SAP HANA (High-Speed Analytical Appliance) is an in-memory database platform developed by SAP SE that can be deployed on premises or in the cloud. It uses in-memory computing to store compressed data in random access memory (RAM), rather than storing it in relational databases on disk drives. Compared to accessing data on standard disks, SAP HANA can access in-memory data 10,000 times faster. Thus, it allows companies to rapidly analyze large amounts of data and process transactions in seconds rather than hours.
Enterprises use SAP HANA to accelerate business processes, improve digital insights and simplify their IT environments. As a data foundation, SAP HANA removes the burden of maintaining separate legacy systems and siloed data. It can reduce data redundancy, hardware requirements and data management costs as well. SAP HANA analyzes live data for real-time business decisions – processing transactions and analytics wherever they reside – using advanced data processing engines for business, text, spatial, graph and series data. SAP HANA supports real-time analytics for monitoring telecommunications networks, fraud detection and security, forecasting and profitability reporting, optimizing energy use and other business processes.
More than 1,000 certified appliance configurations from 13 leading vendors run on SAP HANA. Several cloud providers offer SAP HANA as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. SAP also offers their own cloud services: SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, a private managed cloud, and SAP Cloud Platform, a Platform-as-a-Service. SAP HANA is certified to run on Linux. The system is designed to support both horizontal and vertical scaling. Because SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a reference development platform for SAP software, SUSE collaborates with SAP to tune the Linux OS for peak performance.