SAP HANA Cloud Negotiation. Compute Blocks at $1,200 per month, Storage Blocks at $48 per TB, and a Data Lake most customers should be using.

SAP HANA Cloud is SAP's strategic in memory database delivered as a managed cloud service, hosted on hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) with SAP managing the database layer. It sits at the bottom of the SAP cloud stack: S/4HANA Cloud, Datasphere (formerly Data Warehouse Cloud), Analytics Cloud, and other BTP services all consume HANA Cloud as the underlying database. The pricing model is per Compute Block and per Storage Block consumption, measured in Capacity Units within SAP BTP. A HANA Cloud database tier minimum is typically 30 GB memory and starts at around $1,200 per month per Compute Block, with Storage Blocks at $48 per TB per month for hot storage. Customers buying HANA Cloud through the BTP Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) or the newer BTP Enterprise Agreement (BTPEA) get CU based bundled pricing with annual commitment discount. Customers on RISE with SAP get HANA Cloud as part of the RISE bundle, with the commitment scaled to S/4HANA footprint. The most common pitfall is over provisioning Compute Blocks for peak load when HANA Cloud actually supports vertical and horizontal scaling, and forgetting that the Data Lake (a separate priced product) is often the right answer for cold data rather than expensive HANA Cloud Storage Blocks. This paper sets out actual Capacity Unit math, the Snowflake / Databricks / Oracle Autonomous Database competitive frame, the RISE bundling tradeoff, and the eleven move buyer side playbook. Read the related SAP services practice, the SAP knowledge hub, the SAP BTP licensing strategy, and the SAP RISE and ERP cloud advisory.

What you will learn

• The HANA Cloud product family. HANA Cloud database (in memory transactional and analytical), HANA Cloud Data Lake (cheaper storage tier for cold data, with Files and Relational Engine options), and the relationship to Datasphere and Analytics Cloud which consume HANA Cloud.
• The Compute Block and Storage Block pricing. Compute Blocks for memory and CPU (typically $1,200 to $1,800 per Compute Block per month depending on configuration). Storage Blocks at $48 per TB per month for hot storage. Capacity Units in BTP map to these underlying blocks.
• The CPEA versus BTPEA commercial vehicle decision. Per service consumption with annual commit discount, versus multi year commit with deeper discount and price protection.
• The RISE with SAP bundling math. HANA Cloud included in RISE entitlement at scaled allocation. The bundle math versus standalone HANA Cloud purchase.
• The Data Lake economics. Cold data at $48 per TB on HANA Cloud Storage Blocks versus the same data at $4 to $8 per TB on Data Lake Files. Material savings on workloads where the data does not need in memory access.
• The vertical and horizontal scaling trade off. When to scale up Compute Blocks versus scale out across replicas.
• The competitive frame. Snowflake for analytical workloads, Databricks Lakehouse for ML and data engineering, Oracle Autonomous Database for SAP customers also running Oracle, AWS RDS PostgreSQL or Google Cloud Spanner for greenfield workloads.
• The eleven move buyer side playbook. Sequenced from workload classification through Capacity Unit rightsizing and competitive process, with dollar values against each move.

Table of contents

Who this is for

CIOs, Chief Data Officers, VPs of IT Procurement, Database Center of Excellence leaders, Data Platform leaders, SAP Center of Excellence leaders, and procurement leaders running SAP HANA Cloud at scale. Particularly useful for customers approaching a RISE with SAP renewal that includes HANA Cloud allocation, customers running standalone HANA Cloud through CPEA or BTPEA, and customers evaluating Snowflake or Databricks as an alternative for analytical workloads currently on HANA Cloud.