SAP HANA dynamic tiering (“DT”) was the first SAP HANA feature introduced to provide the ability to tier data between HANA in-memory storage and disk based storage. The customer response to DT confirmed that SAP HANA customers wanted and needed to scale their HANA data volume beyond pure in-memory storage in order to manage the TCO of older data. However, DT also increased the complexity of an SAP HANA system requiring separate nodes for the DT server process and originally requiring tiered data to be split between separate in-memory HANA tables and disk-based DT tables.

In SAP HANA 2.0 SP04, SAP HANA native storage extension (“NSE”) was introduced as a feature of the core SAP HANA server providing the ability to store either whole HANA tables, or individual partitions of HANA tables as disk based data. As an integral capability of the core HANA server, NSE immediately provided full compatibility with HANA backup and recovery and system replication features, which had been a challenge for DT implementations.

HANA 2.0 SP04 was also the last SP release for SAP HANA dynamic tiering. DT continues to be fully maintained with regular PL or patch releases, but since there have not been any new features implemented for DT it has stayed at the SP04 level compared to the current SAP HANA 2.0 SP07 release.

SAP HANA, dynamic tiering is now formally deprecated as announced in SAP Note 3414255 – Dynamic Tiering is Deprecated: Migrate to NSE or an SAP IQ Sidecar

Deprecation means that a feature will no longer be enhanced, but will continue to be supported. Customers who are already using DT can continue to use this feature, but should consider migrating off the feature. For most systems using DT, the preferred migration path will be to use NSE. NSE is widely and successfully used by HANA customers to tier data to disk with data volumes up to and in excess of 10 TB. Some large DT systems may find that moving to an SAP IQ side car is required.

To assist with evaluating and planning a migration off of SAP HANA dynamic tiering, there is now a migration guide available:

SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering: Migration

SAP HANA dynamic tiering will continue to be in mainstream maintenance through 30.06.2025.