Getting access to SAP HANA
If you want to do any development work on SAP HANA, the first thing you need is access to a server.
There are currently three ways to access a SAP HANA machine. They have been listed in decreasing order of price:
Purchase a SAP HANA license from SAP, and then a SAP HANA appliance from a hardware partner
Sign up for the SAP HANA One license on a cloud-based service
Ask SAP nicely for a free 30-day trial of SAP HANA on CloudShare
Each of these options will give you access to SAP HANA, in slightly different ways.
Purchasing a SAP HANA license and appliance
This is obviously the most expensive option, and only really feasible if you are an end user client of SAP who wishes to use SAP HANA as the database for enterprise applications.
The purchase of a SAP HANA license gives access to the SAP In-Memory download section on the SAP Software Download Center (SWDC) website, as shown in the following screenshot:
In order to access the SWDC website, you'll need a SAP Service Marketplace...
