Paper

Normalized Throughput
1.5
1
2.5
2
0.5
0
-1.2%
+5%
Intel® Xeon® processor
E7-4870
Intel® Xeon® processor
E7-4890 v2
Performance of SAP HANA With and Without Encryption
[Workload: SAP-OLTP]
Without Encryption
With Encryption
Figure 4. Performance Summary- SAP-OLTP. [Source: Performance tests in SAP Co-Innovation Lab
9,7
]
Faster Performance with Encryption
for SAP ERP
Workload: SAP-OLTP
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An SAP transactional workload
representative of an SAP Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) sales and
distribution scenario was used to test
the performance of SAP HANA when
operating as the database for the SAP
ERP application. SAP-OLTP simulates the
execution of a general sales cycle in a
system running SAP ERP, from the initial
order to delivery and billing. Performance
throughput is measured in dialog steps
per second.
During the testing, the workload placed
on the system was equivalent to that
generated by 40,000 users accessing a
4 GB dataset loaded in the SAP HANA
database for various ERP functions.
The results are shown in Figure 4.
(The throughput measurements are
normalized, using as the baseline the
throughput measured for the previous-
generation SAP HANA platform, based on
the Intel Xeon processor E7-4870.)
In essence, the SAP HANA platform based
on the Intel Xeon processor E7 v2 family
provided 2.26x the performance of the
previous-generation SAP HANA platform
based on the Intel Xeon processor E7
family.
9,7
There was no performance
overhead for encryption. In fact, the
new platform actually performed up to
ve percent faster with encryption than
without encryption.
How can encrypting data increase
the performance of SAP HANA on the
Intel Xeon processor E7 v2 family? The
benchmarking team conjectures that the
increased availability of computational
resources on this newer processor family,
combined with enhancements to AES-NI,
allow increased parallelism, witnessed
by a signicant increase in the context
switching activity of the system with
encryption, and other efciencies for
encryption and decryption processes.
SAP HANA with Vormetric
Transparent Data Encryption
Intel® Xeon® processor
E7 Family
Intel® Xeon® processor
E7 v2 Family
Total Performance with
Encryption (normalized)
1.0 2.26x
Performance Impact of
Encryption
-1.2% +5% (Faster with encryption)
This enables higher throughput for
both encryption and transactions due
to improved data locality, higher multi-
threading levels, and possibly other
factors, as well. The team believes that
the slightly higher system throughput
observed with encryption is a transient
effect that will progressively fade with
higher volumes of data. The results
obtained in the OLTP-Bench scenario with
365 GB of data provide clear support for
this educated guess.
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Security in the Cloud for SAP HANA*