Actifio is now part of Google Cloud. Read the full announcement.

Backup & Recovery for SAP


OVERVIEW

Actifio enables enterprise-grade backup and disaster recovery for mission critical SAP environments.

Enterprises use Actifio software for rapid SAP backup and recovery of mission-critical SAP supported databases instantly, anywhere, on-premises and in the public cloud.

CHALLENGES

Enterprises using legacy backup architecture face most of the following challenges:

HOW Actifio HELPS

Actifio reduces database backup window and the associated performance impact by up to 20x by deliver an application consistent incremental forever backup solution.

Agility

A small backup window reduces RPO to under an 1 hour. Also, Actifio Sky software reduces RTO from days to minutes with its unique capability to instantly recover multi-TB databases .

Speed

With the ability to store backups in native database format on any storage, Actifio delivers production-like post-recovery and cloning performance. Best-of-all, enterprises can use Actifio  in any combination of private/public/hybrid cloud.


Media

 
 

Actifio helps organizations to outperform their peers by becoming truly data driven.

Frequently Asked Questions.

Actifio supports all major databases like Oracle, SQL, SAP HANA, DB2, ASE (formerly Sybase), and MaxDB.

Actifio’s pricing model is very simple and easy to understand. It’s based on the amount of source data protected. For example: If an enterprise wants to use Actifio to protect 5 database instances, each with 10 TB source database size, the enterprise would need Actifio license for 50 TB of source data. Enterprises can use this license anywhere in private, public or hybrid cloud.

Following are the key comparisons:

  1. Full vs Incremental forever backup for SAP supported databases: Legacy vendors perform recurring full backups while Actifio performs app consistent incremental forever backups using native snapshot APIs and Block Change Tracking (BCT).
  2. Large vs Instant recovery time: RTO with legacy vendors is large because of restoring from their proprietary backup format. Compare this with Actifio’s instant recovery where it can recover even a 100 TB database in just minutes.

Following are the key comparisons:

  1. Low vs High Performance post instant recovery: While mounting backups from deduplication appliances might be instant, the deduplication format on commodity storage impacts the IO performance significantly. Users just can’t run mission-critical databases from such appliances. Compare this with Actifio which stores backups in its native format on any storage tier, thus delivering the raw native performance of the underlying storage.
  2. None vs High flexibility for storage and storage protocols: With deduplication, appliance vendors users are locked into whatever storage the vendors supply. Typically deduplication vendors only offer NFS for back up and mount. Compare this with Actifio which allows users to specify any storage vendor with the right performance metrics, thus eliminating storage vendor lock-in. Moreover, users have complete flexibility to backup, recover, and mount over Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS protocols.
  3. High vs Low Cloud TCO: The scaleout deduplication appliance vendors support very few public cloud providers. They also need a very large amount of compute to protect cloud resident SAP workloads with a minimum of 3-4 node clusters, thus driving up the cloud costs. Compare that with Actifio which needs very small compute to protect SAP workloads, leverages cloud block and/or object storage and even delivers instant recovery from cloud object storage.

Yes, Actifio leverages database specific native Block Change Tracking (BCT) technology to capture just the changed blocks in its incremental forever backups. After the first backup, which is an Image Copy using the native database API, Actifio does an incremental backup and incremental merge.

Check out more details on how Actifio works.

Yes. The backup admin or DBA can setup SLAs in such a way that archive/transaction logs can be backed up every X minutes or hours in between the incremental backups. For example, a user can set up incremental backups every 4 hours and log backups every 15 minutes.

During recoveries, a user can specify any point-in-time. Actifio automatically identifies the nearest incremental point-in-time, mounts a synthetic virtual full copy instantly as of that point-in-time, and applies the archive/transaction logs to recover the SAP supported database to the specified point-in-time. All of this is fully automated.

Actifio stores the database backups in native format. This ensures that, after instant mount and recovery, there is no performance overhead because of format conversion.

The other factor to consider is the storage on which the database backups are stored by Actifio.

Depending on the performance requirements after instant recovery or provisioning database clones to test/dev users, enterprises can specify the right storage tier to use with Actifio.

And lastly, Actifio also offers the flexibility to instantly mount and recover over Fibre Channel or iSCSI or NFS depending upon the user preference.

Thus the performance can be as good as the underlying storage and the protocol the user wants to use.

Yes. Actifio supports all the major public cloud providers including  AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and Oracle. It’s also available in the leading public cloud marketplaces.

Yes. Please refer to this page for details.

Yes. Please refer to this page for details.