Protect and manage copies of your SAP HANA database with HPE Recovery Manager Central

[StorageExperts]

Tired of failing SAP HANA backups? Worried about recovering your mission-critical database fast enough? Searching for ways to prevent copy data sprawl? Learn how HPE Recovery Manager Central delivers an innovative approach to SAP HANA data protection and copy data management.

We all know about the typical data protection issues that your organization encounters for each of your applications. But let’s face it, SAP HANA backup and recovery has its own unique challenges, including:

• Online backup and recovery process is heavily script-based today and it’s mostly a two-step process
• Third-party online backup products supported with Backint require dedicated backup media servers and involve complex backup scheduling
• Online backup and recovery times are long with many customers challenged to backup within a 4-hour window
• Online backup and recovery infrastructure for SAP HANA is not robust enough for S/4 HANA

Then there’s another big challenge: Regardless of the size of your business, you’re relying more and more on multiple copies of your SAP HANA production database for testing and development, analytics, and report generation. Yet, managing the creation and use of these copies can become complex and costly to the point that it can negatively impact your daily business operations. You definitely need a faster, easier, and more efficient way to manage data copies is needed.

How flash-integrated data protection and copy data management for SAP HANA could be better?

By combining the speed of taking non-disruptive SAP HANA data volume snapshots on HPE 3PAR Storage and the reliability and efficiency of deduplicated backups on HPE StoreOnce, Recovery Manager Central (RMC) provides a converged availability and fast backup and recovery service for SAP HANA that can be easily managed by the HANA DBA.

SAP HANA copy data management includes system copy or refresh operations, which involve moving one or more tenants or entire SAP HANA systems from one host to another to create production and nonproduction copies of existing systems. System copy or refresh processes use HPE RMC and many other methods to manage data copies.

Additionally, if you are considering cloud storage for long-term data retention and lower cost disaster recovery, HPE Cloud Bank Storage enables you to implement a simple and reliable off-site disaster recovery solution. It backs up your database to and restores from the cloud storage. HPE Cloud Bank Storage is integrated into HPE RMC and HPE StoreOnce Catalyst Plug-ins.

And the benefits?

• Speed up backup and recovery of SAP HANA databases—Unlike traditional backup approaches, backups of large data volumes, such as those of multi-terabyte SAP HANA databases, with RMC are faster and bandwidth-efficient because RMC moves only the changed blocks from 3PAR to StoreOnce and uses multiple block-based streams. Backups on StoreOnce are also stored as synthetic fulls, meaning they are available for rapid and instant recovery which helps to deliver on your aggressive Recovery Time Objective (RTO) SLAs.
• Reduce cost and complexity—Data protection of SAP HANA databases with RMC is much simpler with direct backup from 3PAR snapshots to StoreOnce. Since the stored backups on StoreOnce are deduplicated, you don’t have to worry about backup storage costs sky rocketing and in fact, you can economically store data on StoreOnce for extended periods.
• Lower risk during unplanned downtime—With frequent recovery points, you can commit to tight Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) SLAs. If there is a failed hardware or a data center outage, the SAP HANA backups on StoreOnce can be restored to the original or a different 3PAR. As an added benefit for disaster recovery use cases, backups can also be copied to and recovered from one StoreOnce system to another across geographical sites.

The copy data management bonus: Rapidly fire up new environments to meet business demands while avoiding copy sprawl

Your business is expanding quickly and you need to respond with faster time-to-market with products and services. Rapidly cloning your SAP HANA deployments enables you to create new environments that can be used for troubleshooting problems or testing out new features.  HPE RMC allows you to quickly replicate your data to respond to the rapidly changing needs of your SAP HANA deployment.

HPE RMC takes an application-consistent data snapshot of the source database and copies it to an HPE StoreOnce Catalyst store. This can be restored to a snapshot on the same HPE 3PAR or to a new volume on the same or different HPE 3PAR. Using SAP HANA Studio, you can then restore from the data snapshot of the source database. In summary, HPE RMC copy data management delivers these benefits:

• Policy-based copy automation where a single copy policy helps minimize secondary copy data sprawl across tiers
• Creation of live and updatable clones of production databases without consuming additional storage space or impacting production
• Enabling zero footprint clones to run at production speeds, even while servicing multiple copies from the same original volume by high I/O delivered by all-flash HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble Storage

Deploy a flash-integrated SAP HANA data protection and copy management solution

HPE RMC for SAP HANA, now also supported on the ConvergedSystem 900 systems, integrates robust flash-optimized HPE 3PARStoreServ primary storage and the very fast, scalable, and highly resilient StoreOnce System. The result is a flash-integrated data protection and copy data management solution that addresses the challenges of data management for SAP HANA databases. It not only provides rapid backups and restores, but also gives you flexibility in managing copies of your SAP HANA environment for new deployments and use cases.

Dig deeper for more information

• Brochure: Intelligent storage for database protection and copy data management
• DCIG Special Report: Why SAP HANA Running on 3PAR StoreServ and Protected by HPE StoreOnce Storage Platforms Beats the Competition

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Meet Around the Storage Block blogger Parissa Mohamadi, Data Protection Solution Product Manager, HPE Storage.