The HANA Experts Digital Forum
In the first webinar of Centiq’s HANA series, we explored the various infrastructure deployment options to help tackle the ‘On-premise Vs Cloud and Hybrid’ argument. Don’t worry if you missed it, you can catch it below on our YouTube channel.
Once you have made a decision on an infrastructure deployment option for HANA, a platform needs to be designed to deliver an IT service that matches your business’ needs for uptime, performance and growth. The second webinar in our HANA series, aired on October 4th and explores the specific architectural and sizing considerations organisations will need to make.
Hosted by Robin Webster (CTO) and Steve Stringer (Lead SAP HANA Platform Expert), Centiq, the webinar begins by outlining what the typical HANA requirements are, for example Service Level Agreements (SLAs), uptime and growth and how these requirements can be mapped to HANA deployments regardless of the infrastructure choice your organisation has made. Once your business requirements have been established, you can begin to work out how ‘big’ your problem is, and therefore how big your HANA system needs to be. You will learn the methods of obtaining a correct sizing of a HANA system; these include ABAP Programs, Quick Sizer, database scripts, growth estimation and working out your data retention requirements.
Business continuity and system design
Business continuity objectives can impact HANA system design, which is why recovery times and recovery points due to different failure events including node failure, site failure and human error, are also addressed by the webinar. You will also learn how to design your HANA solution to satisfy your specific recovery objectives. Following this, the webinar will assist you in mapping your agility requirements to your design choices, exploring various agility demands including the need for a high number of SAP products, the need to increase in size and the need to adopt DevOps principles.
Infrastructure and Realising High Availability
Now you have established your design requirements, it is necessary to understand your architecture choices. We explore these choices, starting with scale-up and scale-out options and where they are suitable and how they are achieved; within a shared storage layer either by GPFS or Enterprise storage.
Next, the webinar will introduce you to HANA High Availability – the automatic system recovery point following the failure of hardware or software. The webinar explains the different methods of this available in HANA; SAP HANA Auto Host Failover, Host Level Clustering and container restart. Here, we deal with the complexity, infrastructure footprint and speed of failover of each option, as well as whether it is suitable for Disaster Recovery. You’ll learn the various Disaster Recovery methods available with SAP HANA, from ‘SAP HANA System Replication’ to Storage Replications and Backup/Restore’. We’ll talk you through the different recovery points, speed of recovery and technology requirements of these methods.
Finally, the webinar discusses HANA design testing. It’s really important to make sure you test a new HANA implementation as thoroughly as possible, so we’ll show you how to perform breakpoint analysis and build a test plan as part of your initial design process. Designing a platform that is right for your business can be an intimidating task. We want to provide you with the tools to design the best one for your business.