Towards the end of 2020, China's cloud computing market is reappearing a major event: SAP HANA Cloud landed on Alibaba Cloud! SAP launched the epoch-making in-memory database HANA 10 years ago, and has since led the global database trend. After the launch of HANA, the demand for SAP HANA can be compared to when SAP R/3 ERP software was launched. In 2013, the entire SAP Business Suite was migrated to SAP HANA. The SAP S/4HANA launched in 2015 was completely built on top of SAP HANA. In 2017, SAP HANA has landed on the three major cloud platforms of AWS, Azure and GCP.
48 years ago, SAP started with "real-time computing" as its original intention and vision for entrepreneurship, that is, enabling enterprises to process data in real time. This is a common pain point of choosing enterprises-helping enterprises solve the complexity of data management and processing. The vision has always supported SAP's subsequent technological innovation. The birth of SAP HANA stems from memory computing, which allows business data to be stored in memory to respond to business needs in real time. It can also handle both OLAP and OLTP requirements in memory, which solves the traditional need for two sets of databases The complexity of the system architecture, while greatly enhancing the real-time performance.
If 10 years ago, the industry still had doubts about in-memory computing, SAP HANA has now become a database leader, continuously entering the Gartner global database magic quadrant leader camp, accumulating 32,000 customers and becoming the cornerstone of SAP's smart enterprise vision. SAP HANA cooperates with SAP HANA Cloud to provide enterprises with hybrid cloud data management and analysis infrastructure across public, private clouds and enterprise local IT. SAP HANA Cloud all over the world can become an extended data and analysis platform for enterprises and developers. , To develop various enterprise applications on it to promote the transformation of digital intelligence.
Gartner predicts that by 2022, 75% of global databases will be migrated to cloud platforms or directly deployed in the cloud. On December 15, 2020, on the occasion of 2020 SAP TechED, SAP announced that SAP HANA Cloud will land on Alibaba Cloud. The competition in China's cloud database market has become increasingly fierce. The addition of SAP will make China's cloud database market rise again.
Polaris Strategy: The Next Chapter of SAP
Since SAP HANA, SAP has launched a strategic transformation to the cloud. As of 2019, SAP has spent nearly $70 billion in acquisitions of Hybris, SuccessFactors, Ariba, Concur, Fieldglass, Qualtrics and other companies in the past ten years, refactoring traditional core ERP products, and rewriting 400 million lines of code to make Compliant with the cloud computing architecture; and at the same time released S/4HANA Cloud, launched HANA-based CRM solutions, and Leonardo smart solutions.
In February 2015, SAP launched the most important product in history: SAP S/4HANA's fourth-generation ERP suite. Based on the HANA in-memory real-time database, S/4HANA can process massive data in local memory, which can significantly reduce data processing time. It also provides multiple modes such as public cloud deployment, local deployment and hybrid cloud deployment. In June 2018, SAP launched another major product: SAP C/4HANA, or CRM suite, is an integration of the acquired Hybris, Gigya and CallidusCloud solutions. With C/4HANA, SAP was named an industry leader in the "The Forrester Wave: Digital Experience Platform, Third Quarter 2019" report.
While SAP has embarked on its journey to cloud transformation through large-scale acquisitions, another problem is also plagued by SAP customers. This is the various problems caused by excessive acquisitions resulting in different SaaS software products and inconsistent architectures. As a result, SAP launched a new strategy in 2020: North Star. The so-called "Polaris" strategy is to unify all acquired software, SaaS cloud services, and development platforms on a single SAP platform, and support all front-end applications and back-end data integration through a unified platform architecture. This architecture is the "Polaris" "Architecture.
Guo Lei, senior director of SAP product development, introduced that under the Polaris architecture, SAP has unified the front-end applications into "6+1", which includes 6 solution areas including Hybris, SuccessFactors, Ariba, Concur, Fieldglass, and Qualtrics, as well as one platform. "Polaris" platform. The SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is responsible for the implementation of the Polaris architecture. The SAP business technology platform BTP is developed from the previous SAP digital platform. As an open platform, BTP also strategically develops the ecosystem, embraces partner solutions, and provides customers with complementary value.
Guo Lei emphasized that after starting the Polaris architecture, SAP will give priority to cloud in the future, and recommend customers to give priority to cloud platform. When a customer encounters a problem during implementation, the rapid implementation method of LACE, namely "Landing-Enable-Application-Promotion" will be launched, and it will be launched in half a year or even a few months, so that the cloud platform can be obtained faster and more timely the value of.
Future-oriented SAP business technology platform
With the launch of SAP HANA Cloud on Alibaba Cloud, SAP HANA will support AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba Cloud and SAP's own cloud data centers, and provide customers with the underlying cloud infrastructure through the "4+1" solution. Under the Polaris architecture, SAP will lead a unified data architecture based on the BTP business technology platform, simplify data processing integration and other environments, and make applications run more smoothly. Guo Lei emphasized that SAP HANA and HANA Cloud are the main components of Polaris. In the future, SAP data, model and code development will be realized through HANA and HANA Cloud.
Under the Polaris architecture, the SAP BTP business technology platform will be divided into three levels: a unified infrastructure layer, a unified data layer, and a unified application management layer.
- In the unified infrastructure layer, SAP provides infrastructure management of reusable services such as identity services, audit logs, subscription management, or data privacy. It supports multi-cloud and Kubernetes/Serverless-based infrastructure, which includes cross-public cloud and private Cloud hybrid cloud infrastructure.
- In the unified data layer, HANA database in the local data center, cloud HANA database and data lake, or federated access to SAP HANA, and allows third-party non-HANA application data to be aggregated together, SAP provides a unified data layer Data model, data governance and control, analysis, artificial intelligence and machine learning services, etc.
- In a unified application management layer, it provides a unified automatic configuration function for business applications, realizes a cross-platform public data model, provides no-code, low-code and full-code development methods, supports RPA and other business process automation solutions, and can manage business in a unified manner Applications and services, especially the application market for users and ecology.
SAP HANA Cloud undoubtedly plays an important role in the SAP Polaris architecture and the new BTP business technology platform architecture. Guo Lei emphasized that SAP HANA Cloud has three major advantages: stimulating data vitality, seamless data integration and ensuring data credibility.
- "To stimulate data vitality" means to use modern computing architecture to more comprehensively mine data, including using smart technology and multi-mode processing to provide stronger mining capabilities. Memory processing can shorten the response time from hours to seconds. Auto-optimized real-time transactions and advanced analysis provide hybrid processing modes.
- "Seamless data integration" means to quickly connect SAP and non-SAP systems, which can connect to local ERP, CRM and other data for integration, as well as network data such as online payment and operation data, for unified integrated analysis, while providing virtualization and physicalization Storage mechanism.
- "Ensuring data credibility" means the unified management of user permissions, access control and behavior auditing to ensure access security; data encryption and authorization mechanisms are available to ensure data security; data is managed in accordance with strict global standards such as GDPR to determine security Application data in the environment.
It is worth mentioning that SAP HANA Cloud provides platform as a service (PaaS), memory-centric infrastructure, database and application services, and provides an environment for building, expanding, deploying, and running various cloud application software. Start-ups, Third-party independent software developers and customer IT teams can develop various enterprise application software on the SAP HANA Cloud cloud platform, ultimately forming an ecological community. Therefore, SAP HANA Cloud is also an ecological digital platform for ecological applications.
Top Ten Features of SAP HANA Cloud
On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of SAP HANA, SAP HANA Cloud landed on the Alibaba Cloud platform, which brought new competitors to China's cloud database market. Gartner’s evaluation of SAP is: SAP HANA provides unified analysis and transactional processing based on a copy of data, as well as embedded predictive analysis, multi-mode capabilities, language processing, OLAP engine, data virtualization, Hadoop, Spark and cloud objects Storage and other capabilities; and SAP HANA Cloud has landed on Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, GCP, etc., as well as the SAP public cloud, and can also be deployed in environments such as integrated machines, hyper-converged systems, bare metal and virtual machines.
SAP HANA Cloud puts SPA HANA products that have been verified by more than 30,000 customers on the cloud, making it easier for customers to obtain and use memory computing. SAP HANA Cloud provides two data processing methods: One is virtual access, which provides a data center that can be accessed and associated for global data. The data can be left in the original place, or locally or in the cloud. SAP HANA Cloud uses virtual access. Build a virtual connection and perform data modeling; the second is to copy data to SAP HANA Cloud through replication. SAP provides memory, disk and data lake in three ways, allowing customers to configure performance and cost-optimized data storage pools Store it.
SAP HANA Cloud has ten major technical features: First, memory computing. The core of SAP HANA Cloud is for memory computing, which can reduce the cost of customer applications and underlying deployment, and improve the cost-effectiveness of HANA. In addition, customers can start with small-scale data, and SAP HANA Cloud can be expanded as the data scale grows, so that the initial cost is low, and subsequent purchases can continue as the data volume grows. In terms of development, SAP HANA Cloud is fully in line with DevOps operation and maintenance and development integration, making development more convenient. Guo Lei emphasized that the database compression ratio provided by SAP HANA Cloud can reach about 10 times, that is, the original data can be compressed by one-tenth, thereby increasing the flexibility of data storage costs and analysis; secondly, the management cost is reduced by 29%. There is no need to use different data services because of different data formats.
The second is the data storage layering, which is the data pyramid. For the hot data at the top of the data pyramid, the data and calculation engine are implemented through memory calculations, mainly for applications that require extreme response time; for the temperature data in the upper layer of the data pyramid, the extended storage method of local disk is used, in the SAP HANA Cloud The intelligent algorithm stores the data that is not frequently called and used in the disk storage space attached to SAP HANA Cloud, provides a disk engine for processing, and can also load disk data into hot storage for processing; for the cold data in the lower layer of the data pyramid, Mainly processed through the data lake, which can store structured and semi-structured data. SAP HANA Cloud provides large-scale data storage equivalent to traditional library storage; for the external data at the bottom of the digital pyramid, it is processed through the object storage of external vendors , This time using Alibaba Cloud's object storage, which can process log data, IoT data, video data, etc.
The third is data virtualization. Many SAP customers and non-SAP customers have invested heavily in other cloud products. SAP HANA Cloud builds a unified data center to reuse the original data through virtualization. SAP HANA Cloud mainly uses the virtual table method to map the data structure of SAP HANA Cloud with external data structures and models, and rebuild the data model in SAP HANA Cloud based on the virtual table. In the future, data algorithms will be provided by SAP HANA Cloud, but data is not necessarily stored in SAP HANA Cloud. SAP HANA Cloud will provide unified modeling and interfaces to achieve unified data center and data integration and optimization.
The fourth is that SAP HANA Cloud provides a unique data copy. Thanks to the SAP HANA Cloud hybrid processing engine, OLAP and OLTP processing can be implemented on a copy of data for real-time analysis and processing. In the past, two platforms, OLAP and OLTP, were required, and the data transaction library was copied to the data analysis library, while SAP HANA Cloud was integrated.
The fifth is the flexibility of configuration. SAP HANA Cloud realizes the separation of computing and storage. Computing and storage can be configured independently. For example, in data science scenarios, a large amount of computing needs to be used, and more CPU resources can be configured. In IoT big data scenarios, more storage resources and less configuration can be configured CPU resources...In this way, flexible allocation and adjustment can be achieved. Even when there are multiple application systems, offline resources can be offline and the offline resources can be redistributed to the applications that are in use. Customers can recycle the unused resources. Allocate to production-type or resource-requiring systems to save costs.
The sixth is the flexible allocation of resources. The construction of the local data center is to define the size and capacity of the hardware according to the peak value. In SAP HANA Cloud, the size of the required resources can be customized according to the needs of a certain application, so that future work plans, loads, and system resource usage can be updated. Quick response.
The seventh is the intelligent application platform on SAP HANA Cloud, including machine learning predictions and real-time insights that can be embedded in applications and analysis solutions, quickly delivering applications running anywhere and safely operating various data, in a single database Process all forms of data and workloads, and provide real-time queries and forecasts for real-time transactions and historical data.
The eighth is security and anonymity. SAP HANA Cloud provides TLS/SSL encryption, and performs data applications within a safe and controllable range to ensure that data is not leaked or attacked. SAP's control of data encryption and partners' encryption control of underlying data storage provide a complete set of security mechanisms.
The ninth is to extend data services through the SAP cloud platform, including the integration of SAP HANA Cloud and SAP cloud platform. SAP HANA Cloud provides data storage together with Kubernetes on the SAP cloud platform, and provides application development services on the SAP cloud platform. The combination of the two enables faster application development and release on SAP HANA Cloud, faster display of data and application integration. Through the joint use of SAP HANA Cloud and SAP cloud platform, ecological operation and maintenance and development operation and maintenance can be realized.
The tenth is simple and flexible pricing. SAP HANA Cloud charges transparently, and you can check real-time usage and historical usage fees through bills. Based on the convenience of the cloud platform, users can purchase a small space of SAP HANA Cloud at the beginning, and continue to purchase more as the amount of data expands and applications expand. In this way, small and medium-sized customers do not need too much expense in the early stage, and for applications that are difficult to predict future growth, they can also control their budgets through the cloud.
In summary: SAP HANA Cloud landing on Alibaba Cloud has a profound impact on the Chinese cloud database market. SAP already has a large customer base in China, many of which have been migrated to the SAP HANA platform, and SAP HANA Cloud can further expand the existing customer base’s demand for cloud databases, and it can also cover small and medium-sized enterprises’ cloud access and global adoption The requirements of ERP and cloud database. SAP HANA Cloud comes with the advantages of globalization, which is undoubtedly very attractive for the globalization of Chinese companies and their overseas needs! (Text/Ningchuan)