SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering – Now Validated and Supported on the AWS Cloud

This post is by Somckit Khemmanivanh and Rahul Kabra, SAP Solutions Architects at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

We have been working closely with our partner SAP to validate SAP HANA dynamic tiering on the AWS Cloud. We’re excited to announce that AWS is now a supported platform for SAP HANA dynamic tiering—see the announcement by Courtney Claussen, SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering Product Manager. Here’s more information about dynamic tiering and its benefits on AWS.

SAP HANA dynamic tiering allows your SAP HANA database to store warm data on a separate dedicated host that houses the dynamic tiering service (an esserver process). The dynamic tiering service gives you the ability to create multistore and extended store tables to store and process your warm data.

Dynamic tiering provides three key benefits:

• It allows you to offload older, less frequently accessed data to an integrated disk tier.
• It lets you access the data in the disk tier with excellent performance.
• It lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your SAP HANA system significantly.

Courtney Claussen recently published a blog post about a very compelling use case for dynamic tiering. 5 million records were processed as part of the billing run of an SAP utilities customer. These records were processed in 53 minutes when running entirely in SAP HANA. After this baseline was established, 25% of the 5 million records were moved to dynamic tiering’s multistore table. This resulted in 75% of the table’s rows being placed in SAP HANA and the other 25% in dynamic tiering. The billing run was then repeated again, and the result was a total runtime of 58 minutes, that is, only 10% degradation in runtime, which meant almost equal performance at a much lower cost footprint.

These impressive results and feedback from our customers motivated us to work closely with SAP to validate SAP HANA dynamic tiering on the AWS Cloud, so you can now benefit from the performance, cost savings, and future innovations for this service.

On AWS, you can start small with your certified SAP HANA systems (with systems ranging from 244 GiB of RAM up to 4 TiB of RAM) and scale up as your requirements change. Similarly, with dynamic tiering, you can choose to start small and add capacity as your needs, workloads, users, and traffic patterns change. For example, if you have a 4-TiB SAP HANA system, you could choose to start with a small dynamic tiering system such as our validated 488-GiB system (which is equivalent to 512 GB of RAM). Should you find that you need either more CPU or RAM, or disk space or IOPS, you can scale your dynamic tiering system up to a medium and eventually to a large configuration. The following diagram shows the 4-TiB SAP HANA system with a small dynamic tiering configuration.

Here’s a table that shows the options for scaling your SAP HANA dynamic tiering systems.

Having this flexibility to scale enables you to optimize performance, lower your costs, and extend your SAP HANA systems as much as possible.

For details on dynamic tiering support on AWS, including prerequisites, supported versions, and other specifics, see SAP Note #2555629 (requires SAP Service Marketplace login).

Feel free to contact us with your questions or suggestions. Thank you!

– Somckit and Rahul