As business analytics gain more mainstream acceptance, three primary trends are driving the technical development of software platforms designed to support decision making:

• Growth in the number of end users
• Shorter decision cycles, requiring more flexibility
• Growth in data volumes

In response to the market demand for greater analytic capability on ever-increasing amounts of data from a variety of sources, SAP has adopted a two-pronged approach that will lead the way in the use and management of enterprise data. With the release of SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0, SAP has provided a comprehensive approach to address these critical requirements:

• Business Accelerator (BIA) to meet the analytic demands of more users and more complex queries
  
  • BIA leverages industry-leading technology specifically designed to boost performance for SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0. This is done by building a predetermined selection of InfoCubes which will reside in main memory (similar to a giant cache), enabling blazingly fast performance for queries that access these cubes. Running on 64-bit Intel® Xeon™ Processors and low-cost blade servers, this can be deployed as an appliance that works seamlessly with traditional SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0 installations. Significant additional performance gains can be achieved by adding more memory and processors (a performance-cost trade-off).
    
• Nearline Storage Interface (NLS) to address the ever-increasing volumes of data in SAP data warehouses
  
  • In SAP NetWeaver 7.0 Release Notes SPS 7 (New “Data Archiving Process (DAP)”), the Nearline Storage Interface is described as providing effective management of vast data volumes based on an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) approach, which classifies warehouse data into current data kept online in the main data warehouse, less frequently used nearline data, and old data that is moved into an archive solution for economical storage.
  

• Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as a result of support for off-the-shelf hardware, easy installation, and reduced administration.
• Flexibility, thanks to on-the-fly aggregation for any query, at any time
• Scalability, as a result of data partitioning and other techniques that optimize the use of scalable hardware
• Performance that include a 10x to 100x increase in average speed and up to 80% faster load times
• Maximum return on investment, thanks to increased user adoption of BI and analytics as well as productivity advantages gained through better, more timely insights and decisions.

Reduced TCO immediately and over the long term

• Provides economical data storage of less frequently used InfoCubes and DataStore Objects with more than 90% compression
• Permanently lowers or caps storage, memory and CPU requirements for SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0
• Reduces costs for disaster recovery systems

Efficient satisfaction of Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) over the long term

• Permanently reduces backup/recovery times
• Permanently reduces SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0 system management requirements (data loading, reorganization, indexing)
• Optimizes efficiency of BIA usage

Implementation of an efficient “Corporate Memory”

• Makes much more history and greater data granularity available for ad hoc analyses
• Increases flexibility in creating/rebuilding Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
• Simplifies data reconciliation/data audit processes, and enables regulatory compliance

SAND/DNA for SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0 itself is slower than BI Accelerator, and is not designed to support the “Analytical Layer” like BI Accelerator.

However, because SAND/DNA and the SAP NLS Interface deletes data from the underlying relational database when it is loaded into nearline storage, some performance improvement for SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0 can be expected – but only if the relational database is reorganized, and not reloaded with new data.

For very efficient use of BIA, SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0 customers can avoid indexing the “less frequently used” time slices within InfoCubes by moving these “old” time slices into SAND/DNA via the NLS interface. As a result, only current and frequently used data will be presented by BIA. Furthermore, when rebuilding of the index is required, smaller InfoCubes can be reindexed faster than large objects.

It is possible, to store part of an InfoCube nearline while accelerating the remaining online portion of the basic cube. Queries that run against this InfoProvider will access both online and nearline data, if the NLS flag is set appropriately and the BIA index is used for the online part of the data. The OLAP Processor manages this dual access automatically.

Customers implementing both products are able to cope efficiently with the demand for greater analytic capability as well as with the ever-increasing amounts of data from a variety of sources within the enterprise.

• Business Intelligence Accelerator:
  • Designed to strengthen the “Analytical Layer” within SAP NetWeaver BI 7, BIA boosts performance for “important” and “frequently used” InfoCubes while enabling users to “ask any question, anytime”
• SAND/DNA:
  • Designed to relieve the relational database from “infrequently used”, “read-only” data and to maintain an efficient data and system management process in SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0, the NLS Interface in combination with SAND/DNA provides access to “infrequently used”, “read-only” data (DataStore Objects) in a cost-effective fashion, but with slower performance compared to BIA.

Together, these two components provide an efficient cost-value ratio, and are the key to enhanced, economical usage of SAP BI capabilities across the enterprise. Both are designed to help SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0 customers reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and administration requirements, while helping them cope with users’ demands for increased analytical capabilities.