Jay Livens & Ashok Ramu talk about protecting SAP HANA in the cloud
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Solution Brief: Actifio for SAP HANA
Jay Livens: One application we hear a lot about from our customers is SAP. Can you talk about some of the best practices or the most efficient way to protect SAP in the cloud?
Ashok: Absolutely. SAP, no matter which organization we talk to, which vertical we talk to, this is of paramount importance, it’s the crown jewel. That’s the one they protect; they have redundancy for. SAP is a fantastic application because it runs on so many different data bases.
To have an effective governing strategy for SAP people typically rely on storage snapshot which I don’t care, but don’t give you the level of granularity and control you want. It doesn’t give you the application consistency you want. It doesn’t give you the DR consistency you want. The other side is I’m going to do a traditional downtime recovery.
Most SAP data bases are tens of terabytes that is going to take you a 24-hour downtime recovery. So how do you optimize for both of these cases where you can’t have a downtime? You need to have an effective backup and DR strategy, and possibly you have a few customers doing DevOps, and they spin up multiple lower tier environments with SAP
You see the strategy that covers no matter what the database is. You could have Postgres, Sybase, SQL, Oracle, HANA all of these are coming up. So the strategy that Actifio employs is we have one strategy across all databases. Actifio pioneered the technology where you see a full copy of the data only once, and then only the incrementals, and they give you instant access to any type of data.
Combining all of these, what you get is a single solution that gives efficient backup. Day one backup might take four, five, six hours, but after that the backup takes 15 minutes. And then what we can do is we understand logs so essentially we can go into a 15-minute RPO/RTO intervals.
What you’ve done and enabled customers to do is to take their 13 terabyte data bases, and bring them up in five minutes. And this bring-up happens anywhere you want, because Actifio works one way across all cloud platforms and the data center. So you could run SAP locally on premise, and then recover it in Google; you could run SAP both in Azure, recover it in Google. It gives you unified strategy and also a data migration strategy. The other angle we’re looking at is if people want to move too hard, and this is no easy conduit to go from Oracle to HANA, or Postgres to HANA, how do you do it.
So Actifio has this capability where you can plug in your transformation engine as you bring up the data. And you make that data migration as seamless and as painless as possible. Those are the aspects that make Actifio solution really, really powerful for large databases and mission critical applications like SAP.
Webinar: Protecting SAP in the Cloud