Welcome to the SAP HANA Academy.
This short video will give you an overview about the usage of the HANA sizing tool Quick Sizer.
It briefly summarizes the most important features and
will enable you a smooth start if you are using the HANA Quick Sizer for the first time.
Sizing means translating business requirements into hardware requirements.
The Quick Sizer is a tool that was developed by SAP in close cooperation with its hardware partners.
The tool is free of charge and is mainly used by SAP customers and partners.
If you go to www.sap.com/sizing, you will be at our main public sizing page.
On this page, you have access to publically available sizing information from SAP.
If you scroll-down, you see on the left side two boxes called „HANA version” and “Classic version”.
If you want to do a sizing for HANA, then you should click on the first box.
By clicking on HANA version, the HANA Quick Sizer entry page will appear.
As you can see, you will have several possibilities on this page.
You can create a new sizing project, change or just display an existing one,
create a reference project, or show your projects in which you were working on.
For some applications, the sizing team from SAP has created example projects,
which will make your life easier in entering data into the tool.
You can also find on this page a link to a document that is called
'Quick Sizer for Beginners',
which is highly recommended if you are new to Quick Sizer.
If you decide to create a project, you have to enter your customer number and a project name.
It’s important to know that everyone who has the combination of customer number and
project name can enter your project, unless you have restricted the access.
Once you have entered the customer number and your project name, you can create a new sizing project.
Please note, that the look and feel of the classic Quick Sizer and the HANA Quick Sizer is the same.
There are differences in terms of sizeable applications and the calculation algorithms are different.
As mentioned, you can limit the user access by clicking on the button “Limit User Access”.
By doing so, you make sure that only selected people can access the project.
Basically, the Quick Sizer is built on three parts.
On the left hand side, there is the tree of elements,
on the upper right hand side you have some project-wide information
and the main part is the respective sizing questionnaire below.
As a first step, you should choose the appli cation on the left side.
As you can see, there are applications from SAP S/4HANA, Analytical Solutions,
Industry Solutions and different Technology Platform applications.
Not all of SAP’s applications are part of Quick Sizer.
For some applications, SAP has created sizing guidelines that are listed on the public website
under 'Sizing Guidelines'.
If you choose to conduct a SAP S/4HANA sizing, then you extend the SAP S/4 HANA tree and
choose for example 'Sales & Service'.
On the sizing questionnaire, you see now different sizing questionnaires.
Normally, we distinguish between user-based and throughput-based sizing.
You can enter your data either in the user-based or throughput-based questionnaire.
Of course you can enter your input in both questionnaires.
Let’s spend some time on the two sizing approaches.
If you want to do an S4/HANA sizing for users working in Sales and Service,
you have the possibility to determine the activity pattern.
In Quick Sizer, three different activity patterns were implemented.
It’s is distinguished between low activity users with a think time of 300 seconds,
medium activity users with 30 seconds think time
and high activity users with a think time of 10 seconds.
Please note that concurrently active users are the type of users who have to be entered in the tool.
To give a valid forecast about the required disk space, you also have to determine how
long your data shall remain in the database.
Therefore, you can also specify the residence time.
The user-based sizing is very straight forward and data can be entered very easy.
The biggest challenge is to find out the concurrency of the users.
Let’s enter some numbers into the different boxes:
1000 low active, 500 medium active, 20 high active, and 30 months residence time.
In parallel, you can work on your throughput-based sizing.
It might be a little bit more difficult to get the numbers as compared to the user numbers.
The biggest difference is that you have the possibility to include peak times into your
sizing which is marked with a 'P'.
'A' stands for Average.
For the sake of convenience, let’s conduct an SD-SLS Sizing.
As you can see, you have the chance to enter the sales orders and the respective line items
that have to be processed in a pre-defined time period.
Apart from that, you can define the number of changes and displays to an object in %.
If you have, for example, 10.000.000 sales orders per year with 10 line items per order and
your assumptions is that all orders are being changed one time
and that half of the orders are being displayed one time,
then you have to enter 100 in the field 'Changes in %' and 50 in the field 'Displays in %'.
You also have the chance to define the retention period and as already mentioned the average working day and the peak time.
In addition, you can also define the residence time for data that is kept in-memory.
This is called Data aging which is a business data management concept
for reducing the memory footprint in SAP S4/HANA.
This easy example is of course not very realistic because a typical business scenario as it
is implemented at customer site often includes many more scenarios.
So let’s have a look what Quick Sizer has calculated and what the result page looks like.
If you click on 'Calculate Result', you normally get a result for Memory in MB,
disk space in GB, disk I/Os and CPU in SAPS.
If there is a need to refine the Quick Sizer inputs, you should go back to your sizing project team,
which typically consists of people working in IT Infrastructure, the Business Department and Implementation
and discuss the inputs again more in detail.
You also have the possibility to check other result levels.
If you have, for example, a very complex Quick Sizer project with many different input values
and you would like to investigate where the major resource drivers are then you can drill
down to the different result levels for further analysis.
Before concluding this brief Quick Sizer introduction video, let’s spend some words
about the typical sizing process.
After the completion of the Quick Sizer project, customers usually want to get a proposal from hardware vendor.
To facilitate the communication to hardware vendors, there is a link in Quick Sizer
which provides a list of email addresses or online templates to get in contact
with hardware vendors quickly and easily.
Of course, Quick Sizer has much more functionalities which couldn’t be introduced in this video.
If you are interested in learning more about Quick Sizer, please have a look at the documentation.
And if you have questions that are not covered by the documentation, please don’t hesitate
to contact SAP.