SAP Extends HANA Data Management and Analytics Capabilities

The Challenges of Gaining Useful Insight into Data

At the SAPinsider HANA 2015 conference today, SAP released an SAP HANA SPS10 update that extends the data management capabilities of the in-memory computing platform while at the same time automating the algorithm selection inside version 2.2 of SAP Predictive Analytics software.

In addition, SAP revealed that it now has 6,400 SAP HANA customers and 815,000 active users, almost twice as many as it had this time last year. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform accounts for 1,400 of those customers and there are now 370 customers using SAP S/4HANA ERP software, while another 1,900 customers are using SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA. Finally, SAP says 1,900 independent software vendors have committed to the platform, with over 150 of them already shipping applications.

Mike Eacrett, vice president of product management for SAP, says the newest data management capabilities added to SAP HANA include dynamic tiering of data across different classes of storage system both inside and out of HANA, bi-directional data synchronization with remote systems and endpoints, and extended integration with distributions of Hadoop from Cloudera and Hortonworks that include faster data transfer with Spark SQL, the ability to cleanse Big Data and identify duplicate data, and a common user interface (UI) for SAP HANA and Hadoop cluster administration using open source Apache Ambari software. Eacrett also notes that customers can now build their own data dictionaries inside SAP HANA.

Other new capabilities include extensions to the ability to process up to 12 TB of data in memory using Intel non-uniform memory access (NUMA) technology along with improvements in mixed workload performance and new high availability and disaster recovery capabilities, such as 1-to-n asynchronous replication, log-based transfer, auto-host failover and incremental backups.

Finally, spatial processing enhancements of SAP HANA include support for 3D and 4D objects and the ability to render spatial expressions in SAP HANA models or SQL Script.

In terms of analytics, SAP with the release of version 2.2 of SAP Predictive Analytics software, now makes it possible for its software to automatically identify which algorithms in a library are best suited to a particular analytics task. In addition, this latest update enables SAP predictive analytics software to support ultra-wide data sets, tighter integration with the R programming language and new modeling tools. Within SAP HANA itself, the latest release now supports text mining across 32 new languages, and text analysis adds full linguistic support for Polish.

Separately, SAP also announced it has developed a mobile application for planning and will resell governance, risk and compliance (GRC) software developed by NextLabs.

Eacrett says all SAP HANA customers are currently using either SAP HANA SPS 8 or 9 and that users of the company’s cloud platform will be upgraded to SAP HANA SPS 10 automatically, thereby sharply reducing the number of HANA releases that SAP needs to support at any one time.

With SAP gaining HANA adoption momentum, it’s clear that in-memory computing is finally on the cusp of mainstream adoption. The only issue now is the rate at which enterprise applications will make the shift to SAP HANA and other types of in-memory computing platforms that are clearly several orders of magnitude faster than any other class of platforms that have gone before.