Data Tiering

You might have heard about Hot Warm Cold storage of data.

Let's understand a little more on those Data Tiering.

Hot Storage:

1. Hot storage: It's the data storage section where you generally put all the business critical transactional data that is directly connected to your online applications. So that applications can instantly access and operate on those hot storage of data.

For this purpose, SAP put the data into in-memory DRAM and PRAM-based storage.

Warm Storage:

1. Warm storage: For less frequent data access purposes, we can store in less cost-based warm storage.

SAP calls it NSE, which is a native storage extension

This is a kind of Disk storage with a page-loadable technique

That means, required Data can be queried from this warm disk storage and put it into on-demand data cache space.

Although it is cheaper than hot storage, you don't have to compromise a lot for the data throughput and latency.

Then comes...

Cold Storage:

1. Cold storage: For rarely accessed data, we can use this cold storage, for cost efficiency,

Actually, it's the cheapest option compared to any other storage type.

And in general terms, it is called a HANA Data Lake. It is mainly based on SAP IQ (previously called Sybase IQ)

In simple words, it is the Sybase database, hosted in SAP managed cloud platform.

So, in Cold storage, we have a Relational data lake as SAP IQ

Not only that... We also have the File container, to store unstructured data and files.

And this is actually, SAP-managed file storage on Hyperscalers.

The good part here is, if you store structured files,

like CSV in that file container, you can use "SQL on file" to actually query the data from the file into SAP IQ Data Lake.

And on top of everything... You can easily manage the lifecycle of your enterprise data, like when to move from hot ... to warm ... to cold storage based on your defined retention period.