Why I love AWS for trying out #SAPHANA

[Former Member]

I just wanted to share some research that I pulled together after my client decided that they wanted to try out HANA for their database solution. They were pretty much set on getting an appliance, but it was taking forever for vendors like HP, Dell, and Cisco to commit to providing an appliance. It seems SAP really doesn't want non-SAP customers to get an appliance only to find out it didn't work for them - but that's a different story for a later blog post.

Back in October, fresh off the TechEd in Las Vegas, our team spin up two of the small instances of AWS HANA - 17GB in the Oregon and California data centers. Originally, we used Virginia, but it was causing problems early on - so we dumped the instance and went with the west cost AWS data centers.  In addition, we spun up a similar m2.xlarge machine with 120 GB of EBS storage configured a six 20GB drives with Raid 0 to improve IOPS to run our baseline SQL Server application for comparison. So we have three m2.xlarge instances that we've been running an average of 4 hours of day over the last month - total bill from AWS was only $255. Keep in mind, we are super religious about stopping and starting the instances to control costs - see my post - http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center/hana/blog/2012/11/26/stop-and-start-rules-for-hana-on-...

Ok - $255 per month for three dev boxes - two running HANA - not bad.

Now, compare this to getting an XS HANA appliance. You figure your going to lay down about $20k for the server. The kicker comes with you price out the SAP HANA Platform edition with standard support - you're looking at approx $250k for the 128GB RAM configuration based information from GSA Advantage. See pricing at https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/advantage/s/search.do?q=0:0SAP+HANA+PLATFORM+EDITION&s=19&searchType=0&.... Now I had to do a little interpolation because the 1-10 unit price is not there - but the standard support price was - you can figure about 20% support to full license costs. Here is a little table that I whipped together for the XS through L sized machines.

	RAM (GB)	Units	License	Standard Support	Total License and Standard Support
XS	128	2	$207,360	$41,472	$248,832
Small	256	4	$414,720	$82,944	$497,664
Medium	512	8	$829,440	$165,888	$995,328
Large	1024	16	$1,555,200	$311,040	$1,866,240

I'd like to say thank you for SAP for making HANA available on AWS - now if SAP could only update it with SP5 and make the OSS notes available :smile:

Regards,

Bill Ramos, Data Architect, Advaiya Inc.

Please follow me on twitter @billramo