SAP has brought its Oracle-killer database, Hana, to Amazon's cloud.
Enterprises can now choose to use SAP's super-fast in-memory database for 99 cents per hour, plus other fees.
Interestingly, SAP also announced a competitor to Amazon, called the SAP Hana Cloud, which will also let companies build and run apps using rented computers running Hana.
The Amazon version of Hana is not quite the same as the full-strength database appliance. SAP Hana One, the name for the version on Amazon, tops out at 60 GB of RAM, or random-access memory, per instance. A typical on-premises version of Hana begins with 64 GB of RAM and goes up from there—to terabytes. The amount of memory is important since this is an in-memory database, meaning it does all of its work on data stored in memory rather than on disk. The bigger the RAM, the more data it can process.
So this means that Hana on Amazon is geared toward smaller businesses or smaller apps and isn't really a replacement for buying the Hana appliance, or for using SAP's new cloud, for a typical enterprise database. As for those other fees, Hana One costs 99 cents an hour, plus another $2.50 per hour for the Amazon hardware that provides 60GB of RAM. That's a total of $3.49 per hour. Amazon could charge other fees, too, depending on how much data is being used.
To compare, SAP's entry-level price for Hana for companies that aren't already using its other business software starts at roughly $52,000.
This isn't the first software that SAP has put on Amazon's cloud. In fact, it had previously offered a trial version of Hana on Amazon to developers for free, but it was limited to megabytes, not gigabytes.
Now, there's no shortage of database options already available on Amazon Web Services, as the Internet giant's cloud-computing offerings are known. Oracle's database is also available, for instance, at prices that start as low as $0.04 per hour, for companies that don't already have Oracle databases licenses. It's 2.5 cents per hour for those that do.
Amazon also offers its own collection of home-grown database as cloud services on AWS, and in-memory caching services.
Meanwhile, SAP's brand-new cloud, called the SAP NetWeaver Cloud, is aimed at developers writing Java apps. It puts SAP in a crowded market competing with the likes of Salesforce.com and its Heroku cloud, Oracle and its Oracle Cloud, and many, many others.
