SAP Tech Ed and HANA
By Gabe Smith October 25, 2013
I just returned from Las Vegas, where I was attending SAP’s annual Tech Ed event, which is focused on technology innovation and education. At the event, I spoke at a couple of sessions about our experience with porting Vendavo Profit Analyzer to run on SAP HANA. I also gave live demonstrations of Profit Analyzer with a 555 Million row data set that contains about 200 dimensions and measures.
As with most SAP events, HANA was the star of the show in Las Vegas. If you watched Vishal’s keynote here, you will see that it was focused squarely on HANA. In it, he discussed the partner innovations and mentions the work we are doing with them around price optimization.
Around about 1:01, Vishal also talked about the AWS progress – they were able to spin up a 1776 core instance to “end the tyranny of waiting for servers.” The ability to cluster together 111 16 core, 60GB machines is awesome. They are also able to daisy chain 5 CR1 240GB machines together. Now, let’s get more cores available SAP and AWS! He also mentioned the newly available HANA Infrastructure as a Service, where you can get a 512GB appliance for $3500 a month or 1TB for $6500 a month (bring your own license).
We at Vendavo began our HANA development on AWS, and it was a great experience: we got the instance up and running with data loaded in hours and got our application running in a day or so on top of it.
We have since purchased an 80 core, 1 TB HANA environment in scale out for development and testing, and are using it for our Beta customers now. We are also working with SAP COIL on joint performance and scalability testing using a 160 core machine.
It’s great to be able to work so closely with bleeding edge innovation, and we are helping to move HANA forward based on our experience with over a decade of in memory computing in production environments at the world’s largest companies. We are getting mindshare from SAP in a new way, but we are also getting closer to the data – we will be able to reduce the TCO and ETL and simplify the architecture for deploying our solution with HANA.
