Database Reference
In-Depth Information
3.1
Hardware
SAP HANA is an appliance for in-memory processing. This means that both the hardware
and the software for SAP HANA are sold as a complete system. HANA systems require the
purchase of a three-year maintenance license, and only hardware vendors or certified SAP
partners should install SAP HANA and its components on the system hardware. Approved
vendors for HANA hardware solutions include Silicon Graphics, Cisco/EMC, Dell, Hitachi,
Huawei, Fujitsu, NEC, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard.
The summer of 2014 was noteworthy because the new Intel Xeon E7 CPUs first became
available. The Xeon E7 CPUs are known as the Ivy Bridge chipset and they are much faster
than the previous generation of hardware. Ivy Bridge processors have 15 cores instead of
the 10 cores that were available in previous versions of the E7 processor, and they also have
faster clock speeds. While several processor variants are available, including the 2880/90,
4880/90, and the 8880/90, only the 4880/90 and 8880/90 are in use in certified SAP HANA
appliances at the time of writing this topic.
When planning for your implementation of SAP BW on HANA, you must consider whether
to design the system to scale up or scale out. Scaling up means increasing the size of each
node (i.e., from 1 TB to 2 TB). Scaling out means increasing the number of nodes in the
system (i.e., from 4 x 1TB nodes to 8 x 1 TB nodes).
3.1.1
Scale up
A scale-up implementation has the benefit of requiring the purchase of a single node system,
with a lower investment in hardware, data center space, and power consumption. We dis-
cussed properly sizing your BW on HANA system in Section 2.3 , so you can use the chart
in Figure 3.1 to select a configuration that meets your needs.
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