SAP TechEd Q3 2017 Hot Topics
SAP in the Cloud
“Moving to the cloud” is a vague statement of intent. For the Technical Architect it requires evaluating a number of possible scenarios based on business and technical requirements, and matching those with SAP’s current offerings.
Listening to some of the Keynote speakers at TechEd 2017, it’s clear that SAP is going through another renaming frenzy. “This used to be called” and “Internally we still refer to this as” were heard far too often. Those of us who have been involved with SAP products for a number of years will remember the R/3→ECC→ERP/2004s fun, not to mention BW→BI→BW. Now, the internal debate appears to be how many times should they say “HANA”. As of mid 2017, the SAP HANA Cloud Platform has been renamed the SAP Cloud Platform.
The diagram above shows the mapping between the traditional IaaS, PaaS, SaaS cloud solutions and SAP’s offerings. The first column shows an on-premise solution. The second shows Infrastructure as a service: this could be a datacentre provider or infrastructure provider such as Amazon Web Services. The fourth column (I’ll come back to the third one) is SAP’s public cloud which offers SAP HANA as a service: a suite of services accessed via a web browser.
The third column is the tricky one. SAP Cloud Platform, SAP’s PaaS offering, also includes the HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) which they previously classed as IaaS. SAP HEC offers infrastructure and managed services on a subscription basis. It provides dedicated hardware which you may customise as you wish, including having it act as if it’s part of your corporate LAN. As such, it really is IaaS but with SAP also taking on the role of platform management in a private cloud offering. Instead of HEC, you can use the SAP Cloud Platform as a traditional public cloud PaaS. This gives you more control over the environment such as the option to install non-HANA cloud applications. As SAP manage these, the price increases rapidly with any customisation/application.
From left to right, you decrease complexity at the cost of customisation. It’s often useful to have your landscape utilise multiple options. The cloud "aaS" landscape can be more complex than this. For example, some providers will offer the HANA database as a service (DBaaS) allowing you to control and maintain any applications yourself. In addition, if you have a complex SAP and non-SAP landscape, you can potentially use cloud-based integration (such as Dell Boomi's IPaaS) to control the integration as you migrate and/or create cloud-based solutions.
Big Data
The idea of data being online, nearline and offline have been blurred by the Cloud. To decouple the definitions from descriptions of physical storage, the terms now in use are: Hot, Warm and Cold. Typically, Hot refers to data stored in memory, whereas Warm and Cold are stored on disk. Data stored offline (such as on tape or on disks disconnected from any application) would be referred to as Archived. The difference between Warm and Cold is that Warm (like Hot) is data available directly to the warehouse application where as Cold would be stored in another application. Within the SAP ecosystem: Hot is stored in BW HANA memory, Warm is stored in BW HANA on disk and Cold is external to BW HANA, typically Hadoop. The diagram below explains this.
SAP HANA DT (Dynamic Tiering) is currently available for Hot and Warm data storage and is a separate product requiring additional licences. Cold data can be stored within SAP IQ or (using SAP Vora from 2018) Hadoop.