In-Memory Bi Appliances and How Can Benefit for Organizations

INTRODUCTION

In today's data-driven culture, tools for business analysis are quickly evolving and improving

significantly. Moreover, we have a fundamentally different technology platform available to

us on which to build business intelligence more powerful. Organizations need new ways to

leverage critical data on the fly for not only accelerate decision making, but also to gain

insights into key trends. The ability to instantly explore, augment and analyze all data in nearreal

time could deliver the competitive advantages to our organization needs to make better

decisions faster--as well as take advantage of constructive market conditions, customer

trends and other factors that directly persuade the management.

In-memory technology is situating to reform enterprise applications not only in terms of

functionality but also cost due to a greatly improved performance. This will enable enterprise

developers to create fully new applications and allow enterprise users and administrators to

think in new ways about how they wish to view and store their data. The performance

improvements also mean that costly workarounds, necessary in the past to ensure data could

be processed in a timely manner, will no longer be necessary. Chief amongst these is the need

for separate operational and analytical systems. In-memory technology will allow analytics to

be run on operational data, simplifying both the software and the hardware landscape, leading

ultimately to lower overall cost.

What is In-Memory Computing?

In-Memory computing means technology that allows the processing of huge quantities of real

time data in the main memory of the server to provide immediate results from analyses and

transactions.

In-Memory BI

The main difference between the traditional BI tools and in-memory BI products is that the

business queries data from disks, whereas the latter queries data in random access memory

(RAM). In traditional BI tools, when a user queries a data warehouse, the query goes to the

database, which reads the information from multiple tables stored on the server's hard disk.

With in-memory tools, all that information is loaded into memory instead of the hard disks.

Most in-memory tools use compression algorithms that reduce the size of in-memory data

significantly from what would be needed for hard disks. When a user queries this data, the

query interacts with the data loaded in the server's RAM instead of the hard disk, and hence

provides performance improvement.

In-Memory BI Appliance

As in-memory BI solutions become more and more feasible, the software vendor has also

been going through tremendous changes. As one would be expect in a maturing technology

space, vendor consolidation, emerging pure-play leaders, and acquisition of smaller pure-play

vendors by established, traditional BI vendors are all signs that in-memory BI is here to stay.

For examples: SAP released the Business Warehouse Accelerator in 2006, IBM Cognos

acquired Applix and its TM1 product in 2007, and TIBCO acquired Spotfire in 2007. In

2009, the name of SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence Accelerator has been changed to

SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator. In 2011 SAP introduced SAP HANA and

SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3.

SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator

The SAP BW Accelerator is a computer appliance combined with preinstalled software on

predefined hardware. It is used to speed up queries. This solution help to reduce the need of

organizational decision making and future planning.

It's not easy to make timely business decisions based on current information. Relevant data

definitely exists - about sales, inventories, receivables, forecasts, and more - but it's hard to

identify, aggregate, integrate and present relevant data at the speed demanded by today's

business environment. SAP and Intel have responded with a business intelligence

"accelerator" that dramatically improves performance speed and load time. As a result,

queries that used to take hours, or even days, can now be answered in seconds.

There are no relational or other database management systems in BW accelerator. There is

only a file system, and indexes are essentially held as flat files. The second primary

component of SAP BW accelerator is the engine that processes the queries in memory. The

operating system used for BW Accelerator is 64-bit Linux, so in addition to having no

database license cost, there is also no OS license cost.

Benefits of SAP NetWeaver BW

Major benefits of in-memory BI solutions are

* Enhanced Scalability & Performance for faster decision making

* Increased flexibility through SAP Business Objects BI and EIM integration

* Reduced TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and improved development efficiency

*