This week's unveiling of SAP HANA 2.0 is of particular symbolic and practical importance for both SAP and its customer base, as it underscores how much the in-memory computing platform has matured even as SAP races to add scores of new features.
First released in 2010, HANA has become the focal point for most of SAP's development activities (and branding), whether concerning the core database, specialized applications, HANA Enterprise Cloud and HANA Cloud platform.
HANA 2.0 is far from the second version of the product; rather, the name marks the start of a second era. SAP has added new features to HANA through what it calls support package stacks, and released SPS 12 last year. The plan going forward will see SAP offer standard maintenance—security patches and bug fixes only—for SPS 12 until May 2019. This is aimed at serving customers who don't want to get involved with upgrades on certain workloads for now.
All new innovations, however, will go into HANA 2.0, with a twice-yearly release cadence for new support package stacks. Customers who want to take advantage of those bleeding-edge options can move to HANA 2.0. SAP says the process is a "simple upgrade" and not a database migration. Existing reports and applications will run without changes on HANA 2.0, SAP adds.
Customers who haven't applied SPS 12 yet are encouraged to, as the release offers capture and replay capabilities that can be used to test how production workloads will behave on HANA 2.0.
The initial RTC (release to customers) of HANA 2.0 will come at the end of November. About those new features: There are many, as outlined in SAP's announcement:
• Database Management – IT organizations will be able to ensure business continuity with enhanced high-availability, security, workload management, and administration enhancements. For example, the new active / active read-enabled option will enable IT organizations to leverage secondary systems – previously used only for system replication – to offload read-intensive workloads for improved operations.
• Data Management – Businesses are expected to leverage all data regardless of where it resides with enhancements to enterprise modeling, data integration, data quality and tiered storage. For example, the new SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer, Edition for SAP HANA is a Web-based solution that will allow IT organizations to manage complex information architectures and visualize the potential impact of new technologies before they are implemented.
• Analytical Intelligence – Developers are projected to embed rich insight into applications with enhanced analytical processing engines for text, spatial, graph and streaming data. For example, new algorithms for classification, association, time series and regression have been added to the predictive analytics library, which will empower data scientists to discover new patterns and incorporate machine learning in custom applications.
• Application Development – Developers are expected to build and deploy next-generation applications with enhanced capabilities for the application server, development tools and languages. For example, Bring your own Language support provides a choice of additional third party build packs and runtimes that can be used within the SAP HANA extended application services, advanced model. Also, a new file processor API will enable developers to extract text or metadata from documents for delivering deeper insights.
Microservices is one of the hotter buzzwords in software today, and SAP is addressing it with HANA 2.0:
Users of cloud-based microservices powered by SAP HANA can enhance applications with analytical insight with simple APIs using any language or development platform.
The new cloud services include:
• Entity extraction, fact extraction and linguistic analysis: Use text data processing capabilities of a managed SAP HANA instance in the cloud for application enhancement with natural language processing.
• Earth Observation Analysis service (beta): Co-innovated withEuropean Space Agency (ESA) and based on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) EO-WCS standard, this microservice accesses satellite data from ESA and uses SAP HANA spatial processing in the cloud.
"It's good to see SAP pushing HANA forward," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "There are a number of good new capabilities in the area of data management, machine learning, analytics and bring-your-own language. But we have to see if this is truly a new platform, or just a well marketed 'fork' in the product."
"Ultimately it is a sign of success for the HANA platform," he adds. "Some customers are looking for stability and no changes, as they are in production, and other customers want or need to push the envelope with the latest and greatest."
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