The exponential growth of data has increased the demand for scaled-up storage and processing power to keep up with the complexities of enterprise information management. Businesses thirst for a data management strategy that satisfies their requirements for SAP HANA performance and data accessibility with a limited IT budget while lowering their TCO.

Mission-critical (or “hot”) data is stored in memory on the SAP HANA database for
real-time processing and analytics. Less frequently accessed (or “warm”) data is saved in a lower-cost storage tier while still managed as a unified part of the SAP HANA database. Retaining and managing older data in this cost-effective way is key in maintaining data growth while minimizing the expense of hardware growth.

SAP HANA Native Storage Extension

Native Storage Extension (NSE), a native SAP HANA feature, is a warm data solution. NSE provides an improved cost-to-performance ratio that is similar to the ratio provided by other SAP HANA warm data tiering solutions, such as SAP HANA Extensions Node and SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering.

The following figure shows the difference between standard SAP HANA in-memory storage and the storage that is offered with NSE:

Figure 6.              Standard SAP HANA database and SAP HANA database with NSE comparison

The capacity of a standard SAP HANA database is limited to the amount of main memory. Using SAP HANA NSE, customers can bypass these limits by storing warm data on a storage system. A relatively small amount of SAP HANA memory for the NSE buffer cache is needed for paging operations because the buffer cache can handle up to eight times the size of warm data on disk. For example, a 2 TB SAP HANA system without NSE equates to a 1 TB database in memory. With NSE and the addition of a 500 GB buffer cache, you can expand your 1 TB database to a 5 TB database: 1 TB of hot data, 4 TB of warm data, and a 500 GB buffer cache to page data between memory and disk.

Note: Only SAP HANA scale-up systems are currently supported with NSE.

Hot (or “column-loadable”) data resides completely in memory for fast processing and is loaded from disk in columns into SAP HANA memory. SAP HANA NSE enables you to specify certain warm data as “page loadable.” This data is loaded page by page into memory as required for query processing. Unlike column-loadable data, page-loadable data does not need to reside completely in memory.

NSE reduces the memory footprint for page-loadable data. The database is partly in-memory and partly on disk, as illustrated in the following figure:

Figure 7.              SAP HANA database with NSE

NSE is integrated with other SAP HANA functional layers, such as the query optimizer, query execution engine, column store, and persistence layers,

For more information about SAP HANA NSE, SAP HANA NSE Data Sizing, and other NSE related topics, see SAP HANA Native Storage Extension.

NSE is subject to certain functional restrictions. For more information, see SAP Note 2771956L: SAP HANA NSE Functional Restrictions.

PowerMax storage family

PowerMax storage arrays can be used to substantially increase SAP HANA data capacity and reduce the TCO for customers.

The PowerMax family is the first Dell Technologies hardware platform to use an end-to-end Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) architecture for customer data. NVMe is a set of standards which define a PCI Express (PCIe) interface that is used to efficiently access data storage volumes based on Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) media, including NAND-based flash and higher-performing Storage Class Memory (SCM) media technologies. The NVMe-based PowerMax was created to fully unlock the bandwidth, IOPS, and latency performance benefits that NVM media offers to host-based applications. These benefits are not attainable with the previous generation of all-flash storage arrays.

The PowerMax family consists of two models: the PowerMax 2000 and the flagship PowerMax 8000. The PowerMax 2000 model is designed to provide Dell Technologies customers with efficiency and maximum flexibility in a 20U footprint. The PowerMax
8000 model is designed for massive scale, performance, and IOPS density within a one or two-floor-tile footprint.

When using SCM drives, you can configure a PowerMax system to have its SCM drives intermixed with traditional NAND flash drives in the DAEs or as a 100 percent SCM system.

For more information, see Validation Guide – PowerMax Storage Configuration Best Practices for SAP HANA TDI.