One of my favorite questions during Dr. Bjarne Berg and Penny Silvia's Q&A web chat about SAP HANA this week had to do with the cost of the in-memory technology.

Berg is a NetWeaver BW expert at Comerit, and Silvia is North America leader within IBM for SAP Business Analytics & Technology solutions and a technical advisor for SAPexperts.com. They are co-authoring a new SAP PRESS book, SAP HANA: An Introduction, which is available for pre-order.

During our Q&A, participant Sunil Kolhe asked a jackpot question: 

For a 30 TB database to migrate to HANA (standalone, not on BW), what HANA hardware will I need for successful implementation and what would be cost and license estimates?

Try asking that question to SAP during a public forum and you'll usually get an answer like, "Well, you need to talk to your account rep, blah, blah."

This is why I like Berg's work on this website: He's straightforward.

The hardware costs for a 1 TB memory box with 20 cores and 3 TB disks is around $50K to $90K, and there are different editions of HANA depending on what you want to do with it. The first is called "HANA appliance software platform edition", the second is called "HANA appliance software enterprise edition," and the most complete solution is called the "HANA appliance software enterprise extended edition." The difference between these editions is basically how you want to extract, move and replicate the data.

Another interesting question came from participant Rene Tschauder: With HANA as a non-BW sidecar option, can you still access BW data, such as DataStore object tables?

"In that scenario, you would be able to bring BW data in via the HANA data capabilities - most likely via Data Services," Silvia answered.

At least scanning the full transcript of Berg and Silvia's chat is time well spent if you're involved with HANA.

And if you need more HANA info, check out some of our expert written content on SAPexperts.com.

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