SAP's Hana vs Splunk

[marinaof]

Has anybody considered using SAP's Hana as an alternative to Splunk or vice versa? It's praised by its marketers for being able to process huge volumes of structured and unstructured data, producing business insights at lightning speeds. This sounds very familiar from Splunk. Does anybody have any views on whether Hana is a comparable, competing or compatible product at all?

Thank you,
Marina

[cquinney]

Hi marinaof,

PowerConnect for SAP (https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/3153/) can most likely be utilized for what you're wanting. However, you'd have to purchase a license for the add-on that sits on the SAP server. Depending on where you're located you can either purchase a license and support through RHONDOS or BNW directly.

RHONDOS - Rhondos.com

BNW - http://www.powerconnect.io/contact-us/

Again, PowerConnect is an SAP-certified app that sits in the SAP ABAP layer and pushes data out to Splunk.

[msmith4]

You can do a lot with Hana especially with XS or using the traditional ABAP.

But many problems Splunk addresses in processing large log type data from various sources will have to be reinvented by you since this type of use cases haven't matured on Hana yet.

Splunk is quite powerful and simple. And there is a strong community already. I'd stick to it.

[marinaof]

Thank you very much for your answers! (apologies for being slow to thank you..!)
Marina

[bsheppard_splun]

Splunk software and SAP HANA are complementary products. SAP HANA offers a hybrid in-memory database that combines row-based, column-based, and object-based database technology. SAP HANA is designed to replicate and ingest structured and semi-structured data from SAP and non-SAP relational databases, applications, and other systems.

Splunk was founded to pursue a disruptive new vision: make machine data accessible, usable, and valuable to everyone. Machine data sources are poorly-suited for relational databases. Machine-generated data is one of the fastest-growing, most complex areas of big data. It's one of the most valuable, containing a definitive record of all user transactions, customer behavior, machine behavior, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more.

Splunk software and cloud services enable organizations to search, monitor, analyze, and visualize machine-generated big data coming from websites, applications, servers, networks, sensors, and mobile devices. With Splunk software’s schema-on-the-fly, organizations can ingest raw, unstructured and polystructured machine data in any format and the structure is applied at query time. This provides a more iterative workflow with major productivity advantages and avoids the costly ETL (extract transform load) and planning processes required for database approaches. Splunk software doesn't rely on brittle schemas that limit your flexibility and break when the data formats change.

Splunk Enterprise supports managed forwarders from disperse data sources and continually indexes all of machine data in real time. With Hunk: Splunk Analytics for Hadoop, rapidly search, analyze and visualize historical data at rest in Hadoop, all from one integrated, full-featured analytics platform that works with your choice of Hadoop distribution. With the Splunk for SAP app http://apps.splunk.com/app/819/ visualize and analyze performance and log data from SAP applications that use the SAP ABAP language.

The 6,400 enterprises, universities, government agencies and service providers in over 90 countries that use Splunk software include many SAP environments. For example, Corporate Express uses Splunk software to aggregate data from multiple disparate systems including SAP applications to create comprehensive capacity management dashboards. Corporate Express uses Splunk software for troubleshooting, capacity planning, security, customer service and, increasingly, for actionable operational intelligence. For more on how Corporate Express uses Splunk to monitor its SAP environment, take a look at the case study at http://www.splunk.com/view/splunk-at-corporate-express/SP-CAAAFNR

[dwaddle · Accepted solution]

Having done only a little research on SAP HANA, I don't think I would put HANA and Splunk into the same category. I found this article quite useful in describing HANA and how it might differ from Splunk, http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Primer_on_SAP_HANA

One thing that stuck out to me were that HANA is an appliance, not just software. So you don't get a lot of choice in how you deploy it.

Another observation is that HANA appears to store everything in memory. This gives it a great chance to be fast, but limits how much data can be stored to physical memory available in your node(s). I can see HANA dealing with many hundreds of GBs of data, but I think Splunk would be able to scale larger. Splunk customers routinely process hundreds of GBs of data daily. It would take a lot of servers with a lot of memory to do that with HANA.

In SAP's own words:

SAP HANA is a fully ACID compliant,
In-memory, columnar, massively
parallel processing platform that
provides common database for online
transactional processing (OLTP) and
online analytical processing (OLAP),
eliminating redudancy and latency.

The words "ACID compliant" and "columnar" make HANA sound like a relational database. While it may be able to process unstructured data, it appears to be the kind of rough support provided by RDBMS over the years with things like BLOB columns and RBMS fulltext indexes.

I don't think I am qualified to try to say if Splunk is better or worse than HANA at specific use cases, but I think the information on record about the two products is enough to know they are different breeds of technology.

I think Splunk's traditional use case (IT data, system logs, etc) would be an ill-fitting match for HANA.