Seamless Scaling of SAP HANA on Intel Xeon Processors from Micro to Mega-Databases

[stefan_baeuerle]

Unleashing Business Potential with SAP HANA and Intel Xeon Processors: A Value Proposition for Customers 

In today's fast-paced business environment, the ability to handle, process, and extract insights from vast amounts of data are a competitive necessity. SAP and Intel have collaborated for over a decade, offering unparalleled innovation to organizations aiming to leverage the power of the SAP HANA in-memory database and scalable hardware by Intel.

Our joint efforts to deliver a robust value proposition empower businesses to scale seamlessly from micro to mega-databases. Today, over 90% of global SAP HANA customers run some of the most mission critical solutions in the SAP HANA database, deployed on Intel Xeon processor technology. 

High-Performance Processing for Critical Operations 

At the core of this partnership lies the commitment to performance. We optimized SAP HANA’s database for Intel's 4th and 5th Gen Scalable Xeon processors and achieved up to 40% improved performance in transactional queries (OLTP) compared to previous processor generations. This leads to quicker decision-making and the ability to easily process high volumes of concurrent transactions, thus reducing the time to value. Intel's Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX), also implemented into the SAP HANA database, further enhances this scalability and offers a significant performance boost for critical HANA database operations.

Being able to run the SAP HANA database with superior performance on a wide range of system configurations, from small servers with a memory footprint of a few GB at a low cost and energy consumption, up to the largest scale-up HANA instances with up to 32 TB of memory footprint deployed, is a unique capability enabled on Intel Xeon-based server platforms. Such configurations are supported in Scale-Up but also in Scale-Out scenarios, enabling the mega database capacities that customers require.

 

Large Servers for Large Databases 

A key feature of the Intel® Xeon® 4th Gen Scalable processor is its extreme scalability. The largest companies in the world are using SAP HANA to run their business-critical database workload. These installations keep growing due to the increase in data size and enhanced capabilities of S/4HANA installations running SAP HANA as a database. 

Intel and SAP meet these performance requirements of SAP HANA customers for their business-critical database applications with ease. For example, SAP internal tests demonstrate up to a 40% higher performance for transactional queries with the 4th and 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor, compared to previous generation.

Intel 4th Gen Xeon is equipped with 4 Ultra Path Interconnect (UPI) lanes between processors to enable additional connectivity and the best customer experience, especially for the largest SAP Customer Landscapes.

Scaling-up to over 8 CPUs with UPI lanes enables the mega database capacities required. As shown in the figure below, the 4th Gen Xeon processors use a dedicated fourth UPI link to improve the connectivity and bandwidth between the Intel Xeon processors. It also enables low latency, which is especially beneficial for SAP HANA’s transactional workloads. The reduced number of hops to a remote processor, that are needed to fetch data from the memory associated with that remote processor, enables improved cross-socket bandwidth, which is essential for low response times of analytical queries. 

With up to 8 processors connected, as shown in the figure above, the SAP hardware partner ecosystem can support systems with up to 16TB of memory and 448 CPU cores. Our joint partners HPE and Eviden even support 4th Gen Xeon-based server platforms with 16 CPUs and up to 32TB, resulting in an impressive 960 CPU cores in a single scale-up system. This is achieved with the support of a node controller that further extends the UPI enabled interconnect to an additional 8 CPUs.

Small Cores for Efficiency and Sustainability  

Intel recently launched the all-new Intel® Xeon® 6 with Efficiency Cores (E-Cores, code-name Sierra Forrest), offering a new class of light-weight efficient cores that deliver an optimized performance per watt. SAP and Intel engineers spent the last year validating and certifying SAP HANA on Xeon 6 with E-Cores successfully. A key benefit of Xeon 6 for SAP with E-cores is the impressive performance at a reduced power consumption, helping SAP customers to reduce their carbon footprint. In SAP internal tests, we have observed up to 60% better power efficiency with SAP HANA compared to previous gen processors.  

SAP did not require rewriting or reworking SAP HANA; the already optimized SAP HANA solution runs out of the box on Xeon 6 with E-Cores. As such, no porting of HANA code was needed, since the new Xeon 6 processor remains backward compatible with existing Intel Xeon processors, which are already supported by SAP HANA.

Intel Xeon 6 for SAP with E-cores matches SAP HANA requirements very well and provides a good match for analytical use cases (OLAP). The analytical workload can scale well on the 144 Core Xeon 6 with E-core processor.

Intel Processors for Business-Critical Database Workload 

When SAP HANA customers run their business-critical database workload, e.g. a quarter-end closing required for financial reporting, the highest throughput and reliably low response times are critical. Intel processors enable such workloads with various unique features. 

Hardware-Assisted Synchronization with Intel TSX 

Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (Intel TSX) enable effective synchronization of frequent concurrent accesses to data structures in SAP HANA, since their introduction in 2013. This implementation of hardware transactional memory remains a distinct feature of Intel processors in SAP HANA’s cloud environment. Recent enhancements to Intel TSX allow the temporary disabling of tracking loads from memory in a section of code within a transaction. This simplified further optimizations of the scalability of SAP HANA, and SAP internal tests show a performance upside of up to 1.4x for some workloads. 

Revolutionary Speed for Analytical Insights 

 For organizations needing quick insights, SAP HANA uses Intel's advanced Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) technology to speed up SAP HANA’s full-table scan. This enables the search for one or multiple values in a table, achieving a remarkable speed of 560 billion rows per second.

This unprecedented performance redefines analytics, enabling businesses to process vast amounts of data quickly and efficiently. Combined with Intel technologies like Advanced Vector Extension, AVX-512 and Vector Bit-Manipulating Instructions (VBMI), data processing becomes faster, more efficient, and remarkably cost-effective. 

Extending the Address Space for More Memory 

In-memory databases like SAP HANA are pushing the limits of memory capacities of servers. Until recently, Intel-based systems with up to 24TB were in use by SAP HANA customers. Although efficient algorithms compress the data in memory, the need for more data continues to drive the demand for even larger systems. The Scalable Xeon architecture, in its 4th and 5th generation, expanded the address space to 57 bits for virtual address space and 52 bits for physical address space. The increase in core count and the expansion of the address space now allow SAP HANA customers to use even larger systems with up to 32TB. This allows SAP HANA to grow further than before and serve the largest Fortune 500 customers. 

Future-Proofing with Innovative Memory Solutions   

Looking ahead, the collaboration will redefine memory scalability through emerging technologies, like Compute Express Link (CXL), that has been introduced into the market with the Intel Xeon 6 processor family. Compute express link will revolutionize the data center, like the storage revolution a decade ago. In storage, we evolved from having disks inside the server, to remote disk, to remote virtual disks provided by a central storage solution that mount them to computing nodes. This enabled scalability, flexibility and reduced costs. Similarly, CXL allows accessing memory on a local system or remote system. It enables so-called Memory Pools, that are dynamically linked to computing nodes. Using CXL technology within an SAP HANA system will allow businesses to adopt flexible memory architectures, seamlessly adjusting to diverse workload demands in both on-premises and cloud environments. 

Delivering Exceptional Value 

This partnership between SAP and Intel brings more than just technological advancements: it delivers tangible business value. Customers gain access to unparalleled scalability, efficiency, and performance, enabling them to unlock new opportunities, reduce costs, and stay ahead of their competitors. Whether you're a small enterprise or a global conglomerate, SAP HANA powered by Intel Xeon processors equips your business to handle today's challenges and seize tomorrow's opportunities. The question isn't whether you can keep up with the data revolution; it's how far ahead you can get. With SAP and Intel, the answer is straightforward.

Notices & Disclaimers

Performance varies by use, configuration and other factors. Learn more on the Performance Index site.

Performance results are based on testing as of dates shown in configurations and may not reflect all publicly available updates.  See backup for configuration details.  No product or component can be absolutely secure.

Your costs and results may vary.

Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software or service activation.

© Intel Corporation.  Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries.  Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.