Hana backups in 19 seconds

Experts consider the in-memory concept to be the future database standard for business applications. This is also reflected in the fact that SAP has firmly anchored in-memory technology in S/4 Hana.

For customers, the question is no longer whether they should use the new solution - the question is rather whether they can still afford to work with old system architectures for reasons of competitiveness.

A recent survey by the market analysts at PAC, for example, shows that 62 percent of the companies surveyed in Germany are convinced that every SAP customer will have to implement S/4 sooner or later.

New architecture requires rethinking

With Hana, new demands are placed on the backup infrastructure, as considerably more data has to be backed up. For example, larger volumes of data need to be moved for permanent persistence of the data, i.e. from internal server memory (RAM) to disk or flash.

In a classic Hana environment with a conventional backup concept, the data is backed up as a streaming backup via the host to a backup system. For a backup in the TByte range, backing up to disk and then to tape can take several hours.

Restoring is similarly time-consuming. Reloading from tape or disk and filling the persistence layer in main memory are time-consuming. Afterwards, log files of the transactions have to be imported.

The times for a system recovery are correspondingly high and productive, business-critical systems are impaired. From the point of view of those responsible for the process, it would be desirable to be able to perform a data backup more frequently in the form of a snapshot, during which the productive IT systems are not burdened.

As a result, fewer logs need to be processed during a recovery and recovery times are reduced.

More safety with SPS10

With SPS10, SAP improves the handling of backups in Hana and has introduced incremental as well as differential backups. However, this requires the application to actively control these processes. In addition, there are still large amounts of data to be backed up and noticeable impairments for the database while the backup is being performed.

Initially, every CIO will have an interest in continuing to use the existing backup environment even with SAP Hana. However, when using traditional concepts, the volume of data to be backed up rises sharply with SAP Hana, increasing the load on the existing infrastructure.

As a result, the CIO has to invest in a conceptually obsolete infrastructure to counteract this development.

To manage the increased backup requirements due to in-memory, companies can rely on NetApp's proven snapshot technology. Here, images of the current SAP Hana data are created within a few seconds and made usable as a backup.

The concept of snapshot-based backups at the storage level has been supported by Hana since SPS 07. NetApp's backup functions are seamlessly integrated into Hana Studio. Thus, in the backup history, snapshots appear in the same list as traditional backups.

NetApp FAS or AFF storage systems provide persistent data storage for the Hana in-memory database. The storage solution can back up multiple versions of operational data in an efficient manner and without burdening production systems.

Backups are thus performed with significantly lower storage requirements and take only a few seconds - instead of several hours as before. The storage snapshot is completely self-contained and does not affect the performance of the Hana servers through data handling or transport.

Because NetApp storage systems recognize changes in data from the last backup, only deltas need to be moved between the primary server location and the long-term backup storage.

This creates a fine-granular incremental concept for data protection that can be used independently of the applications in use.

With snapshot technology, backing up a Hana environment takes just a few seconds. An analysis conducted by NetApp among SAP Hana legacy customers showed that the average time for a Hana snapshot backup is 19 seconds.

Many NetApp customers also manage this in less time, and even the most complex backups ran through in a maximum of one minute. The noticeable time gain becomes even more apparent the larger the Hana database is, because the backup times are largely identical regardless of the database size.

The reason: The technology developed by NetApp works with "pointering", i.e. no data is physically moved.

To achieve comparably short times with a classic backup infrastructure, a large number of Gigabit Ethernet connections would be necessary - including a system architecture suitable for this.

The DB administrator can also import a recovery similarly quickly. All that is required is to stop SAP Hana and select the desired backup. Instead of a lengthy process of restoring data, an earlier image of the SAP Hana data is activated in the NetApp system (a so-called snapshot restore) and Hana can restart immediately.

This concept can be used with NetApp FAS systems in the appliance. Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) is also supported, allowing users to use virtually any certified server combination with NetApp storage solutions.

The Hana backup solution is integrated with SAP NetWeaver LVM (Landscape Virtualization Management) from SAP and thus offers overarching infrastructure management from a central location.

NetApp's data fabric concept also supports the use of hybrid cloud environments. For example, companies can use smart replication mechanisms to store their backups in the cloud and set up a flexibly scalable test environment there. Corresponding scenarios for SAP users are already offered by service providers.

Not an outlook, but a fact

With storage-based backup for SAP Hana, IT professionals can tailor data protection to meet business needs - rather than being limited by technology constraints.

Thus, the IT manager regains control over the service levels of the data protection. In addition, snapshot technology offers other important added values, such as the cloning of a system environment via NetApp FlexClone.

This allows backups to be tested for their data integrity. It also enables the IT department to offer complete SAP test environments to the business departments in self-service at the click of a mouse.