Rajesh Gupta - SAP HANA Distinguished Engineer and ASUG Volunteer

[Former Member]

Tell us a little around your background in the industry

I’m a Lead SAP Enterprise Architect at Deloitte Consulting LLP based out of Philadelphia, USA office focused on SAP HANA, Migration and Upgrade and aligned to SAP Technology Practice. I have over 21 years’ of consulting experience with around 15+ years in SAP and 6+ Year as Oracle DBA.

rajesh.gupta11 is ASUG Volunteer & ASUG Enterprise Architecture SIG Group Community Facilitator of the ASUG HQ Team. I’m a lead SAP solution Architect and SAP HANA, NetWeaver, BASIS & OS/DB Certified Consultant. Rajesh has an extensive background in SAP upgrades, Unicode conversions and OS/DB Migrations and now SAP HANA. He has completed many Upgrade, Unicode conversions and OS/DB projects. Strong on installing and managing complex SAP implementation, System copy/Refresh, Database upgrade, maintenance, production support, Performance tuning and strong in troubleshooting.

Currently leading the SAP HANA COE, I have led and delivered many HANA related projects including BW on HANA and Suite on HANA migrations, CRM on HANA, BPC on HANA, and SCM on HANA.

Rajesh has written many articles and spoken at all major SAP conferences and forums like SAP TechEd SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG, SAP HANA, SAP CRM, SAP SCM, SAP Admin and ASUG Local Chapters on topics related to SAP HANA Migration, SAP Upgrade, SAP Migration

I started my career as Oracle Database Administration in 1994 and later in 2000 switch to SAP BASIS administrator, As of now I hold the following SAP and Oracle certification under my belt.

SAP and Oracle Professional Certification

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- SAP Certified Technology Professional - Platform Technology with SAP NetWeaver 7.0

- SAP Certified SAP HANA Technical Consultant

- SAP Certified OS/DB Migration Consultant.

- SAP Certified Technical Professional (NetWeaver)

- SAP Certified Exchange Infrastructure & Integration for SAP NetWeaver´04

- SAP Certified in “SAP Application Management Expert - Root Cause Analysis.

- SAP Certified Change Control Management Expert

- Oracle Certified Professional – Oracle9i DBA

- Oracle Certified Professional – Oracle 8i DBA

You can find some details about me and my sessions on SCN Blogs:

Effective SAP ERP on HANA Migration Strategy - ASUG SAP TechEd d-code Speaker Rajesh Gupta

Meet ASUG TechEd Speaker Rajesh Gupta and Learn CRM on the Amazon Public Cloud Lessons Learned

How did you get into the SAP HANA space?

I work in Deloitte, The Solutions Network (SNET) group, The SNET is an integrated Technology Center of Expertise that combines highly skilled technical resources with a series of data centers that help Deloitte consulting sell and deliver projects, manage investments, and enable the practitioners with the right skills at the right place at the right time. SNET resources provide consulting services and support for solution and client-related work from evaluation to project start-up through development, delivery, and support.  We do all Co-Innovation, explore the product and the first one in Deloitte to get the hand dirty, and this get me focused in HANA when SAP HANA was released.  As I has worked in BW accelerator in 2005 when it came out, so it was in-line and tempting to explore HANA and  see how HANA is different, So, I started to play with SAP HANA on the first day when it was in Ramp-ups. I lead the HANA COE within my group and run the HANA training program to create next generation HANA resources, I work on HANA every day, and it would be suffice to say I breathe HANA every day. I still remember my installation on HANA SPS02. I got certified in HANA Technology on Dec 21, 2012. We have multiple instance of HANA running in our competency center – we have every flavor of HANA appliances, VMware and running ECC, BW, CRM, GRC, SRM, SCM etc. on HANA, with this you can understand we are well blended in HANA world

What advice would you give to people looking to learn SAP HANA?

HANA is the future, SAP is betting the company on HANA’s future success. HANA’s is do-or-die importance. So HANA is going to be around and not going to vanish, so take HANA seriously and read and read and read.... and whenever get opportunity get your hand dirty to build the confidence. HANA is not a rocket science, it pretty easy compared to other databases, and SAP has excellent material from help SAP portal and amazing blogs and documents, videos in SCN. Whenever you find good materials, never forget to make your hands dirty on it. AWS, Cloud share and Remote desktop are the sources for these. If you have knowledge of any database, the concepts are similar. So you already know half of it. You just have to get your hands around it. There are lots of HANA materials out there. Try open sap courses, SCN, saphana.com or search for HANA Academy in YouTube for many useful videos. Finally you need to practice and practice to enhance your confidence. Practice makes perfect. Reading materials and watching videos are theoretical and not enough, so doing practical is path to success.

Can you tell us a little about the projects you are working on right now?

I am currently on multiple project within Deloitte and client. Among all, the exciting one is Project RUBICON  proof of concept (POC) Phase 2 - Production Workload for Virtualized HANA and Cloud Service Fabric in Hybrid Cloud Mode to show that the combination of tools can provide the performance “guarantees” of the physical appliance in a virtualized SAP HANA environment with Production workload. In Phase 1, we prove out that Disaster Recovery over long distance for virtualized SAP HANA is possible and provide real world metrics to customers. Showcase the benefits of Disaster Recovery for HANA via data replication using VMware SRM and Recover Point at a distance over 500km

Tell us about one of your HANA war wounds!

Honestly, I didn’t hit any major issue, but definitely have good amount of lesion learned, especially toward patching and upgrading to latest HANA revision. While updating the Hana DB from SPS8 Rev 82 to latest version (SPS 9 Rev 92) the installation stopped and prompt to install necessary operating system packages. If your operating system is on RHEL 6 or SLES 11 you would need to additional operating system software packages.Also had good learning experience especially toward performance tuning especially after Stack upgrade and running large complex report as hit the CPU utilization and Memory contention.

What do you see in the future of HANA?

HANA is the future and the way SAP is adding business value using Real-Time concept, Big Data & IoT, Next Generation Apps and openness. Adding all new concept like Multitenant Database Containers (MDC), Dynamic Tearing, and Lower TCO, simplified IT operations, decreased time-to-value for solution development, and increased agility. HANA is clearly the SAP's top technology initiative and focus, its fastest growing database and the platform in the world and adoption. The pace it moving, I believe it will replace most of its competitors in the near future; and  open more opportunities for the HANA folks in the market

If there was one change you could make to HANA, what would it be?

HANA should support other operating systems like AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX etc.

Also add wizard for workload or table distribution in HANA studio.

Tell us a bit about yourself outside of HANA and work?

With the fast moving change in time and technology, my hobbies also keeps changing with same pace with. As living and breathing in technology world, my hobbies are aligned technology. I love spending times on computer figuring out cool things and making the life easier with technology. Apart from computer, love to play Tennis for hours, and enjoy all thrill ride in amusement parks, Love watching American Football and Basketball and finally spending quality time with family.