As the data volumes burgeon and cloud complexity and costs increase, more and more SAP customers are adopting data tiering. The usage and value of data tends to change over time. Aged data becomes less important for processes or decision making and is thus less frequently accessed. Whereas current operational data is vital for process execution, reporting, analytics and needs to be accessed instantaneously. Data Tiering For Large Data Volumes Many SAP customers have started data tiering to categorize data into different categories (hot, warm, and cold tiers) by various characteristics of the data. The most common characteristics used to assign the data to the correct categories are:

frequency of access to the data
requirement to update the data
performance requirement and timely access to the data
criticality of the data for operational business processes

Assigning your data to the correct category is a process that is specific to your business and IT requirements. Here are some ways to align these categories with your specific requirements.

Hot tier data used (read, accessed or updated) in real time and must be available in a performant and timely manner. This data is critical and valuable for critical operational and analytical processes.
Warm tier is read less often than hot data, has less stringent performance requirements, but must still be updatable.
Cold tier is for storing data that is infrequently accessed, does not require updates, can be accessed in a longer timeframe, and is not critical for daily operational or analytical processes.

In SAP HANA, the warm tier is integrated with the hot tier so that applications accessing the data are unaware that the data physically resides on different data tiers. Adoption of Data Tiering In SAPinsider’s Data Management Strategies and SAP HANA report, twenty-one percent of respondents are implementing a tiered-data approach for both SAP and non-SAP data, while 30% use it for SAP data only. Thirty-seven percent have no plans to implement tiering at all For example, companies may decide to host “hot” frequently accessed, critical data in the in-memory SAP HANA database, and the warmer less-accessed data on the unified SAP HANA database. Rarely accessed data may be housed in low-cost storage. Many applications, including SAP, offer ways to tier data into hot, warm, and cold categories. SAP HANA and Cloud Data Tiering Native SAP HANA applications can also make use of dynamic tiering. SAP HANA offers dynamic tiering for managing less frequently accessed warm data. It extends SAP HANA memory by providing the ability to create, query, and load data into disk-based, columnar database tables—called extended tables and multistore tables. While easy to implement and manage, SAP HANA dynamic tiering supports only SAP HANA native applications. The SAP HANA dynamic tiering server may be deployed on commodity hardware, making it a lower cost option for managing warm data, although with slower performance and reduced functional parity compared to HANA in-memory nodes. Cloud providers and allied vendors also offer data tiering capabilities for non-SAP data. What Does This Mean for SAPinsiders? For SAPinsiders moving data to cloud and especially SAP HANA, data tiering can deliver value in terms of cost reduction as well as risk management.

Run a metric-based assessment of data and categorize into hot, warm and cold tiers
Leverage data tiering options that are built into SAP and non-SAP products to enable data tiering
Enable periodic reassessment of data tier categories as data volumes increase.