SAP HANA Native Storage Extension: A Native Warm Data Tiering Solution

With the rapid growth of data showing no indicators of slowing down, clients aiming to decrease their Total cost of ownership (TCO), while still leveraging their large reservoirs of data to optimal effect, need to continually manage their data storage expenses without forfeiting the high performance they’ve come to expect of SAP HANA. A few data tiering options with different price/performance qualities are available, but quickly SAP customers will have another option in their data tiering toolbox: an indigenous option for warm data tiering– the SAP HANA Native Storage Expansion.

A Quick Data Tiering Refresher

A quick data-tiering refresher– mission-critical warm data is maintained in-memory on the SAP HANA database for real-time processing and evaluation. Less regularly used warm data is stored in a lower price tier, but, still managed as a unified part of the SAP HANA database. Rarely used, voluminous cool data is located on the lowest cost storage. Regardless of the location, all data remains accessible at any time.

The new SAP HANA Native Storage Extension (NSE) includes an indigenous warm data tier to the SAP HANA database. Any customer-built or SAP-built HANA application, that is, tested by ballooning data quantities can leverage this deeply integrated warm data tier. NSE increases SAP HANA data capacity at a reduced TCO via a simple, scalable landscape that offers a piece of great performance. Supporting complete SAP HANA functionality and all SAP HANA data types and data models, NSE complements– without changing– the Expansion Node and Dynamic Tiering warm data options. NSE is supported for both on-premise SAP HANA platform, and SAP Cloud Platform, SAP HANA Service.

Image courtesy: https://blogs.sap.com/ 

How Does SAP HANA Native Storage Extension Work?

While hot data is ‘column loadable’, staying totally in-memory for rapid processing and loaded from disk into SAP HANA memory in columns, the SAP HANA Native Storage Extension allows a user to define particular warm data as ‘page loadable’, which is then packed into memory page by page as required by query handling. Page loadable data does not require to reside totally in-memory, like column loadable data.

NSE lowers the memory footprint of the SAP HANA database with broadened disk capability and an intelligent buffer cache that transfers pages of data between memory and disk. Question efficiency differences might be obvious in between warm data and hot data.

Image courtesy: https://blogs.sap.com/ 

Additional Data Source Capacity with SAP HANA Indigenous Storage Extension

SAP HANA scale-up systems are supported with this upcoming preliminary NSE launch and scale-out support will follow in a later release. With NSE, you will be able to expand SAP HANA database ability with warm data on disk up to 4x the size of warm data in memory. A relatively small amount of SAP HANA memory for the NSE barrier cache will be needed for paging procedures, as the buffer cache can manage 8x its size of warm data on disk. As an example, a 2TB SAP HANA system without NSE equates to a 1TB data source in memory. With NSE and the enhancement of a 500GB barrier cache, you can increase your 1TB database to a 5TB database: 1TB of hot data, 4TB of warm data, and a 500GB buffer cache to web data between memory and disk

Following Steps

We are excited to roll out this indigenous SAP HANA warm data tiering option that flaunts complete SAP HANA functionality at a reduced TCO for clients. Want to find out more about SAP HANA Native Storage Extensions? Learn here or drop your queries in the comment section below.

That’s all for today. If you’re interested to read more blogs on this topic, feel free to visit our website.

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