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!
