SAP's 10-year HANA gamble: A life without the big boys and girls SAP was gung-ho about its HANA-or-nothing database play for the next version of its software crown jewels earlier this month. The enterprise and software giant rolled out what it claimed was its biggest launch in decades – SAP S/4HANA. The system is built to run on one single database – SAP’s HANA. Previously, SAP has relied …
"That said, looks like good consultancy rewriting all those reports."
And remember also the additional tuning fees when these reports don't perform as expected after a couple of months of throwing real life data at them. Oh wait, that won't happen with HANA, for sure. Oh, yes, it will, as with anything else.
That they priced HANA out of the market - it's a compelling product but usually priced eye wateringly even by oracles standards. SAP may have captive market in ERP (gawd knows why) who pay through the nose but they have never really tried to outcompete MD and Oracle in the database space. I Think they aspired to be another Teradata when there's only room for one.
But think of the lock-in opportunities.
- reporting? None of that 3rd party crap, SAP-stuff or nothing.
- db-level integration with external apps? if we feel like it.
- migrate off SAP? No pesky regular ETLs to help there.
- database revenues? All for SAP, all for SAP ;-)
Granted, this is a big gamble for SAP, but it looks even more so for its users.
Agree, this is an unprecedented attempt at a land grab in IT. People might say, 'Oracle does the same with their ERP'. True, but you knew Oracle was only Oracle stack going into the ERP purchase. Oracle didn't take JDE after they acquired it, for instance, and tell people they couldn't run it on IBM anymore because they wanted the DB business. They certainly encouraged them to use Oracle, but it wasn't a mandate.... SAP is now trying to change the terms after the deal is done.
How can he claim that HANA is much faster than oracle? What has he been smoking?
Hana is a clustered ram database, and we all konw that clusters have bad latency when trying to reach far away nodes, i.e performance sucks in clusters especially in latency critical applications (such as databases).And we also know that one single server does not have latency problems, ie SMP servers latency always are superior vs cluster latency. The only advantage of running clustered ram database is that it can scale much more than a single server, ie handle larger workloads (not faster workloads). That is, clusters are slow but handles larger workloads, whereas an SMP server handles smaller workloads much faster. But Hana is a ram database, so it should also be very fast, and handle large workloads at the same time! Or?
Well, this is wrong because, imagine a huuuuuge SMP server, shouldnt it be fastest? Low latency and huuuuge workloads at the same time? Well, this is exactly what oracle will release this year. The sparc M7 server will have 64TB ram, 32 sockets, 1024 cores, 8192 threads. Each M7 cpu will do SQL queries at 120GB/sec. Add in compression (10 to 1)and it can run huuuuge databases directly from ram.
Contrast this with each Hana node; they are tiny. Only a few sockets, and each socket does maybe 5GB/sec SQL queries. And they have little ram, only a few TB. So one sparc M7 server will be much faster than a reasonable sized Hana cluster. So instead of having a Hana cluster with... 100 small x86 nodes, imagine a Hana cluster consisting of two or three sparc M7 servers. A x86 cluster with many nodes will always have much slower latency (when reaching nodes far away), than a small cluster consisting of two or three nodes.
Besides, it is very difficult to do a distributed database while keeping performance up. Data integrity is difficult, and to synchronise data among all nodes. How do you rollback, for instance? Clustered databases are very difficult and error prone. And slower than a single huge SMP server. But maybe the Hana guy did not know of the new coming sparc M7 monster?
The reason why they are doing this now is there is little greenfield left for growth in ERP at manufacturers and SAP traditional industries. They have been unsuccessful in trying to enter new verticals, like financial services and health care, and the mid market.... When you run out of ERP prospects, you go back to the install base to try and replace Oracle and DB2 with your label.
Side note, there is no way that 1,800 customers run their entire business suite on HANA. Maybe one module or an accelerator or something.
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