Scale-up: This means increasing the size of one physical machine by increasing the amount of resources such as RAM and CPU.
Scale-out: This means combining multiple independent nodes/machines into one system.

Even the biggest Business Suite installations fit nowadays on an 8-socket 6TB system. This is why it makes sense to use a scale-up configuration for the SAP Business Suite.

But what about BW and Analytics? This question is not that easy to answer. It is recommended to scale-up first before considering scale-out. One single box is easier to configure and manage than managing the complexity of a cluster and a SAN. Before scaling-out a HANA configuration one should first consider all options to increase the HANA performance and to reduce the data footprint.

But if you need to scale-out your HANA system it requires having a deep knowledge about data and workload to achieve a good scaling. Optimizing the scale-out performance is ongoing task. With OLAP environments scale-out works well but in a mixed OLAP/OLTP environment a scale-out can be challenging.

Click here to find a more detailed description about the different appliances and SAP HANA setup scenarios.