SAP Data Tiering - SAP HANA on Amazon
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SAP Data Tiering

SAP data tiering is a data management strategy that’s used to separate your data into different categories (hot, warm, and cold tiers) by various characteristics of the data. The most common characteristics used to assign the data to the correct categories are:

  • data access frequency

  • data update requirement

  • data access performance requirement

Assigning your data to the correct category is a process that is specific to your business and IT requirements. Here are some ways to align these categories with your specific requirements.

Hot Tier: The hot tier is for storing data that is used (read or updated) frequently and that must be available in time. This hot data is critical and valuable to the business for its operational and analytical processes.

Warm Tier: The warm tier is for data that is read less often than hot data, has less stringent performance requirements, but must still be updatable. SAP HANA manages application access and update to data transparently regardless to where the data resides - hot or warm tier.

Cold Tier: The cold tier is for storing data that is infrequently accessed, does not require updates, can tolerate high access latency, and is not critical for daily operational or analytical processes.

The following table summarizes the data tiers and their characteristics.

Data tier characteristics
Data access frequency Data access performance Data criticality Data updatability
Hot High High High Required
Warm Medium Medium Medium Required
Cold Low Low Low N/A

After you have assigned the data to your preferred tiers, you can map your SAP product to the data tiering solution that is supported by SAP on Amazon. For more information, see SAP HANA on Amazon: Dynamic Tiering.

For the hot tier, all relevant data stays in memory. You must have an Amazon EC2 instance with adequate memory to meet your sizing requirement. For more information, see SAP HANA certified instances. You can choose a tier based on the type of your SAP product. See the following table to learn more.

Warm and cold tier options
Native SAP HANA

SAP BW on HANA or

SAP BW/4 HANA

SAP Business Suite on HANA or

SAP S/4 HANA

Hot Amazon EC2 instances certified for SAP HANA Amazon EC2 instances certified for SAP HANA Amazon EC2 instances certified for SAP HANA
Warm

SAP HANA dynamic tiering

SAP HANA extension node

SAP HANA native storage extension

SAP HANA extension node

SAP HANA native storage extension for data tiering optimization (DTO)

Data aging

SAP HANA native storage extension

Cold

Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) with SAP Data Hub and Amazon S3

SAP Data Intelligence and Data Warehousing Foundation DLM with SAP HANA Spark Controller

SAP BW NLS with SAP IQ

SAP BW NLS with Hadoop and Amazon S3

SAP BW/4 HANA Data Tiering Optimization (DTO) with SAP Data Hub and Amazon S3

ILM Store with SAP IQ

Data archiving and Amazon S3