SAP HANA is real real-time technology

Why is SAP HANA so fast?

In recent time, SAP released its incredible innovative idea of In-Memory Computing for providing real-real time computing, along with an appliance SAP HANA (High Performance Analytical Appliance). It is claimed to be a game changing innovation, which has forced other vendors to take a step forward and jump into this dimension of technology.

As claimed by SAP, the HANA appliance achieved outstanding statistical figures:

• Ability to scan 2 million records per millisecond per core and over 10 million complex aggregations calculated on the fly per second per core.
• Full parallelization at 1,000 cores and beyond
• 450 billion record system implemented on less than three terabytes of physical memory.

An explainination of this outstanding performance, as given by John Appleby, Head of Business Analytics & Technology, Bluefin Solutions stands as:

"Regular RDBMS technologies put the information on spinning plates of iron (hard disks) from which the information is retrieved. HANA stores information in electronic memory, which is some 50x faster (depending on how you calculate). HANA stores a copy on magnetic disk, in case of power failure or the like. In addition, most SAP systems have the database on one system and a calculation engine on another, and they pass information between them. With HANA, this all happens within the same machine."

(content taken from publicly available information available here)

This really shows a good potential of a game changing technology breakthrough, forcing vendors to work on the In-memory concept. And if this continues in the same fashion, one day, everyone will be having a super computer (as we know them today) into the pockets of common people.