Update 22-Nov-2014: The post was removed from SDN by the moderators.
Update 7-Oct-2014: Follow the discussion on SDN:
Watch out SAP HANA! IBM BLU is here; now with support for DSOs PSAs, and Characteristics!
On December 2013, IBM and SAP announced that you can use IBM BLU acceleration for SAP BW Infocubes. This was trough the following SAP note: 1889656 - DB6: Mandatory SAP NW BW corrections for BLU Acceleration dated 04.12.2013.
On September 2014 they announced that you can use IBM BLU with SAP BW: Characteristics (Master Data), DSOs and PSAs thanks to the DB2 Cancún release. This was announced via SAP note: 1997314 - DB6: Enablement of BLU Acceleration for PSA, DSOs, and Characteristics InfoObjects date 29.09.2014.
I know that SAP HANA and IBM BLU are not directly comparable, but they share some interesting things like in-memory and columnar storage.
I´ve experimented with BLU for SAP BW only for Infocubes and you can notice the difference straight away.
You can find advantages and disadvantages in both approaches (HANA and BLU). In these times were economy is not on its best, I think IBM BLU is a really interesting option, specially since you can go live gradually, meaning one cube at the time and maybe using the same hardware or just upgrading it a little.
What are your thoughts?
Interested in BLU ? Reading this material from IBM is a great start: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg248212.pdf (chapter 6)
