Database enhancements make SAP HANA 2.0 a compelling choice for delighted SAP HANA 1.0 users
Last week as we were rolling out
SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 02, I had the pleasure to chat with a few of our customers. I was especially intrigued by a conversation I had with a couple of them who were still running SAP HANA 1.0 SPS 12.
These IT professionals were really pleased with the breadth of capabilities and reliability their current installations deliver. Not only they could safely run SAP apps, and BW with tangible performance gain in a simplified landscape, but also use SPS 12 to develop new applications for their specific digitalization needs. Bottom line, they were happy with what they had and were not considering a move to SAP HANA 2.0 now.
During the conversation, however, it became clear that as part of their company’s digitalization strategies, they were looking at ways to facilitate the continuous access to data, strengthen data security, and further simplify landscape administration. Their priorities were safety, security, and simplicity - not innovation. It turns out that, SAP HANA 2.0 adds new capabilities to its core database that clearly address the needs of these customers. Let me share with you why they have since then decided to have a closer look at SAP HANA 2.0.
Keeping your data safer and secure
Like for these customers, keeping your data safe it is most likely one of your top priorities, and when it comes to data safety, SAP HANA 2.0 brings important improvements, both from the security and business continuity perspective.
When it comes to securing uninterrupted data access for your users, HA/DR is greatly enhanced in SAP HANA 2.0. You can now expand your SAP HANA HA/DR landscape to include multi-tier system replication chains - beyond 2 secondary systems - and have continuous data access on the secondary node even when the primary server is in restart mode.
Additionally, you can now serve more users as it is possible to load balance read workloads between a primary and secondary instance of SAP HANA - with the active/active-read enabled mode. This also allows you to get more from your investments as secondary nodes can be actively used to access data instead of remaining idle until the next system outage or planned maintenance.
Reducing downtime in SAP HANA 2.0 also extends to planned maintenance. For example, you benefit from a shorten set-up time for secondary nodes as it uses multi-streaming and parallelization to pre-loads the data. You can also copy or move tenant databases across different multi-tenant environments while system replication is still running.
With SAP HANA 2.0, your data is also more secure as we have extended native data encryption to include all your data at rest - including log backups, and re-do logs. Additionally, you can enable
dynamic data masking to ensure that unauthorized users can only see the obfuscated version of sensitive data. For example, you can now protect a column with employee social security numbers or credit card information from certain users who may have SELECT privileges on a certain view but who do not have the right credentials to see that data itself.
Running simple
With SAP HANA 2.0, we also have renewed our commitment to making it simpler for you to manage your IT landscape. SAP HANA Cockpit is packed with new capabilities that help you manage virtually all aspects of SAP HANA deployments from a single, intuitive graphical interface. For example, you can now use SAP HANA Cockpit to manage multiple tenants and thousands of SAP HANA instances, improve efficiency by and taking advantage of a simplified way to manage user groups, encryption, security alerts and user configurations. You can also get an instant snapshot of your SAP HANA landscape health by monitoring multiple performance KPIs in one view, manage and monitor system replication effectively, and enforce best practices by applying a consistent set of configuration parameters and backup strategies across all your SAP HANA installations – including multi-tenant environments.
Additionally, we have enhanced the workload management capabilities of SAP HANA 2.0 to reduce administration efforts and ensure that different workloads get appropriate resources. For example, it is now possible to automatically manages incoming database requests according to assigned priorities and enforcing limits on the cumulative memory and CPU resources that each user, application, or workload class consumes. You can also prevent run-away queries and manage system thresholds with greater granularity to improve your overall quality of service.
Finally, we have made it easier for you to adopt new software versions by building on top of the workload capture and replay capabilities we introduced in SAP HANA 1.0 SPS 12. You can now capture, compare, and analyze multiple workload replays, perform in depth SQL analysis and significantly lower the time and cost of tuning SAP HANA environments.
Embracing SAP HANA 2.0
There are plenty of reasons for you to have a serious look at SAP HANA 2.0, even if you are happy with your current installation. Just by looking at the core database features that have been released over the past year, with SAP HANA 2.0 you can make your data safer and more secure, all while your landscape becomes simpler to administer.
If you’re on SAP HANA 2.0 and want to chat with us, please reach out to me: philip.on@sap.com
For a deep dive into all the new innovations in SAP HANA 2.0, check out the
what’s new page
