SAP announced enhancements to the SAP HANA database in the cloud and on premise that provide everyone instant access to critical data and extreme performance to democratize in-memory computing.

Updates include enhanced cloud support, persistent memory support with Intel, intelligent recommendations for efficient database management, new machine learning (ML) capabilities, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) certification, improved cost-effective data tiering and data security enhancements. These SAP HANA innovations help organizations be more intelligent, agile and efficient.

“SAP HANA is the heart and soul of SAP,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, senior vice president of SAP HANA and Analytics at SAP. “The latest release of SAP HANA brings the power of data and in-memory computing to the masses by empowering organizations with a deeper understanding of their business for making the right decisions in the moment. More than 28,000 customers are using SAP HANA to achieve real-time, end-to-end awareness of their businesses. Companies finally have a single business data platform to process information coming from all channels to drive continuous innovation, predict business outcomes and uncover new business opportunities.”

SAP HANA now scales cost-efficiently by offering customers the flexibility and choice of managing data and running applications across multi-cloud, hybrid and on-premise environments. The latest release improves application performance with increased memory capacity, while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) through enhanced data tiering with the new SAP HANA native storage extension and support for the new Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory modules.

“We evaluated the new persistent memory technology from Intel with two of our existing SAP HANA systems and experienced greater than 400 percent improvement in data load times at startup, which will really help maintain business continuity for planned maintenance and more,” said Daniel Rothmund, IT manager for SAP Development and Innovation at Geberit, a European leader of sanitary products.

“When we moved our data warehouse and SAP ERP system from Oracle to SAP HANA we experienced performance improvements, greater cost savings, and a 72 percent reduction in database volume,” Rothmund said. “Continued innovation with SAP HANA guarantees we have the most intelligent digital platform to make more timely, informed decisions for our customers.”

Lisa Davis, vice president and general manager, Digital Transformation & Scale Solutions, Enterprise & Government, Data Center Group at Intel said: “The new persistent memory technology from Intel enables more data capacity, lower platform TCO, and faster insights, and allows more virtual machines to be stored on a single system, significantly reducing hardware requirements. SAP HANA is the first major data management platform optimized for this breakthrough innovation, and the enhanced features for data tiering are extremely complementary. It allows for faster recovery time for SAP HANA, which helps to minimize planned or unplanned downtime, reducing cloud operating expenses while providing a highly resilient application environment.”

Customers benefit from intelligence built into SAP HANA that accelerates IT and data science operations by automatically processing analytical and transactional workloads in real time for any data type. The new Python and R machine learning APIs enable data scientists to work in familiar environments while directly accessing data as well as powerful in-database ML capabilities in SAP HANA. The latest version also provides database administrators with intelligent recommendations for SQL optimization, data tiering and more.

SAP HANA modernizes data management by extending broad multi-cloud support and extreme flexibility for cloud, hybrid and on-premise deployments. SAP offers HCI providers certification for SAP HANA to bring cloudlike infrastructure agility to all landscapes. By supporting an advanced approach to data virtualization, SAP HANA continues to enhance its ability to seamlessly connect data everywhere. In addition, SAP HANA was the first data platform to anonymize personal data in real time without duplication. Now, with these further enhancements, SAP HANA offers end-to-end data privacy management.