How Does Data Archiving from HANA Improve Business Information

SAP Hana is a relational database management system that stores data in memory rather than on traditional hard disks. It is used in conjunction with "big data" for accelerating business processes, data processing, and analytics.

We're not talking about a few gigabytes of data, we're talking about terabytes and petabytes in some cases. When stored traditionally, gleaning insights from the massive amounts of data stored on hard disks takes time - and it can lead to bandwidth issues. With SAP Hana, a business's dat - even multiple terabytes of it - is stored on in a memory where it can be accessed instantly. The ability to gather information in real time is one of SAP Hana's biggest selling points.

However, storing big data on memory rather than on low-cost, high capacity hard disks is costly. Data archiving from Hana is a technique used to lower the overall cost of SAP Hana. After all, if you no longer need data, why pay to store it on one of the most expensive forms of storage.

While controlling costs is certainly an important factor when considering data archiving from Hana, it's not the only one. Data archiving can improve business information and help ensure that your most critical information is readily available.

For example, data archiving is a process that not only moves data off of expensive primary storage tiers, it also classifies and indexes it. Once fully classified and indexed, your archived data becomes searchable. In other words, you can easily find data and files in your archive. Prior to archiving, you may not have known that data even existed!

Though this may not apply to Hana per se, data archiving also moves data off of end-users' machines and into the centralized archive. No matter how many memos IT has sent out instructing users to save files to a central storage device, it's likely that individual desktops and laptops have more than their fair share of files sitting on their C:\ drives. Again, some of these files may exist without your knowledge. By archiving the entire enterprise, they will become searchable and IT will regain control over files that never made it to the preferred destination. This ensures that these files can be discovered when needed, and it ensures that they are properly backed up for business continuity planning.

Archiving from Hana improves business information by categorizing and indexing it. Whether you need to look up a sales order from ten years ago or want to view the latest real time sales information, integrating a data archive with SAP Hana is a winning combination. You'll be able to quickly find old data (without having to pay a premium to store it in memory) and you'll have more in-memory space available for current information. In addition, moving non-essential data from Hana can improve the  performance of other applications that may not be as capable as Hana is at sorting through terabytes of data.