When it comes to applications, performance is everything. The good news is that as memory become less expensive, it’s now feasible to run applications in memory.

Case in point is SAP, which has rolled out a High Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA) that was developed in cooperation with Intel to optimize the performance of certain SAP applications running in memory.

Jake Klein, SAP vice president for solutions management and data and analytic engines, said HANA is the first instance of a dedicated appliance for running SAP applications in memory. The first SAP application to be deployed on HANA will be the company’s Business Objects Strategic Workforce Planning offering.

Applications selected to run on HANA will tend to be analytic in nature as they have the appropriate footprint to run in memory. Over time, however, Klein says core components of the SAP ERP suite will be rewritten to run in memory and solution providers in the channel should expect memory to become the primary place where many of SAP applications will run in the future.

SAP claims that it ran complex reports and queries against 500 billion point-of-sale records in less than one minute on a multicore system with 10 blades and 32 cores each. In addition, SAP says that in the future customers will be able to deploy systems with 1,000 or more cores that enable complex real-time analytics that will leverage massive levels of parallelism on next generation Intel hardware.

When it comes to anything to do with analytics especially, customers always have a need for speed. And as the demand for these types of applications continues to rise, the opportunity for solution providers with expertise in analytics is rising commensurately.

The HANA appliance will be available via a variety of SAP system partners.