The Invade of SAP HANA 2.0

With HANA 2, SAP is not releasing ground-breaking technology but instead changing how they release updates to the HANA platform. Yes, HANA 2 will include some new capabilities enhancements in the areas of system management, data-tiring, predictive capabilities and bring your own language to name a few) but these are essentially HANA SPS 13 capabilities.

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What is really changing is SAP enabling customers to choose how they manage their update cycles. Currently, SAP releases a new SPS pack for HANA every 6 months and expects customers to be within 2 SPS levels as part of the terms of their maintenance contract. For some organizations, this rate of change is just too much but something they have to manage to retain support, meaning those organizations often has to live with the constant change – this constant change of their core landscape can often kill innovation.

Whilst SAP will continue to make new SPS packs available on a regular basis for HANA 2, they are also extending the maintenance period for HANA until May 2019. This enables customers who don’t need or simply cannot stomach the rate of change of 2 SPS packs per year, to stick with their current HANA platform for longer, without worrying about keeping up with SPS releases.

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Essentially, SAP is offering two routes to HANA, hoping that stable customers will welcome the reprieve from a support perspective with HANA, whilst innovators will welcome the ability to take advantage of new features as they are released via HANA 2. It is worth noting that SAP is still recommending customers move their stable HANA platforms to SPS 12 prior to “slowing” the update cycle.

This approach benefits SAP as it continues to ensure customers are on a relatively recent SPS level, which aids SAP’s support functions, whilst at the same time allowing them to deliver innovation and advancement to their database platform. I see many customers taking advantage of this dual model to achieve a bi-modal landscape for their database platforms. They can use HANA to support the stable core and roll out up to date HANA 2 instances as and when needed as the agile layer. I do wonder though whether customers will simply look to HANA Cloud Platform to act as the agile layer, taking advantage of an up to date and low impact route to HANA there. Either way, this added flexibility will be a massive advantage for many customers keen to explore more advanced and innovation capabilities without the worry of impacting their BAU landscape. The easing of maintenance efforts in the BAU landscape should also free up resources to be invested into innovative initiatives.

If you are on a pretty recent release of HANA (i.e. SPS 10 or above) it should be a simple upgrade to get to HANA 2. If you are on an older release SAP recommend migrating to SPS 12 first, then completing the upgrade to HANA 2. Key here is that SAP state it is an upgrade to HANA 2, and not a full-on migration, so it should be comparatively straightforward to take advantage of HANA 2.

Along with the news of HANA 2, there was also a lot of coverage of the new HANA Express Edition (HXE for short) that SAP has very recently made available. In short, SAP has listened to its developer community and delivered HXE as a free HANA platform that can be used for productive solutions up to 32 Gb and then with small licensing terms to expand the size. (There are some restrictions in terms of features but generally, you get access to a pretty fully featured HANA instance.) HXE is targeted at two key areas – SAP developers who want an easy way to access HANA (it can run on relatively low-spec systems, requiring a minimum of 16 Gb system memory) and non-SAP developers who might have an innovative idea that needs the power of HANA to deliver. SAP hope that ISV’s and independent developers will start their new product journey on HXE as the barriers to entry are very low, and then as their solution grows, they can migrate to a bigger HANA platform or HANA Cloud Platform instance. This is a great step forward from SAP and offers a very easy route to the power of HANA.

It feels SAP is accelerating their drive for more HANA adoption and isn’t just focusing on big enterprises. With a range of core HANA options from HXE, through HANA and to HANA 2, customers & developers and more importantly potential customers & developers, have a better choice to pick the right HANA solution for their own needs.

Read Also : Differences Between SAP HANA and HANA 2.0

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