Tailored to Your Needs: Managing Your Data Footprint

[Former Member]

Today, companies are faced with the challenge of supporting ever increasing data growth to enable innovation while at the same time trying to keep technology infrastructure costs under control. However, managing these amounts of data can be costly for organizations. One way companies can keep costs down is by reducing the data storage footprint.

And indeed, our customers not only ask us for support in becoming more innovative, they are also looking for ways to manage their IT landscapes more efficiently, thereby reducing the costs of running their solutions. Innovation for us at SAP is about solving real customer challenges, so we came up with solutions to do precisely that, both at the software and the hardware level.

Take for example SAP HANA, our in-memory data platform that lets companies accelerate business processes, deliver more business intelligence, and simplify their IT environment. It provides the foundation for all your data needs, removing the need to maintain separate legacy systems and siloed data. Make sure you check out the blogpost by Daniel Schneiss, Global Head of Database and Data Management Product Development & SAP HANA Development, to learn more about how SAP HANA powers digital transformation.

At the software level, multitenant database containers allow you to run many isolated databases in a single SAP HANA system. Also, we further improved the overall performance of SAP HANA with a better balance of workloads, using active-active read enabled replication and dynamic tiering. Active-active read enabled replication is based in the continuous-log replay feature, including functionalities such as fast take-overs and reduced need for bandwidth in continuous operation. Heavy-duty analytical OLAP queries now can be offloaded from the primary SAP HANA system to the secondary system, resulting in higher availability and performance and an increased return on investment for standby SAP HANA hardware.

With SAP HANA dynamic tiering, companies can use lower cost disk storage for historical data within a single SAP HANA database, or even a single multistore table. Data aging allows older data to be moved into secondary storages to free up more working memory for SAP HANA.

At the hardware level, costs are reduced by maximizing the utilization of your SAP HANA hardware. A new phase of SAP HANA Tailored Data Center Integration (SAP HANA TDI) allows customers to leverage existing hardware and infrastructure components for their SAP HANA deployment. It includes support for customer workload-driven sizing and additional SAP HANA configurations on lower cost CPUs. This introduces new opportunities to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of SAP HANA by enabling customers to buy only the processing power and memory they require for their specific workload.

In addition, we enhanced the SAP HANA Quick Sizer and broadened the SAP HANA Hardware Sizing Service to include detailed sizing guidelines for a variety of workload types, thus making it easier for customers to find an optimal cost-to-performance ratio for their business.

Based on SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA, our intelligent ERP suite designed specifically for in-memory computing, provides companies with a digital core that delivers massive simplification in areas such as data model, user experience, decision making, and business processes. SAP S/4HANA creates unique opportunities to simplify the IT landscape and help reduce TCO. Thanks to SAP S/4HANA, companies can eliminate redundant data, reducing their data footprint while working with larger data sets in one system. A pilot we did with a large healthcare customer showed impressive data footprint reductions from 54 TB to approximately 3 TB, so more than a factor 10 reduction. At the same time, SAP S/4HANA enables customers to reduce hardware costs, operational costs, and complexity.

Interested in learning more? Make sure you check out the blogs by Christian Klein and Thomas Saueressig!