As those of us at Veritas Technologies embark on this year’s SAP Sapphire Now conference, we are reminded just how much digital data transformation has influenced many of the world’s largest applications and databases. We’re seeing a transition of data, broadly—it no longer lives in the data center, but it has become elastic and portable.
Just five years ago, if you were to ask an application administrator or IT Director if they were using the cloud to run their applications and databases, the common response would often be, “We are exploring.” Now, using cloud solutions to many organizations seems like second nature.
To help enhance customers cloud journey, AWS has infrastructure offerings created specifically for running SAP and HANA workloads, like R4, R5, X1,X1e and High Memory Instances. Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) instances offer up to 12 TB of memory as of today. Leveraging these instance offerings, customers can deploy, expand and migrate large SAP/HANA workloads into AWS.
Anytime critical-business applications go through a transformation as is seen in a migration to the cloud, data protection and data availability inquiries from customers and partners begin to fill my inbox. As a data protection specialist, I welcome this influx of questions—it demonstrates customers understand the importance of data protection in their digital transformation journey.
The value of Veritas
In the recent past as customers started adopting AWS for mission critical SAP applications, I’ve held more calls with customers looking to protect, migrate, or recover their SAP environments to the cloud than ever before. These discussions vary depending on where the customer is in their cloud journey, but usually include questions like, “How easy is it for me to backup and recover to the cloud?” or “How do I get a copy of my SAP/HANA database in AWS so that I can make it available to my developers?” or “How can I protect my systems in AWS” or “How can I backup and recover SAP/HANA systems in AWS”
These are common use cases Veritas is able to help customers solve. With Veritas, customers begin by taking existing backups of SAP/HANA instances and store them directly into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Even if a customer requires additional recovery options, or has a larger more complex environment, Veritas can be architected and scale to meet customers’ needs (figure 1).
In the above example, a customer is operating in a hybrid configuration, utilizing Veritas NetBackup to protect multiple flavors of SAP/HANA; that deduplicated data is then replicated to a secondary or disaster recovery environment running in AWS. Data moves from the data center to AWS using a secure and bandwidth optimized method. Once the data is in AWS, it can be used to migrate a database into a new SAP environment. This approach allows for copies of production data to be made available for development and testing operations in an on-demand fashion.
Protecting SAP in the cloud
For customers who are already actively running SAP/HANA in AWS, NetBackup can easily support this configuration. NetBackup can integrate into SAP/HANA to take point-in-time copies, system copies, and checkpoint backups of active data. Once protected, that data can be moved and stored in the various Amazon S3 tiers or archived directly into Amazon S3 Glacier (figure 2). We’ve adapted NetBackup to streamline its deployment in AWS. By deploying NetBackup through the AWS marketplace, customers can drastically reduce the setup time of NetBackup, where you can go from no data protection to running backups in as little as 30 minutes.
AWS offers customers the ability to run applications in multiple regionswhich can help customers meet their disaster recovery and geographic requirements . To support this configuration, NetBackup can be configured to protect SAP/HANA resources in one region and replicate backup data to another NetBackup environment. This approach allows customers to restore SAP/HANA in the same region or into a different geographical region if needed.
Taking on your organization’s cloud journey with confidence
The cloud journey is real and has significantly influenced critical business applications like SAP that were once only run in the customer data center. AWS has made it easy for customers to utilize the cloud for their SAP/HANA workloads—just because the location changes do not mean that considerations for data protection and availability are forgotten.
As your organization takes on a journey to the cloud, please keep in mind Veritas has decades of experience protecting SAP/HANA workloads and can support the new cloud use cases through NetBackup. If you want to backup to or backup SAP/HANA in the cloud, Veritas has you covered.
I invite you to join #TeamVtas at #SAPPHIRENOW in Orlando on May 8 from 130 to 2pm ET at the Amazon Web Services booth#2000 for our presentation: Multi Region Backup and Disaster Recovery of SAP on AWS with Veritas . For details on the partnership between AWS and Veritas to embolden SAP/HANA environments. Or, learn more about our Data Management for SAP with Veritas and AWS on the AWS Solution space where you can apply for AWS credits to work with Veritas on AWS.
