SAP HANA scales linearly

SAP released HANA today which does in-memory computing with in-memory database. Sample appliance with 10 blades with 32 cores (using XEON 7500) each; sample (another buzzword: “data source agnostic”) appliance costs approximately half-million of dollars. SAP claimed that”Very complex reports and queries against 500 billion point-of-sale records were run in less than one minute” using parallel processing. SAP HANA “scales linearly” with performance proportional to hardware improvements that enable complex real-time analytics.

Pricing will likely be value based and that it is looking for an all-in figure of around $10 million per deal. Each deal will be evaluated based upon requirements and during the call, the company confirmed that each engagement will be unique (so SAP is hoping for 40-60 deals in pipeline).

I think with such pricing and data size the HANA appliance (as well as other pricey data appliances) can be useful mostly in 2 scenarios:

• when it integrates with mathematical models to enable users to discover patterns, clusters, trends, outliers and hidden dependencies and
• when those mountains of data can be visualized, interactively explored and searched, drilled-down and pivot…

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