SAP HANA Architecture

[Former Member]

Dear Friends,

I have a question. Hana Architecture is super fast because it is in memory-computing engine.

My question what happens if i run completely on flash storage system on the servers and highest memory. What will be performance of HANA.

If i take Apple Flash storage server with High ram and install Linux and Hana on it. What will be performance of my server.

I know it is dumb question. But i just wanted to know for reference. Did SAP has worked on Flash Storage Architecture.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Srinivas,

as far i know  Apple is not one of the Hardware vendors of  SAP HANA . if my assumption is true then this setup of hana/apple is ruled out.

users please correct me if i am wrong based on the date and year i am writing.

SAP works on Flash storage server. if you use  SSD instead of flash  you will get more answers from our forums users:-)

sample

http://ashminderubhi.wordpress.com/2012/07/04/big-sap-bw-improvements-with-flash-storage/

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Srinivasa,

As Satish already pointed out, Apple is not one of the HANA Hardware partners. HANA is sold as an appliance from various hardware partners. Every configuration has to undergo certification by the SAP HANA team at SAP to make sure customers experience the full power of HANA.

As far as I know, all the certified configurations have a mix of spinning disks (for the data volumes) and high-speed SSDs, mostly Fusion-IO (for log volume). When data is written to the DB, all synchronous I/O is done agains the database logs, so we use the fasted persistent storage option here. (Note: after the change request is successfully written to the DB logs, the transaction is committed. Playing the log into the data files on disk is done asynchronously, so it's not a bottleneck. All read requests are answered from memory)

--juergen

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

sorry for the confusion. I know apple is ruled out for HANA. what i was asking is when i am running sql server on flash storage and hana on a different server 128gb ram. 20 core.

but the result was coming faster on flash storage. it is the same amount of data all i did is index the fields in sql.

my question is for fastest persistent storage why cant we use SSD or flash storage. With higher amount flash storage and higher amount of Ram. and higher amount of core cpus. I feel we can achieve best ever. I am big fan of Hana, i want to make the system more better as far as the performance. when you run indexes on fields on flash storage the performance has increased 13x. As Satish has provided the documentation for SAP BW on flash storage and his performance has increased to 13X.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

HI Satish,

My answer is from your document itself. If we can implement HANA on flash storage we can increase performance 13x times than the existing. It is not like all tables we are loading on to the memory. Example what happens in a situation when you are running BW on Hana. If we change the architecture with Flash storage or SSD. It will be pretty awesome.

Flash Final Test

Making the changes mentioned above made for some big performance gains. Remember again the load is still going through SVC and VMWARE but now with 20CPUs and an increased pga_aggregate_target. The test now showed an overall improvement of up to 13x! The I/O profile looks like:

Look at those figures now! Latency is down to between microseconds to 2ms (2ms on large sequential reads which is good), lost application time is down to only 3 hours and the histograms shows high % of I/O calls are now <;;1ms. In fact random I/O which is showing as 0ms (AWR doesnt shows microsecond) was actually down to 600microsecs through the entire stack of SVC and VMWARE. To add to this amazing performance gain, there was enough headroom to double the SAP processes to 40,000. The batch process went from 24 hours to 3 hours!

Another amazing performance gain from using Flash Storage Arrays. Overall latency went down to 600microseconds from up to 14ms, 10% IOWAIT was down to 1% and application lost time went from 81 hours to 3 hours. For the business a 24 hours batch process down to only 3 hours!