Wednesday, January 4
BW 7.3 on SAP HANA
Jeffery Word, vice president of SAP : Hi I am the chief of SAP HANA globally and I am joined today by a couple of our project managers for our product BW . We have with us Storm Archer and Scott Shepard today . We will talk a little bit about the big news at TECHED , one of the biggest things that we have been talking about on this show, which is SAP HANA . You might have just heard about HANA . You might be just getting exposed to it . One of the biggest things that we are going to show this week is that SAP BW 7.3 is going on the ramp on November 7th with HANA as the primary database underneath BW . And we have got about sixteen thousand BW customers all over the world. You guys work with all the biggest ones that we have got . So why don’t we let these guys talk about what exactly a BW HANA means for our customers , why everybody here is so excited about that and some other things that our customers might actually need to know to get their heads around it and start playing with all the HANA underneath BW . So , Storm you have been leading the workshops for BW for HANA here . Can you give us a little idea , can you give the customers a little bit of idea as to what BW HANA mean . What is different . What is it that they need to know about ?
Storm Archer, SAP NetWeaver product manager : well yes , Thanks Jeff . And yes we are totally packed with people here and we would be glad to be giving information about BW in HANA . Well the biggest message we will be giving about BW under SAP HANA will be that it would be totally undisrupted service with the development of BW today . Everything works via the box when you do the conversions in whatever database you will be running over through , all your current investments are well in place . That is a really important message that all the customers have to lay a match to any other configurations they would redevelop . There are certain optimizations that we can do when delivered to make it work even much better. But really its is the non – disruption by the BW , how we can optimize them further and reduce them fro development .
Scott Shepard, Director, Data Warehousing , HANA Solution Management, SAP : Yes it is true, it is really bringing the horse power of HANA to bear the entire environment . We are removing the underlying database you have and putting HANA in the underneath . This really brings you to a new dimension to BW , and the way you can do things , the power there and so on . So some of these enhancements we have done are done specifically to take advantage of the in memory computing agent HANA . So we have looked at some of the problematic areas with BW that the customers have said . These are the things which we would like to enhance and change . If we look at those , some of those are DSO loading and other loading . So we look the DSO load , figure about 80 percent of the time done by activation . Well we have taken that activation process and pushed it down into the in memory computing engine and bring the power of HANA into play . It would speed that up for our customers . So it reduces the complexity as well . On having to manage performances tightly , HANA just does it better . So we have that and we have situations where there are dimension tables being eliminated . We do all that for you . It has a strongest point , absolutely seamless without disrupting your environment . By eliminating or deleting the dimension tables , faster result generations , you have better performance , faster loading, and simplified architecture in general . With that I would say those are the big ones.
Jeffery Word : So basically , there is nothing different . They keep their BW pack on 7.3 , they are a quick service pack . They get rid of the old , slow , expensive database on the disk and replace it with a faster , cheaper and better database of HANA on it . All the goodness over a weekend ?
Storm Archer : Yes , the conversion process takes about a weekend .
Scott Shepherd : In fact we data did conversion here on the show by my colleague at our demo booth , and he finished it on the show floor . That is how was he was able to do it . That was roughly over a terabyte a believe .
Storm Archer : And there was another guy who started in the afternoon and finished over night .
Jefferey Word : That is actually a very nice thing . You have been actually manning the HANA booth . For those of who you are not at the show , we have actually got five different HANA boxes , from all of the five certified SAP HANA vendors . We have dell , cisco , HP ,Fugitsu ,and we have got IBM . And we have actually got a BW running on the HANA with a one terabyte , 8 way, 64 cords , dual 90 from HP . Running live over here at the booth . Scott , you have got to manning that booth . First of all I haven’t seen you since we got here because there literally have been people standing over your shoulder trying to get a look at this , with bonking lights and all those things . So what has been the reaction ?
Scott Shepherd : the reaction is unlike anything that I have ever seen with SAP. It is actually totally mind blowing . In fact if we start to show them this , and they can get their hands on it and can actually see BW running on HANA , and what it can do to their environment , they start talking amongst themselves and talking about new ideas and how they could do things differently . Maybe change their architecture now potentially depending on their business situation . Simplify things in their architecture because now they don’t have to do things tuned as they used to do . They are totally through . They keep coming back , the same people asking like – let me see that again . there have been several people struck there for hours and hours . That’s why there is not much of voice left now.
Jefferey Word : One guy I could see smoke coming out of his ears when you just told him you could lead all the applications . That is great . That has been absolutely a hit at the show . This starts on November 7 . So Storm give us an idea what the customers need to think about if they wanted to participate an what type of pre requisites are there , who do they need to talk to get to bribe to meet you .
Storm Archer : no no no .But for the Ramp up on the November 7 , the BW 730 is a requirement . We also have support packs for BW required for the process . When we start to look at our environment , MIRD migrated or operated to MW 730 as your first question . That itself has a few things to be dealt with . Authorizations have to be a part of that when you run those . Unicode is also required . if you have any Unicode conversion required for your system you should be looking into doing that as a part of the upgrade . So we are combining the upgrading process over the weekend as well . Again depending on size , database may take an extra day , and various other factors are there . On top of that we look at the various requirements of HANA hardware that you have . That might actually work . HANA is actually going to work on replacing the BWA for the customers . Now that we are including it inside of HANA , will be easy with HANA now running as a database
Jefferey Word : So BW on HANA is basically getting all of the speed and performance from BW A but inside the database itself .
Storm Archer : Yes . So what we are going to do is if we are going to reuse BW , then you are going to have to talk to your hardware vendor , making that hardware to get certified for HANA to run on top of that . We do have a number of requirements we need for the newer intel core processors we have like the E7s ,we have worked closely with Intel for the last several years . We have been doing this since 2005 , so we are getting closer to build in these skills which we really need . We are also working on the sizing tool , because we do have a lot of in memory compression . So you may have to take one third of the data by HANA . It wouldn’t be enough for one third to be taken by the RAM . Be have to put it in smaller footprints .So we are working on a calculation that will help us size those boxes for the customers .
Jefferey Word : And the one question that everybody wants to ask is how much faster is BW on HANA going to be compared to BW on the existing database ? Do you have any solution to it at this point ?
Scott Shepherd : Yes , I think , it varies on the existing architecture , but the performance we have seen is absolutely dramatic . Do we have any exact numbers for the unloading ?
Storm Archer : Yes , we do have some numbers from the AIM session done here , from the BW HANA session running here at TECHED , for people you can go online and check the slides in the content for AIM 300 . In that section we talk about the reduction of time . It is about a two thirds reduction in activation time , so we are seeing really great performance kick ups from that perspective.
Scott Shepherd : It helps in dramatically simplifying the data targets for BW too . The new structure is like that . And by the way , we do all of that behind the scenes . The customer doesn’t have to do anything . With that reduction , everything is speeding up . So its not just the activation . I think we should point out that it’s the general trend to our customers is that as we enhance the product further and further , every single thing that we can do to push the work load down to would be done by HANA . So that is the trend . We can do that and that is what we will do .
Jefferey Word : When we recall we have a database that is created from scratch and then to SAPs requirements , now just for SAP . So we got an optimized database just for the user to use BW . And then that allows to go further after BW . The other options coming would get advantage from this special database optimized by us.
Scott Shepherd : Yes true its not just SAP data . It is important to point that out . I would want you to talk about the data market scenarios .
Storm Archer : What Jeff said was absolutely correct . It would be useful other applications too apart from just SAP applications . We looked into the market and we want to make it open as well . We don’t want to be closed . If a customer is emphasizing on BW platform on HANA , we do have the enterprising warehouse where we do have non SAP data in the data marts . But in BW why we do not have to restrict ourselves . We can take data from the other data marts and assume that with the BW from the HANA box in memory .
Jefferey Word : So we could do basically any type of data from any system , and you get the speed in power .
Scott Shepherd : That is something they wanted us to fix . It is hard for us to get non SAP data an do it . Its not really that bad , but with BW on HANA it is absolutely easy . There are no issues whatsoever with it .
Jefferey Word : I think everybody online can now see what the show is doing and want to shop by our booth . It is absolutely packed and the buzz around it is great . So just in kind of a final wrap up , What advice would you like to give to the SAP customers out there who are running BW ? where do they need to go for more information , how can they get about the HANA band wagon , how could they go about the whole process , and get all these goodness as soon as possible ?
Storm Archer : First with the wrap up process . We are going to ramp up in November , so accordingly planning now would be a great thing for the customer to do . The first thing you would be having to do will be talking to your BW executive . They will help you to run you through the submission process for the ramp up .
Jefferey Word : To get you account adjusted , you will have to go on to SAP and request to do it .
Scott Shepherd : And do it quickly because there is not a shortage of requests for that list . I mean its amazing .
Storm Archer : The list is longer than my arm for the ramp up itself . We already have a lot of customers lined for it .
Jefferey Word : So what do they do to get more information about this in order to start their process ?
Storm Archer : We already have discussed a lot about it live here . We also have thought about blogging coming along , we will do some follow ups , we will do some shows , and ask your account teams , we would also do sessions one on one if that what it takes and that’s what you need .
Jefferey Word : Its great that the information is out there and all set and the last question I want to ask you guys is who is the first customer to go live on BW , who is the first company ? where is the first implementation of BW on HANA ? Atleast internally ?
Storm Archer : SAP IT
Jefferey Word : SAP runs SAP . So we actually are the first BW live customers . We go live with SAP with BW on HANA in about three weeks . Well thank you so much guys . Get back to that booth because there is so many of the customers waiting for you guys to see you do some demos and show the HANA goodness .
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