Running SAP HANA on HEC is supposed to simplify operations: SAP manages the stack, you get HANA-certified infrastructure, and the customer gets HANA as a service. In practice, mid-market enterprises and MSPs find the opposite — rising storage costs, inflexible underlying arrays, forced refresh cycles, and fractured backup/DR practices turn HANA operations into a recurring profit and risk drain. Storage economics and data lifecycle issues are the root cause: high‑performance capacity is expensive, cold data is scattered across copies, and every upgrade or system copy becomes a multi-week project.

Traditional storage approaches — monolithic SANs, manual tiering, and one-off snapshot scripts — fail because they treat HANA as a one‑off performance problem rather than a continuous lifecycle problem. The better alternative is an intelligent data platform like STORViX that treats data placement, retention, and protection as policy‑driven services. That doesn’t magically fix SAP support matrices, but it does cut storage costs, reduce migration risk, enforce compliance controls, and give MSPs and IT teams deterministic operational levers for lifecycle, not just performance.