Why is that?

In the late 90’s, one of the key barriers to enable computer systems to analyze and process larger amounts of data faster, was the limited computing capacity of existing systems.

In the end this is all a matter of affordability, as the cost of IT cannot be higher than the benefit IT brings to the business.

So, if you want to process a certain volume of data, you might need to spend such amounts on computing capacity, that a certain scenario wouldn’t just be sustainable, as the market might not pay the cost of such a solution.

This has made that for many years, a significant level of innovation brought to computer systems was targeted at increasing the computing power (the ability to process larger amounts of data faster) reflected in aspects like the increase of CPU clock speeds, increased capacity of RAM chips, reduced latency and increased bandwidth on the communication between CPU and RAM, alongside with a significant increase size in the CPU internal cache (working memory inside the CPU itself).

As the volumes of data managed by organizations increase, alongside with this massive increase in computing capacity, the bottleneck in computing systems has moved to data movement and transmission.

So, this movement opened the space to change paradigms: instead of storing data further away from the CPU, why not starting to store it as closer as possible? Instead of using the RAM just as a temporary buffer to hold data being processed, why not use RAM as a permanent store for data?

SAP was visionary in seeing the opportunity for this paradigm change, by bringing to market SAP HANA.

For organizations using RAM as a permanent store of data, that is accessible by the CPU faster than ever, means that with SAP HANA, they’ll be able to analyze more data faster, and so it opens the possibility of streaming in real time information from what is happening in the business, and make “automated” machine managed / rules based business decisions in real time.

Being the bottleneck these days on data transmission, but considering that the ratio of analyzed data for a business decision may only imply that less than 10% of it is newly generated data, we are definitely up for some significant paradigm shifts.

Note as well, that this idea has a significant lateral implication: now it’s possible to make this data accessible on mobile devices with “second grade” response times.

In an economic environment where uncertainty is the only thing businesses have as certain; this is definitely an edge for many organizations. But it will have implications on IT infrastructure requirements, which will translate in impacts on other business variables like risk and cost for example. We’ll explore these impacts further ahead in the document.

As SAP HANA stores data in RAM, which is a type of non-persistent memory and is internal to a computer, questions come up like: how do I protect this system from disaster, or how to I recover from a failure, what volume is affordable to store in memory for my business scenario, how do I operate and evolve such an environment, what communications architecture will I need to put in place to tackle these new volumes of processed and transmitted data.

          Merge OLTP and OLAP

The other characteristic communicated in regards to SAP HANA innovation, is the merge of OLTP and OLAP on the same platform.

In the past, for the same reasons referred on the previous point of affordability, software vendors designed two different platforms to make different types of processing for the business.

OLTP stands for online transaction processing. This system processed the transactions of what is happening in the business.

OLAP stands for online analytical processing. These systems were meant for data analysis and decision support.

Why were these two separate? Because, considering the limitations of past computer system architectures, it happened that performing the processing needed for the business analysis consumed all the resources on the system, making it that being both on the same platform, your business operations (transaction processing) would be negatively impacted. So, I would say this is one of the big reasons SAP has come up with the BW system in the early 2000’s.

So, vendors came with 2 different platform designs each one optimized to a type of processing, and built processes both to keep them isolated and minimize impacts of one on the other, while keeping them as aligned in terms of information as possible.

Again, this was another situation of computer systems innovation driven by business needs, but at the same time business functionality limited by technology limitations.

The exploding volumes of information organizations are managing for decision making, and the need to have increasingly more up-to-date information, has taken this model of OLAP and OLTP on separate systems reach its limit. And is clear that the “OLAP and OLTP on separate systems model” has reached its limit by observing the number of organizations where the 24 hours of a day are no longer enough to extract data from transaction processing systems, load it into analytic systems, and report on that data.

Here, SAP, leveraging a number of technology innovations saw also an opportunity to innovate, and by leveraging the massive computing capabilities that today’s systems have which have evolved a lot faster than the improvements in data communications, and by realizing that what makes today the separation of OLAP and OLTP reach its limit is the limitation on data movement and transmission, SAP designed a system that would be able to perform both simultaneously.

You may argue that SAP is going back to the model that existed 20 years ago. And we would say you are right. But 20 years in terms of business, is a lot of time. And the fact is that today the limitation is on data transmission and not on data processing like it was 20 years ago. So, who knows how long it will take for this balance to chance again.

This will also bring some questions like: how do we scale these systems to ensure we don’t fall again on the problems that led to separate OLAP and OLTP in the first place? How do we avoid these systems to become so huge that become unmanageable or that making them resilient becomes simply unaffordable.

          Big Data generated by Social and IoT

The last topic we want to touch is the growth of importance of unstructured data.

There has been processing of unstructured data for many years. For example, in the manufacturing industries, machines brought automation systems that generated files with logs of their activity. And in the 90’s there were already organizations that integrated this data in to business systems, for example to have automatic information of the produced quantities of goods.

The challenge with this data, generated by machines or by social media, is that it usually is not structured, unlike the business data we are used to process in the SAP world through tables and field definitions.

In this new world of Social and IoT we may be talking about images, audio files, videos and log files.

Being able to act upon these types of data, and integrating the knowledge extracted from them with the structured business knowledge we have on our transaction processing systems, may enable organizations in many industries to achieve cost savings and develop business innovations that set them apart from their competition.

The challenge for SAP architects is that the volumes and variety of data involved here are massive compared with what we were used to deal on the SAP Netweaver ABAP type of reality.

Just as an example, in the Netweaver world, to ensure performance, availability and resiliency on a database of 50 to 100 TB was a nightmare, noteworthy as most organizations work hard to contain growth and only very few in the world reach such volumes. In the non-structured data world, we may easily reach volumes in the “Petabyte scale”.

So this brings questions like: if it was challenging to ensure performance, availability and resiliency to SAP Application Landscapes in the Netweaver world, how to we respond to these needs when dealing with petabytes of unstructured data? And what is the most affordable way to store and process this type of data? Can it be in-memory? Will its volume overwhelm the transaction processing so impacting business operations?

          The challenge for SAP Architects from S/4, HANA and IoT

It is clear that there will be new challenges coming up to the hands of SAP Architects, and challenges that involve variables that most SAP Architects haven’t dealt with up until now.

There is then the need to make sense of all of this, and understand in what ways S/4 systems, and in general SAP HANA systems being or not in IoT scenarios, need to be architected to respond to the ever challenge of architects: design systems that respond to the business needs in a sustainable and affordable way.

The contraints are the same IT architects have been asked to respond to so far:

• Cost (of implementation, of operation and of change);
• Performance / stability;
• Availability;
• Security / recoverability.

Then the question is: what solutions respond to these constraints in the reality of S/4, SAP HANA and IoT?

Let's continue this discussion on my next blog post.

EMC Acquires Virtustream, the leader in cloud for mission critical apps like SAP HANA

EMC has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Virtustream!

This will dramaticaly improve the value of the EMC Federation in the SAP space, and will further simplify the deployment of SAP Workloads, including SAP HANA, for all those organizations looking for an Hybrid Cloud environment, that has the flexibility to adapt to each company's specific constraints in terms of Risk, Compliance, Technical and Financial conditions.

This is a BiiiG topic for SAP customers around the world and for service providers as well, and for that, let me spend some time to share my own personal perspective on why this matters to you.

The news came out yesterday, and you can read more about it, or subscribe to listen to the recording of the press conference at: http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2015/20150526-01.htm

Virtustream, being already quite known in the U.S. and in particular in the SAP World for providing Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, for enterprise, mission critical, high workload applications, isn't yet a familiar name in many other parts of the world.

To better understand Virtustream's current capabilities, have a look at the following charts from some of the Market Analysts:

Forrester classified Virtustream as the clear leader in "Hosted Private Cloud Solutions", and Gartner recognizes Virtustream's leadership as a niche player. Now with the EMC Federation on its back, Virtustream's (and the EMC Federation) position in Gartner's analysis, will only improve.

The relevance of the names already in Virtustream customer list also confirm their strength: http://www.virtustream.com/customers/list

So, let me share some words to explain my own personal perspective on what is the value for SAP Customers, from having Virtustream joining the EMC Federation as an independent company.

          What kind of applications (workload profiles) Virtustream specializes on ?

First of all, it's important to understand what kind of SAP Workloads Virtustream has been hosting.

So, let's imagine that you have two applications in your datacenter: one to support your "order to cash" process, including billing and accounts receivable, and another to do career planning and performance appraisal for your employees.

Both applications are important, but the impact of instability or even unavailability of these two applications on the ability for your company to keep operating, are significantly different.

If you loose your career planning and employee performance management system for a couple of days, your company will not stop to operate and generate revenues (and some employees may even be happy about it), while if you loose your "order to cash" system, money stops coming in and your company will go into serious trouble.

This is why, most companies can easily buy into the idea of running the "career planning and performance management" system in a public cloud environment (where they have NO span of control on the architecture stability and resilience), and hesitate a lot (not to say that won't even consider) to run their "order to cash" system in the cloud.

So, let's agree at this stage to call the "order to cash" system, a mission critical workload, in the sense that without it, companies loose their ability to keep operating and fulfill their goals, or even if those systems see their performance and stability decay, it will imply an important negative impact on business.

It's all a matter of risk evaluation. For organizations to consider running mission critical applications in a cloud environment, they will need to ensure a set of conditions: availability guarantee, performance guarantee, and ability to audit (and for the service provider to demonstrate) capability to operate such an environment in a stable and predictable way.

The majority of public cloud offerings do not offer such guarantees.

Well, Virtustream having been born by the hands of people coming from the SAP ecosystem, that had experience setting up and managing these mission critical systems, do fully understand the implications of hosting and operating such environments, and have build their offerings to address specifically the needs of the Global 1000 (the 1000 largest organizations in the world) in regards to cloud offerings for their most critical business systems.

Also Virtustream, understanding well the reality of these large global organizations, also understands that for some systems, those organizations - not wanting to engineer and manage them - may want to keep a significant span of control on them. Meaning, having them be operated in a "hosted, managed, private cloud environment". So, it's having the systems under their span of control (or even under their own property), but hosted and managed in a cloud model in the same way public clouds are managed, to reap all the benefits in terms of business agility, operational risk and costs that a cloud model can offer.

These companies may want as well to dynamically choose what systems run on their own private cloud, and which run on a public cloud, dynamically moving (and controlling the movement in real time) of these systems between their private cloud and the public cloud.

          What are the business benefits of the Virtustream model ?

Such a model enables them to manage risk in the sense that they decide which systems are 100% under their span of control, and which ones are not, by being able to dynamically move systems across boarders between their private cloud and the public cloud.

It enables them to manage cost, by ensuring the same efficient management model that exists in the cloud for a better utilization of their assets, while being able to leverage the public cloud for peaks in demand, avoiding the need to over provision capacity for projects, and keeping their "private systems" provisioned just for average workload needs, and so maximum utilization.

Here Virtustream is really unique as they charge by utilization, and not by allocated capacity like most cloud companies do, making them way more cost effective for that reason, and boosting the benefits for organizations from operating in a Hybrid Cloud Environment. This is a part of the Virtustream secret sauce, where they have come up for example with the concept of microVM.

It enables customers to be more agile, as Virtustream has embedded in their Cloud offering and orchestration software, way more than just provisioning of virtual servers. Coming from their SAP background, Virtustream founders have build in as well automation mechanisms for things like systems cloning and refresh (fundamental and usually labor intensive for most SAP customers), making it simpler for IT organizations to keep up with the demands from their business units.

And again, with the beauty of all of this, in having the private and public cloud resources managed through the same tool set, and both able to bring in the same benefits > complete transparency.

Don't want here to explain what is Virtustream, as you can have it explained in 5 minutes in the words of its founder and CEO "Rodney Rogers" at http://www.virtustream.com/blog/2015/05/24/virtustream-technology-overview/

          How Virtustream joining the EMC Federation, benefits SAP Customers in general ?

So, why is this so important for SAP Customers: Virtustream joining the EMC Federation as an independent company.

First of all, Virtustream has been working very closely with SAP (having SAP been one of the early investors in Virtustream) to drive cloud adoption for SAP applications, and SAP HANA in particular. There is a lot more to the collaboration between Virtustream and SAP, which you can read about at the Virtustream site and blog.

On the other side, Virtustream having started as a "Venture Capital Funded Company", would need at a certain point in time to expand their financing capabilities in order to scale and be able to keep up with the significant demand increase.

Also, to expand its reach it would need further access to the supporting technologies of their business model, and access to markets by means of a broader sales force generating demand for them.

Being today the collaboration between Virtustream and the SAP Community inside EMC already very close, being SAP one of the top strategic partners for the EMC federation of companies (EMC Information Information Infrastructure, VMware, Pivotal, VCE, RSA) and running Virtustream most of their operations on top of technologies from the EMC Federation (VCE VBlock, VMware, etc), all of this aligned to the partnering model the EMC Federation of companies fosters, I truly believe that Vistrustream was a perfect match for EMC.

So, joining the EMC Federation as an independent company will provide Virtustream the robustness of belonging to this amazing groups of companies, enabling it to accelerate their growth, expand their reach, and extend their coverage way further from their current market reach and portfolio. By being an independent company within the Federation, it will enable Virtustream "not to get dispersed or diluted" like it happens on many acquisitions in the IT world, and so keep focused on its unique business strategy. That is why it is referred on the announcement that Virtustream is now "EMC Strong".

As I meet with CIOs and their direct reports all over the world (just landing now coming from a CIO Summit in Prague), they all agree with my own experience that, what works for SAP Applications, will work for almost everything else as well. So I would say, that coming from an SAP background, it shouldn't be hard for Virtustream to expand their reach into other application areas.

With Virtustream, EMC completes its vision for an end-to-end cloud offering, from the "Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud" which aims to cover the private on-premise needs of customers, with Virtustream covering the on-premise and off-premise managed private clouds, and vCloud Air providing a completely public cloud environment (customer has no span of control on infrastructure architecture/operations), having these three working seamlessly.

In summary, for end customers: this acquisition of Virtustream by EMC, will enable you to implement an Hybrid Cloud model today, with out of the box, ready to use architectures for your private cloud, leveraging all the best practices from operating a public cloud, being able to leverage Virtustream's expertize also to manage your environment up to the SAP Basis layer, including if needed performing the projects to migrate your workloads to the cloud, all with the assurance of a robust global corporation recognized for its strength in the "mission critical world" like EMC.

          How about companies with technical and legal limitations to use U.S. based clouds?

There are 2 additional key aspects to which I'm very aware, as I do also work a lot with customers in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa, that are very important in regards to customer decisions about any "cloud plans": technical and legal limitations for cloud in these regions.

One of the key limitations of the "U.S. born and based" public cloud offerings, is that they were born to be "public cloud only" and most of the times hosted only on a very limited number of datacenters, mainly in the U.S.

Well, for a U.S. based company, or a company operating mainly in the U.S., this only represents advantages. Even for most truly global companies, this does not represent a problem.

But there is a lot more world than the U.S., and the geo-political environment in other parts of the world, associated with technical limitations like the access to cheap, stable and reliable broadband communications, makes it impossible for certain organizations to consider the possibility to host any of their business critical systems outside the borders of their countries. More, in many countries in the world, there are "data sovereignty regulations" that forbid local companies from placing their data from outside the physical borders of the countries.

There are also the cases of Global Corporations, that having operations in certain countries, are also obliged (either due to legal or technical reasons) to host their systems closer to their operations.

The consequence here is, even if the existing public could offerings based out of the U.S. were reliable enough to host "in-production" business critical applications like SAP (which most are not), due to the technical and "data sovereignty" constraints, those offerings would not be an acceptable (or even possible) alternative for many companies in the world.

One possibility would be Virtustream "managed cloud services", enabling the systems to be in the location of the customer, but being fully managed with all the cloud best practices up to the SAP Basis layer.


          EMC, Virtustream and Service Providers

But there is another perspective here, where both EMC and Virtustream share one common understanding, that they will not be able to reach to the whole world, and maybe it isn't at all a good idea to try and do it all themselves. In most cases there are already local service providers who are building their own local public cloud offerings to attend to the needs of those companies limited either by technical or regulatory limitations in regards to hosting their business critical data outside the country.

Virtustream, apart from providing their own "Infrastructure as a Service" public cloud offering in the U.S.  and Western Europe, and their "managed cloud services", also licenses their software to power Service Providers all over the world.

EMC also has a strong program to equip service providers around the world with "cloud enabled infrastructures".

So, here both companies come together to provide a comprehensive "hardware and software" solution, ready out of the box, either to power service providers or large enterprises looking to build their own private clouds.

Check here the EMC Cloud Service Provider Directory

Having Virtusteam's own IaaS offerings in a Public Cloud model, as well as their managed services targeted at those customers wanting to have a managed private cloud, together with a vast and strong network of service providers all around the world operating on the same architecture, along side with customers having their own private clouds running on this architecture as well, will truly enable IT organizations and their CIOs to become "IT service brokers" for their businesses, procuring the right IT services, being from their private cloud, a local cloud provider or a global cloud provider, according to their financial, technical and regulatory context policy (needed span of control) applicable to each application environment, knowing that they have partners in the public side ready to host and operate their most critical business applications.

          Conclusions

So, I believe these are truly amazing news for the SAP ecosystem (SAP themselves, customers, system integrators and service providers), as the acceleration of the expansion of this model all over the world, will further simplify things like migrating to SAP HANA, and reducing the operating costs of running SAP Applications (including SAP HANA) while improving the performance and agility of existing business systems.

For example, with Virtustream operating as an independent company within the EMC Federation, a Global Company will now be able to have a truly global cloud strategy, that fits its legal, technical, financial and risk model, for their most critical applications (SAP and non-SAP, as what works for SAP will most likely work for everything else), managed through the same model, using public, private, managed or hosted-managed as appropriate without getting locked-in, truly making justice to the principle of "think global, act local" within a Global Hybrid Cloud.

I would invite you also to have a look at the blog Virtustream's CEO, Rodney Rogers published at the time of this announcement with his own personal perspective.

Adding to this fact that I already have some very good friends at Virtustream, it will be truly a pleasure to bring the Virtustream value to my conversations with IT leaders all over the world.

Know more about Virtustream at: http://www.virtustream.com/

What is still missing on SAP's S/4 HANA Vision

As I'm flying to Amsterdam today, on the plane I saw myself thinking on all the meeting I had during SAPPHIRE a couple of weeks ago in Orlando. And one topic that came across in many of those meetings was: how to make HANA and S/4 become a reality in a cost effective way in my datacenter. So, let me take these two hours of flight to share a bit the raw thoughts that are coming to my mind on this topic.

There are no questions these days that the future of SAP is S/4 and that it runs on HANA.

In the words of a good friend that was already around when SAP migrated from R/2 to R/3, "it's a completely new application stack and solution set".

Also on his words, like it happened with the R/2 to R/3 migration which started in 1992, many working in the SAP world, will take some time to realize and accept that this is the way and there is no way back.

So, for all of those in the ecosystem, the word is: refresh your skills to the new era!

So, applauding the initiative from SAP in reinventing its core Business Software Stack, I still see some aspects missing from the architecture vision, that if not considered will make this transformation fall short on expectations and market potential.

Through this blog post I'll share some of the desires large organizations around the world shared with me, associated with my own interpretation of the situation, in regards to how the reengineering of the SAP Business Suite should look like, as we transition to the new S/4 HANA world.

Let me say upfront, that I agree that what I'll say is not simple to implement. Can say either whether there is someone within SAP thinking about this already as I have NO privileged information. What I can say, is that if SAP really wants to be up to the principle of "Run Simple" these aspects would be major in making it happen.

So, let first have a look at what we know at this date.

We know that SAP is redesigning its applications according the following principles:

   - simplify the data model and reduce the data footprint by eliminating data duplication within the SAP Aplications Landscape.

   - rebuild those applications for Fiori and UI5 for better user experience and productivity;

   - enable guided configuration for simpler startup through configuration wizards and "rapid deployment" easy to consume business scenarios.

All of these will make SAP Applications definitely easier to consume.

To these aspects that SAP announced we can also add other aspect we already know that come from the fact that S/4 is running on top of HANA:

   - pushing calculations down to the database layer, leveraging SAP HANA realtime capabilities to speed up processing;

   - merge OLAP and OLTP on the same platform, enabling real time operational reporting, elimination of data availability lead times and data duplication;

   - enable the processing of structured and unstructured data on the same platform, making it possible to get business insights in real time out of machine, social and other types of unstructured data.

Again, all great here!

So, what am I missing? What are some customers asking about?

I've written a lot about TCO. This is engraved in my reasoning from the days I worked on IT operations and on Management Roles, where I realized in the flesh the weight of OPEX in the agility of organizations, and their resilience to unforeseen events.

And let me reinforce the business agility and ability to react to unforeseen events, as over the last 15 years, with the increased globalization driven by global communications, not only of data, but of people and money as well, we have been going through a series of events, that the majority of the economic players were unable to predict.

Things like the burst of the .com bubble in 2000, the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on 9/11, the SubPrime crisis in 2008 due to real-estate speculation, the European Debt Crisis that we are still struggling to come out of, and that has been having a significant impact on the global economy affecting companies all over the world, and making us see banks considered references for decayed break in the U.S. and Europe.

All of this makes it that - like I read in a McKinsey Quarterly article in 2003 - the only way for companies to survive is either to shape markets or to be very agile in adapting to changing market conditions. Would even say, that in today's economic environment, being able to do both, and reinventing business models is a must to be a player in the future.

As a side note, this is definitely what companies like SAP and EMC are doing by disrupting themselves at their core to get ready for tomorrow.

Not all companies in the world are as prepared for this, and the fact that information technologies, that provide faster and better business visualization to management boards are today slow to react and adapt is a key contributor to that lack of business agility by many organizations.

It is today an absurd that having Information Technologies came to "automate the business processes of organizations", their management and change is still so manual. There is a dramatic need to change in paradigm.

So, one thing that should be included on the reinvention of hardware and software stacks for this new world of uncertainty and rapid change, should be the premise that the systems and architectures should be designed from the start to enable simple and fast change from top to bottom.

This may seem an obvious aspect, and some would argue that this is a lady being done now.

My point of view, and the one of some customers and partners I've had the privilege to discuss this with, is that SAP is still missing some important points.

Why?

One thing we will never be able to fully eliminate will be the human intervention in IT. it can definitely be reduced by increased automation, but at least for the next 10 to 15 years, there will still be a significant human intervention - at least - in two critical phases of the IT lifecycle: when you set it up, and when you need to change it and evolve it either due to obsolescence of the underlying components, or due to dramatic shifts on companies business requirements (maybe driven from change forces in the market.

And this leads to a series of principles that should be though, as a consequence of understanding the human mind.

I believe it was Jack Welch that said that a company who needs super mans to be managed is condemned to failure (forgive me if I quote the wrong author... hope not).

I would say, that an IT Landscape or architecture that need brilliant brains to design it, implement it, manage it and change/evolve it, is condemned to drag down its company's business agility.

So, how do we solve this equation?

I would add two variables: use standard and modular building blocks accross the board as much as possible.

And this goes down to the infrastructure! Some by reading this will think on what is today called the 3rd platform applications as described by IDC. No, I'm not talking about that implicitly.

What I'm thinking about is: look at what infrastructure components are today the most standard, more broadly used components in the market, and design your applications to leverage those!

This is what I though SAP had in mind when they came up with SAP HANA Scale-out architecture, now enhanced with Multi-tenant database containers and Dynamic Tiering, these last two features announced with SAP HANA SPS09.

Let me start to tie in all of these together.

When I asked to some SAP employees involved in the HANA and S/4 roadmap discussions internally at SAP how were they planning to manage the ERP redesign to HANA, the answers I got disappointed me.

Maybe... And I have to repeat... Maybe, they could not disclose anything more than that at this stage. Don't know. I might even speculated that this isn't even yet in the table of discussion today.

Well, I developed my question as what I was looking for would be any hint that SAP would take this opportunity to go deeper into the data model and application architecture redesign.

Talking about the existing SAP Applications (ERP, CRM, SRM, etc), each of these applications is composed by a number of components. SAP started splitting the development cycle of these components still in the R/3 era when they started to provide support packages in separate for HR and the rest of the R/3, back then integrated in the "APPL" component. Today we have even more: these is the Basis, ABA, BW, etc, etc, etc.

Back then the logic SAP communicated for that change would be to simplify the application evolution, since HR had a lot more fluent updates due to legal requirements than the FI/CO/MM/PP/SD/etc modules. And it evolved to keep breaking each application stack in multiple components that led later to the Business Suite running on top of the WebAS. 

Small curiosity: I was teaching SAP Basis academies for SAP when this happened, observing closely the evolution from R/3 3.1i to 4.6d where JAVA was first introduced.

Maybe I'm asking too much, but my expectation now would be for SAP ago further reduce the size of the monster (ERP is still one of the largest and most critical databases in many customer environments, the larger it is, being more expensive and difficult to manage/evolve).

So, I was "dreaming" of a split of the ERP in its fundamental components, being each component installable as a separate entity, and within a separate database.

For example: if SAP delivers as they are saying, that communication between Database Containers within the same SAP HANA Database Cluster, will be almost as fast as if they were in the same database, then it would make all the sense to split logistics, finance, HR, etc... down to all the industry verticals into a separate database container.

This would make each of this pieces "so small" according to today's standards, that it would then make it very simple for customers to install scale-out clusters, with all these applications split accross the multiple scale-out nodes. Here I'm imagining that one application would be able to call data accross containers, leveraging the massive paralel processing of the scale-out, shared nothing cluster architecture.

But, what I've been told so far is that each of the existing SAP application components will keep existing together as a single database.

And this is not good, because even with the data model simplification, and increasing number of customers will see their database sizes such, that they won't be able to use today's most commonly used infrastructure components. For example: in terms of servers, a 4 socket server that with Intel x86 Ivy-Bridge CPU can host up to 3 TB of RAM.

Do, coming from the infrastructure upwards.

The idea would be to take the assumption that whatever SAP redesigns today must aim to fit in a 4 sockets Intel server. So, for example, the ERP would be split into a number of independent modules (the smallest installable modular unit), that could then be distributed in a Multi-tenant, scale-out SAP HANA Cluster.

This would enable simpler and faste backup times for each of the components in paralel, faster restart times enabling bette Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) t a cheaper price, would enable simpler evolution, for example through the usage of the capabilities of VMware...

And by using the most commonly known infrastructure components in the market, the probability for organizations to have a ton of people inside with that skill set would be higher, making it simple to do a risk assessment when change needs to happen, and evolve faster and cheaper.

Again, thine se are the principles of what is called 3rd platform applications, where you design your application through "micro-services" each of them existing in a container, all loosely coupled and hosted on a cheap, standard, massive paralel scale-out cluster.

SAP, where are you on this journey? If you are working in this direction, I'll bet you would win more in sharing this with the community sooner, as it would build more confidence and gain further support to help you through this transition.

So, I hope that something is already happening, and I'm just not aware yet. As otherwise, SAP is missing here a massive opportunity to lay take its application stack to the next level in terms of future proof architecture.

Tying in the Data Temperature concepts, would then make sense for me as well, while we move to a world of OLAP, OLTP, structured and unstructured all in the same platform (SAP HANA), that all this application modules could be able to also consume and push data to a series of "different storage containers" based on the business value of the information.

So, it would make sense for SAP HANA to be able to access and manipulate unstructured data directly from HDFS storage, which would provide "infinite storage for lower value, higher volume" unstructured data.

Then for those slices to be able to use as well a "warm store" ( here relating to the extended store announced with Dynamic Tiering on SAP HANA SPS09), to park structured data that being important, doesn't need to be accessed by the business so often and so fast.

Would also make sense to have a 3rd store that I would call "frozen" archive, that would be read-only in nature for compliance reasons. And this could just be an export to a file in a file system, as there is a ton of technologies today in the market to take care of this.

Leaving to be stored in memory, realy the most critical data which is needed more and faster by the business.

Then coupling flexible storage, with modular application components, distributed in a cheap server farm (Intel E5 - 4 socket severs today), would realy make the core SAP Business Software be set for the future (beyond the next 15 years), while enabling organizations to have it in cheaper, simpler and faster do change infrastructure architectures.

As a conclusion:

I know that what I'm saying here is not easy, and may take SAP quite some effort to realize.

I also understand that they need to show something valuable fast, to be able to monetize the development investments and reduce the profitability impact of reinventing themselves.

So, I would accept that migrating the ERP to HANA as is might be a good first step.

What I did not like was listening from the people I talked with, that just redesigning the ERP for Fiori and HANA, while keeping the monster ( and maybe even adding some other monsters like BW, CRM, ETC) was the end arrival vision.

If this happens, if we make a paralel to More's law to the volume of data an organization will generate with HANA speed, the problems customers came to feel today due to the gigantic databases they come to build, just give it 5 to 10 years for those problems to be back again.

One final comment to cloud: public cloud will still take some years to be an option in certain parts of the world. Either due to technical, legal, confidentiality, competitive or economic restrictions. Not all the world looks like the U.S., Northern Europe or Japan. There is a lot more world contributing to SAP's revenues. So private cloud environments will still be around for quite some years, and hope SAP remembers that as they design the medium term vision.

Key take aways out of SAPPHIRE Orlando 2015

It's time to say goodbye to Orlando after SAP's SAPPHIRE event, with a week loaded of customer and partner meetings.

The technology related news were few:

   - SAP HANA productive support for scale-out on VMware is now on Controlled Availability

   - New servers based on the Intel Haswell CPU started to appear, promising increased performance per CPU core

But to be fair, and putting my self in the shoes of our customers, it was a very full week, with all the focus on:

   - what business outcomes can SAP HANA enable (S/4, Board room of the future, real time cash management, real time supply chain insight are just few of the many examples through the exhibition)

   - how the Internet of Things can impact business (integration of machine data into business decisions, HANA managing structured and unstructured data under a single pane of glass for better business insights)

But the highlight out of my meeting with customers and partners was an increased awareness and concern with:

   - understanding Data Temperatures in HANA as a way to reduce TCO when integrating massive volumes of unstructured data, and keeping infinitely the structured data generated by the organization

   - realization that implementing SAP HANA as an appliance might have been the only option in the past, and is definitely not the best, and so customers that have already been running HANA for some years, came all over wanting to understand better SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration as a way to reduce TCO and enable the leveraging of existing infrastructures and operational processes for less risk, as well all things about running SAP HANA on VMware as the simplest, cheapest and fastest way to start a SAP HANA project.

So, although the majority of SAP's talking points were targeted at C-level executives, the teams of these executives also came by and they were all about "how to make it happen in the simplest, most cost effective way".

For me personally, this was a massive event! I had an agenda so loaded with customer and partner meetings, and meet so many new faces in the community alongside with an increased interest on the topics I've written the most about, made this week exhausting, but very rewarding.

I' leaving with the strong feeling I've helped many organizations move forward with their SAP HANA adoption plans, by making it simple all things related with SAP HANA Infrastructure Integration.

Topics I would have liked to hear more about and that we're almost non-existent, were:

   - preview on SAP HANA SPS10

   - evolution of the Multi-tenant database containers feature

   - evolution of the Data Tiering feature

   - what is being done to make SAP applications running on top of HANA better for scale-out scenarios

   - more insights in to what is planned in regards to "HADOOP alike" capabilities coming to HANA, for example enabling HANA to natively access and process data available on HDFS stores without need for an HADOOP cluster in the middle.

Well, the plane is coming, and I need to run, but didn't wanted to leave without leaving my first impressions "hot off the press".

It was great meeting you all (customers, partners, SAP friends, SAP Mentors, company colleagues), thanks for all the interesting discussions, or just the fun moments, and looking forward to see you all soon!

   

SAP HANA Storage Whitepaper version 2.6 released

SAP has published quite some time ago their "storage requirements whitepaper" for SAP HANA, which explains at a quite interesting level of detail, how SAP HANA uses storage, and to what extent storage characteristics are relevant for SAP HANA operations.

So far, no news.

What is new, is that with each new version of this "Storage Whitepaper", SAP has been simplifying the SAP HANA Storage requirements (for example on this latest version by reducing the capacity requirements for the /hana/shared/ filesystem), which is a clear reflection of the increased experience on SAP HANA operations, increased stability of the software, and so a clear sign of maturity.

If you haven't read this document yet, I would really suggest you to take some time to go through it in detail.

If you already saw this document at some point in time, be sure to review it and be up to date on the latest.

The SAP HANA Storage Requirements Whitepaper is published at: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-62595

Reference to this and other important documents in regards to SAP HANA infrastructure integration can be found on the right pane of my blog under reference pages: SAP HANA Technical Documentation

The right architecture for SAP S/4 HANA and the Internet of Things?

SAP HANA is changing the long time ERP paradigms for SAP customers.

But SAP HANA itself is evolving very fast, and bringing new functionality and possibilities with every new release. Among the new variables needed to be considered are aspects like:

• the introduction of data temperatures and tiering data to the right “economically viable” repository;
• integration of machine data;
• the mandate for the new HANA warm store to be on a separate server than the HANA system, and using shared storage;
• the new HANA functionality (named HANA "Vora") promising to enable HADOOP for the enterprise;
• the increased value of data and the increased need for availability and data protection in organizations.

Despite the expected data footprint reduction from the migration of SAP ERP to S/4 HANA, the volume of data managed by SAP HANA may only increase, which mandates to think infrastructure in a different perspective.

In this blog post, while explaining where the SAP HANA data footprint reduction will come from, and I’ll talk a bit about the relevance of data storage and virtualization in the new HANA world.

Also separating what is marketing noise from the reality, will take a closer look at what is possible today as well as what is coming, confirming the increased openness SAP HANA is providing today just comparing with what was the reality two years ago.

I'll conclude by making the case on why implementing SAP HANA in a TDI and Virtualized infrastructure are the right choices for companies planning to implement HANA today.

               Setting the scene

Just read an interesting article on a UK online journal, talking about the promise of less storage consumption as an IT driver for HANA adoption.

I would find it strange that a company would implement SAP HANA just because of that, as I think the rationale for HANA adoption should be a business related one.

At least, if today I was working as a customer, that would be my thinking: what does this bring additionally to my business, balanced against the change costs it will imply.

Nevertheless, stepping back a bit from all the marketing stuff that has been around since the S/4 announcement, let’s think on it with more calm.

Where the claim for SAP HANA storage footprint reduction does comes from?

For sure many of you have seen the following image:

For the sake of organizing better my ideas, let me call each of the reduction factors in the image above, Jump1, Jump2 and Jump3.

               Where does the data reduction come from when “just” moving from Oracle to HANA?

Analyzing them, where does Jump1 comes from?

• Looking at a traditional SAP ERP implementation on Oracle, one thing we know is that having all data in memory, the need for a massive amount of Indexes to speed up the access to data goes away.
• If you think about it, more than 50% of the storage footprint of an Oracle database supporting SAP ERP is just for indexes! So, here is 50% reduction in space.
• On the other side, SAP HANA compresses the data in memory, which provides an additional contribution to the storage footprint reduction.
• Also, in the “traditional DB world” some records were loaded in multiple database tables (so data redundancy) to serve different application needs and avoid data access bottlenecks. For example, you had a table with the raw data, another with that same data aggregated by year, and another aggregated by some other variable.
• So, in the new in-memory world of HANA, there is no need for this as well, as SAP is replacing all those tables with views on top of a single data record, and through the elimination of data redundancy, also reducing significantly the data footprint of HANA.

And mainly this is where SAP is expecting the 5x data footprint reduction just out of the Jump1.

And it’s a fair expectation!

Of course, like any generic statements, in reality each case will be a case, and I’ve seen cases where there was only about 50% of data reduction (you can call it 2 x), which summing up the need for free space in the HANA server for calculations and HANA functioning, ended up requiring exactly the same amount of RAM as the disk footprint of the original Oracle Database. This was of course an extreme case of a database with an industry vertical where SAP hasn’t yet done all the table redundancy clean-up, and where the source database was already compressed.

Where does the footprint reduction come from when moving from Suite on HANA to S/4?

Jump2 footprint reduction comes from the well know “magic” of Simple Finance.

The image bellow is for sure also known by many:

The data redundancies I’ve started to describe above, when we talk about basic business objects in the ERP, meant in the example of finance that the data that “could reside” only on 4 tables, was duplicated to about 23 tables.

With the redesign of the SAP’s well know FI/CO modules, now rebranded as sFin, SAP reduced the tables from those 23 to 4. So, this is what is accounting for the additional 2,5x data footprint reduction.

Here I would be careful just for one aspect: we only have today sFin. sLog (Simplified Logistics) has been announced to be launched in the 2^nd half of 2015.

But there is a lot more to SAP applications than just sFin and sLog. So, let’s wait and see what the reality will bring us before start launching the fireworks. And with this I’m not insinuating in anyway that the reduction will be smaller than claimed. In some modules it can actually be more.

Again, if you are moving today to S/4, the only module that will observe this dramatic reduction will be sFin, as none of the others are yet available.

Meaning: manage carefully your expectations. This is a nice statement of direction, but the reality is not there yet.

               What about the split between actual and historical?

Jump3 "will" come from the adoption by SAP Business Suite of the functionality announced with SAP HANA SPS09, called data tiering.

And I put the "will" between "", because dynamic tiering is not ready yet for SAP Business Suite or S/4, and is still today restricted in usage to BW (SAP product management mentione the need for dynamic tiering needing to enable "hybrid tables" before it can be considered for busines suite).

So, What I'll describe here is "imagining the future", as today the reality is just based on the possibility of keeping some data only on disk, and load to memory upon need, sort of working like the old ABAP buffers (least used get's "destaged" to provide space for new objects being loaded in memory).

If you look for the presentations released by SAP at the time of SAP HANA SPS09 announcement, you can find one presentation specific on this topic.

In that presentation you’ll find the following slides:

So, the idea if that on S/4 HANA, the ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) functionality will be redesigned to take advantage of this feature (somewhere in the future...), where the idea is that the HANA system will be able to automatically determine the relevance of a specific data record and either place it in memory, or in the “Warm Store”. Remember, I just said this is the “future idea”. So we are not there yet.

If you look at this slide, the warm store is another service of the HANA database, where the primary image will be on disk.

What does this mean? This will be a columnar compressed database, but optimized to run on disk.

If SAP implements this well, and according to the expectations, one of the things that made SAP databases grow so much to a size almost unmanageable, was the difficulty to define data governance policies that then led to data archiving practices.

Meaning: many SAP customers never did any archiving, not because it was technically challenging, but because no one on the organization has put their neck on the guillotine in defining what data could be removed from the database.

So, here we are no longer talking about data footprint reduction but rather about placing the data on the most “economically sensible” medium, according to that data’s value.

For example, if you want to make real time business decisions, maybe this year’s data is fundamental to be accessed very fast, but do you need the data from 10 years ago to be available at the same speed, and so at the same cost? Maybe not.

Here SAP is finally introducing the concept of data temperatures, and data tiering. Concepts, that companies like EMC have developed and successfully implemented many years ago. The difference here is that SAP is trying to implement this logic on the DB code.

We’ll need to wait and see how successful they will be in implementing this, because if the data tiering doesn’t come to be dynamic, lots of benefits will be lost due to the same reasons lots of customers never archived: lack of governance, lack of technical knowledge, or not wanting to deal with that additional level of complexity.

Nevertheless, data storage has never been more important. What changes here is the profile of that storage as new variables will increase of importance in the new HANA reality.

               The VMware effect on SAP HANA Data Volumes

So, lets now put all of this in perspective.

Do you remember what happened to the number of servers that existed in organizations when VMware made deploying them so easy? They went sky rocket!

Translating to HANA, if SAP makes – not only data tiering – but as well data acquisition simple, integrating structured and non-structured data, capturing machine data, making HANA a “business information hub” for the organization, two of the “Big Data V’s” will hit hard these systems like nothing we’ve see so far: the Volume and the Variety.

The performance and lifecycle effects on storage capacity

Adding two final variables to this discussion before diving into my conclusions of this phenomena:

• A system that on Oracle needed 32 CPU cores to run its database, on HANA may run on 120 CPU cores;
• Imagine loading machine data into a 120 CPU (or even 240 cores and more). How many log writes will such a system generate;
• HANA has to comply with ACID principles of Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability, so whatever happens in the HANA world will have to be persisted on a “persistent medium”.
•  Maybe its more sexy to call it persistency, but this is storage! It may be a different type of storage, more oriented to speed than to capacity, but this is what storage companies are moving for, as their offerings will be more needed than ever!
• What about High Availability? Disaster Recovery? Data protection or Backup and Recovery (whatever you like to call it)? And application change management?
• All these activities have demanded additional storage capacity over the years. Having customers demanding as much as 16 times the productive database capacity to support the requirements here (DR site, Test systems, etc);
• One thing I haven’t seen thoroughly discussed yet is how SAP Applications Lifecycle Management will evolve in the new S/4 reality, as this will be determinant to define the true impact of HANA on the storage footprint.

One thing I know for sure: the value of information for organizations will only grow faster.

So, I do not see organizations assuming data loss anymore, and even less in this new HANA world.

Having all data accessible at “nanosecond” grade speeds, and increasing the dependency of business processes on real time data, will imply increasingly demanding architectures in terms of disaster avoidance and business continuity.

Conclusion

In conclusion, yes, HANA may drive some data footprint reduction.

And it must, to be viable! As 1 TB of RAM does not cost the same as 1 TB of disk.

Determining the right value of data, and putting it on the right “economically suitable” medium, is fundamental for the SAP HANA ROI equation.

So, I see the “HANA data volume reduction” more on the perspective of HANA’s viability itself (someone wrote some weeks ago that the price list of 12 TB of RAM is over 1 million USD!!! So, a lot more than the same capacity on disk).

But thinking on the increased easiness of loading and manipulating data in HANA, associated to the expected volume and variety coming for example from SAP HANA integration with machine data, I’m not sure that in a 10 years period the volume of stored data will actually be less than it is today with SAP ERP on Oracle.

If I may make a guess, I think it will not only increase, but it will increase at an accelerated pace!

What I take from all this discussion is that probably the “infrastructure things” customers will buy in this new “in-Memory” world will be different from the ones they were used to buy up until today, but maybe the budget will stay the same.

Providers will need to adapt to this new reality to stay relevant and in business.

But considering SAP’s own statements that the HW costs are only the tip of the iceberg of the total IT costs, there are so much saving to be realized on other areas, that I wouldn’t go all obsessed with the infrastructure part of it, as what I see is that “the early adopter’s induced obsession” with CAPEX reduction, now that some of them have reached 2 or 3 years of operations experience, have revealed a significant increase on all the costs hidden bellow the water (as per the slide above).

The money spend on Operations and Change Management is massive in many organizations, and can easily - over a period of 5 years - be 4 or 5 times the investment cost of the infrastructure.

Let me suggest you all to have a look at a presentation from SAP focused exactly on this: the new HANA economics.

As you can see, SAP is also evolving their understanding, and aspects like SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter and Virtualization are just a natural evolution step on SAP HANA maturity, so options you should consider from the start.

If you agree with SAP’s analysis there, a couple of things stand out that confirm what has been my reasoning for quite some time now:

• When implementing HANA chose a Tailored Datacenter Implementation as it will drive out costs;
• When possible use commodity hardware (for example the new validated Intel E5 based servers – available for configs up to 1,5 TB);
• Virtualize your systems whenever possible (vSphere 6 coming in a couple of months to support HANA Scale-out virtualized, and scale-up systems up to 4 TB).

And be prepared for the unexpected, as not only your business may change to unexpected directions and making massive “monolithic and inflexible” investments will not help your business become more agile.

With all the footprint reduction described here, as it will imply the implementation of data temperatures, and tiering data out of RAM to more affordable mediums, implementing HANA in a VM, with the Warm Store on another VM, and the HADOOP store on another, all using shared storage, will be the right way to go.

Looking to the picture above, I believe it is clear that "an appliance" cannot respond to the architecture needs of this new SAP HANA reality.

And, don’t take my word for it, as it is stated crystal clear in the SAP documents I’ve been mentioning through this blog post!

So, I would expect to see:

• a raise on HDFS capable storage in conjunction with HANA to store the less valuable “machine data” managed by a fully virtualized HADOOP cluster;
• a rise in the demand for cost effective, flash optimized storage to support the warm store, as the majority of volume for the structured thata will be there in the future;
• and a speed optimized “multi-channel” storage to support HANA massive log generation, and speedy restart time needs for application availability requirements;
• SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration become the preferred deployment model for SAP HANA;
• Virtualization usage to see increased adoption.

I hope this discussion will help you out to put in perspective both your architecture and data placement strategies for this new HANA world.

S/4: HANA no longer a matter of if, but rather how and when - strongercase for TDI and VMware

Over the last 6 months I've observed a significant evolution in my conversations with customers in regards to HANA adoption.

More agree that the HANA discussion is no longer a matter of "if they will adopt HANA" but rather a matter of how and when. And SAP's statement of direction with the announcement of S/4 HANA is definitely contributing to this change of discussion.

And when talking about the how and when, one interesting factor is the weight the experiences of the early adopters already start to have on the considerations of the new adopters.

There were 3 particular customer engagements that really got me on to write this blog, as they represented 3 very different stages of HANA adoption. And all these 3 experiences highlighted 3 things I've been writing about for more than a year now: the impact of start-up cost, operations cost and change cost. As usual my focus is on the infrastructure impact of HANA in customer datacenters.

In summary my findings were:

1   - with a customer now planning the introduction of HANA in their datacenter portfolio, one of their biggest concerns was the risk and cost introduced by having to change their standards in datacenter architecture and operational processes. In this case I've found that the ignorance and insecurity of the consultants on the project on topics like SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration, infrastructure architecture, datacenter operations, virtualization and other infrastructure related disciplines, still makes these people communicate (still today!) that HANA can only be installed as an appliance, ignoring the impacts and risk this represents to many customers. Keeping up with aggressive SLAs is all about building a smooth operation. Smooth operations is all about people and processes, and forcing the introduction of an appliance in this scenario makes the risk and cost of change go sky high. This customer was so relieved from listening me guiding him through what is SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration, and the current support status of HANA on VMware;

2   - with a customer that has just finished a successful PoC and is planning the start of the implementation project of HANA, having the customer more knowledge (through their research and search for real experiences from other customers) than their implementation consultants on what can be done today in terms of HANA virtualization, they saw the start of the project blocked because the consultants in the project said that if he decided to virtualize HANA they would be out of support from SAP! You are afraid of what you don't know. Unfortunately I had to be the one to clarify that the negative impact of virtualization of HANA was only of performance and not at all of functionality. This customer was adopting HANA for functionality purposes, and having processes going from 53 minutes on Oracle to 16 seconds on HANA, the discussion of if "on physical it could be 15 seconds" was just irrelevant compared with the cost avoidance that virtualizing their 700 GB HANA instance represented. How much were worth 1 or 2 seconds in these scenario? Non of the consultants working with this customer had the capacity of putting things into perspective. Ignorance is really a killer of faster HANA adoption;

3   - with a customer that has been in production for about 2 years, that we tried to have him adopting a TDI scenario last year, we got to meet him again because he found out that the cost of operations to sustain their SLAs, and the cost of change derived from their business growth and evolution, was just too much as a consequence of having implemented the appliance with internal storage only. It took almost 2 years for them to agree with me, and that the OPEX of operating that scenario over 5 years would far exceed the CAPEX saving of buying that appliance. More, in their case, 1 year was enough for their increase in OPEX to exceed their saving in CAPEX. Being glad to hear them say "you were right", even if it was almost 2 years later, I have to say it could have been avoided. I don't feel better with my ego, just sorry they had to go through such pain. Again here, ignorance and fear of the unknown was a key road blocker to adopt HANA more extensively in their datacenter. Implementing HANA, and operating HANA against aggressive SLAs are two very different things, and more education on what operations implies might do some good to many of the people talking to customers to adopt HANA. I'm so glad for the time I worked on operations. Priceless learning!

So, let me - once more - based on these real customer experiences explain the rationale of implementing TDI infrastructure for SAP HANA, and why virtualization makes sense for many scenarios.

Stay tuned as I'll bring to my blog the arguments learned from these 3 customer engagements, so that other customers starting now this journey, can learn from them, and also force the hand of the consultants their are working with, fighting back the ignorance that keeps delaying HANA adoption, or making it way more expensive than it could be.

Do not let the ignorance on what is possible today, complicate your journey towards HANA adoption!