Test Data Management for SAP
OVERVIEW
Accelerate application test and release cycle for SAP test data management. Rapid cloning of multi-terabyte SAP databases supports efficient, fast, and flexible test environments.
Every enterprise benefits from the accelerated roll out of new application features, security patches, and performance analytics. However, these activities need high fidelity copies of production SAP databases.
Actifio software enables enterprises to rapidly provision clones of SAP databases in a self-service manner to test and development environments.
CHALLENGES
Enterprises can be overwhelmed by the resources required for application testing.
Enterprises using legacy test data management tools create subsets of production data for testers. However, testing software against data subsets leads to high defect levels, poor software quality, and longer release cycles.
Enterprises create multiple physical copies of production databases to overcome this problem. For large databases in particular, this leads to high storage costs as well as long wait cycles and excessive time wasted in creating and refreshing physical copies.
To overcome this problem, some enterprises try using storage snapshots, but with no self-service or data masking automation, and no role-based access controls, this complicates operations and leads to weak security models.
Additionally, in many environments, users can’t perform functionality and performance testing simultaneously to cut down testing cycles.
Lastly, most of these point tools are not cloud-ready.
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HOW Actifio HELPS
Actifio helps enterprises accelerate application test and release cycles by enabling self-service capabilities for instantly provisioning multi-TB SAP supported database clones.
The database clones are rewritable thin-clones that don’t consume any extra storage, which helps reduce infrastructure costs. Actifio helps to mitigate overwhelmed resources with its innovative approach to cloning large databases.
Actifio’s ability to integrate with CI/CD tools using APIs improves software quality. It enables the simultaneous provisioning of dozens of database clones to test environments and enables quality assurance (QA) testers to rapidly iterate through testing and refresh cycles.
For databases containing sensitive data, enterprises can use Actifio to increase security by automating the sensitive data masking process, and implementing role-based access controls.
Enterprises can enjoy all these benefits while leveraging Actifio in any public cloud or on-premises.
Media
Additional Resources
WHITE PAPER
How Actifio Technology Works
White Paper
The Very Large Database Problem
SOLUTION BRIEF
SAP HANA Test Data Management
CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Simplifying and Accelerating SAP HANA Data Protection
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 or public cloud.
Actifio stores the database copies in native format. This ensures that, after instant mount, there is no performance overhead because of format conversion.
The other factor to consider is the storage on which the database copies are stored by Actifio.
Depending on the performance requirements after 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.
Following are the key comparisons:
- Low vs High Performance: Many enterprises have investments in Fibre Channel and want to provision virtual database (VDB) clones over their high-performance fibre channel network for better performance. Delphix relies on NFS and so cannot leverage Fibre Channel to provision VDB clones. Compare this with Actifio which has the ability to provision VDB clones over Fibre Channel, NFS, and iSCSI, thus delivering not only high performance, but also the flexibility to pick and choose any protocol.
- High Availability: Many enterprises expect high availability when there are 100s of testers using virtual DB clones because any downtime means delays in testing and application release cycles. Delphix does not offer HA capability. Compare this with Actifio which offers the option for enterprises to buy its software in a 2-node HA cluster that ensures that testers don’t have any downtime in the event of losing one of the nodes.
- Total Cost of Ownership: High vs Low: Delphix requires a very large amount of compute and memory to run their software as compared to Actifio Sky software. Additionally, Delphix recommends an on-premises staging server for large or mission-critical databases. Unlike Delphix, Actifio offers a global manager to manage one or more Actifio software instances running in multiple data centers or public cloud. Actifio also offers an enterprise-grade backup, disaster recovery, long-term data retention solution with the same license. Actifio’s rich functionality with simple software licensing, large scale appliances, and global management drives down the total cost of ownership for enterprises significantly as compared to Delphix.
There are many more differentiated features. For more details, download this Actifio vs Delphix comparison.
None of these vendors offer advanced test data management functionality where they enable users to provision dozens of database clones at scale, with high performance, with automated data masking, enable users to pick and deep cloud integration.
Yes. This is possible with two approaches.
In the first approach, the enterprise can use Commvault/Netbackup to backup databases from the primary database instance, and Actifio can ingest data from the standby database instance or vice versa.
In the second approach where Commvault/Netbackup and Actifio are forced to protect from the same database instance, Actifio can still ingest data for Test Data Management in an incremental forever manner using Block Change Tracking (BCT) without impacting Commvault/Veritas backups. But only one product can manage the Archive/Transaction log backups.
Yes. In fact, almost all the customers who use Actifio for Test Data Management replace their other backup product with Actifio either on day one or over time. This helps them not only reduce their overall costs, but also simplifies operations with a single platform for backup, recovery, test data management i.e. Copy Data Management for SAP supported databases.
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.