I recently attended the IBM Business Partner Leadership Conference (BPLC), where our sales director, Gareth Pritchard, and I received on behalf of Centiq the fantastic honour of a Beacon Award 2012.

IBM devotes a big part of the BPLC programme to recognize and reward innovation and development by its thousands of worldwide partners.  Only 27 gain the coveted Beacon Award.  To our delight, Centiq received one of them: the Outstanding Optimised Workload Solutions category.

We all like reports. Reports that include graphs and pie charts are even better! One thing we don't always consider is how fresh the data in we are looking at is? In a typical Business Intelligence scenario, the data we can access is normally already a day old. For long-term planning this is probably acceptable, but nowadays is day old data really enough to be competitive? What if manufacturing efficiency suddenly drops in your factory or your online sales suddenly boom and threaten your stoke levels? Do you really want to wait until tomorrow to find that our? SAP don’t think so.

SAP HANA was developed to plug these gaps in reporting (as well as other ventures in the future). HANA stands for "High performance ANalytic Appliance". It uses custom In-Memory computing techniques to offer extremely high query performance. Unlike BWA, HANA supports SQL and MDX giving it far more flexibility. However, like BWA, HANA is an appliance, meaning it can only be ordered from and installed by specialist partners like Centiq.

With SAPs release of the High Performance Analytic Appliance, SAP HANA, I wanted to know...

How fast is SAP HANA?

In September 2009 IBM announced the availability of SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator on the BladeCenter S. Now, just over 18 months later, IBM no longer approve this solution for new systems. However, all systems already in the field are still supported.

The BladeCenter S solution bought BWA functionality to users at a much lower price point than the BladeCenter H solution. Although it suffered from limited redundancy and scalability the BladeCenter S did prove a popular choice with Centiq customers. To plug the gap left by this mini BladeCenter IBM submitted the System X x3850 X5 server to SAP for qualification. The system has been tested and approved for use with BWA. So, if you are looking for a small BWA solution at a low price point, then maybe you should be considering the IBM System X x3850 X5.