SAP Data Tiering

SAP data tiering is a data management strategy that’s used to separate your 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:

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: The hot tier is for storing data that is used (read or updated) frequently and that must be available in time. This hot data is critical and valuable to the business for its operational and analytical processes.

Warm Tier: The warm tier is for data that is read less often than hot data, has less stringent performance requirements, but must still be updatable. SAP HANA manages application access and update to data transparently regardless to where the data resides - hot or warm tier.

Cold Tier: The cold tier is for storing data that is infrequently accessed, does not require updates, can tolerate high access latency, and is not critical for daily operational or analytical processes.

The following table summarizes the data tiers and their characteristics.

After you have assigned the data to your preferred tiers, you can map your SAP product to the data tiering solution that is supported by SAP on AWS. For more information, see SAP HANA on AWS: Dynamic Tiering.

For the hot tier, all relevant data stays in memory. You must have an Amazon EC2 instance with adequate memory to meet your sizing requirement. For more information, see SAP HANA certified instances. You can choose a tier based on the type of your SAP product. See the following table to learn more.