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IBM persistent storage options for SAP HANA in-memory databases

By Tony Pearson posted Tue September 13, 2016 02:02 PM

  

Originally posted by: TonyPearson


SAP HANA is an in-memory, relational database management system supported on Linux for x86 and POWER servers. The "HANA" acronym is short for "High-Performance Analytic Appliance" software. By keeping the data in memory, analytics and queries can be performed much faster than from traditional disk repositories.

Server memory, however, is volatile storage, so the data needs to be stored on persistent storage such as flash or disk drives. SAP has certified several configurations, some involve IBM Spectrum Scale solutions. I will use the following graphic to explain the three configurations.

Spectrum-Scale-ESS-SAP-HANA
Linux on x86-64 with Spectrum Scale FPO

With SAP HANA on Lenovo x86-64 servers, SAP has certified internal flash or disk drives running IBM Spectrum Scale in "File Placement Optimization" (FPO) mode. FPO provides a shared-nothing architecture that matches the SAP HANA architecture. IBM Spectrum Protect can backup this configuration, providing data protection and disaster recovery support.

Linux on POWER with Elastic Storage Server

With SAP HANA on POWER servers, SAP has certified external Elastic Storage Server (ESS). Not only is POWER the better platform to run SAP HANA than x86-64, but Elastic Storage Server offers excellent erasure coding to provide excellent rebuild times and storage efficiency.

The ESS is a pre-built system that combines IBM Spectrum Scale software with server and storage hardware. IBM Spectrum Protect can also backup this configuration, providing data protection and disaster recovery support.

Block-level Storage over Storage Area Network (SAN)

Various IBM block-level devices are support for SAP HANA on both Linux on x86-64 and Linux on POWER. Unfortunately, SAP only has certified (to date) the use of the XFS file system. The problem many clients mention about this configuration is the lack of end-to-end backup and disaster recovery. This is solved by the Spectrum Scale configurations in the previous two examples.

Other combinations, such as SAP HANA on POWER with Spectrum Scale FPO, or on x86-64 servers with Elastic Storage Serer, are either not SAP-certified, or not directly supported by SAP without their approval.

IBM and SAP have worked closely together for many years, and I am glad to see SAP HANA and IBM Spectrum Scale based solutions continue this tradition.

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Comments

Archive User
Thu September 15, 2016 03:30 AM

Originally posted by: laff


great post - thank you for that - I don't want to miss adding a hint about the great performance of a SpectrumScale client - here HANA node. The single client performance in combination with an ESS GL6 can exceed 8 GB/s. This is especially important, when reading data from disk (to memory) during the start up of HANA DB. The faster the data can be fetched into memory, the earlier HANA can start. So great read performance of SpectrumScale can help to shorten the startup time of a HANA DB by factor of at least 2, but more realistic is factor 5 or 6, even up to 8.