Quick answers to urgent business questions: that’s the promise made for in-memory databases (IMDBs).

Their proponents argue that it doesn’t make sense for an organization to be slowed down by waiting for a traditional database to read from (and write to) physical disks. Instead, one embedded directly into the abundant addressable memory offered by today’s servers can deliver faster responses against larger volumes of data.

IMDBs are well-established in specialized high-speed applications in the telecoms, financial and defense industries, and are now increasingly common features of more mainstream business intelligence systems.

Software giant SAP has been leading the charge, and recently launched its own IMDB, HANA (High-performance Analytical Appliance), “an integrated database and calculation layer that allows the processing of enormous quantities of real-time data in main memory to provide immediate results from analyses and transactions.”

Global ICT company Fujitsu has combined SAP HANA with its own PRIMERGY servers and NetApp storage to create the world’s first multi-node, SAP-certified environment for HANA. Unveiled last November, it enables customers to reap the full benefits of high availability, as well as expand in-memory database instance size by a factor of eight.