Backup & Recovery for SAP HANA:
SUSE Linux Supplies High-Quality OS Infrastructure
Nowadays, it is more important than ever before for companies to define a reliable backup and recovery (B&R) strategy. According to a study carried out by IBM and Ponemon Institute, each data breach currently costs an average of 3.8 million US dollars.* SAP HANA environments present a particular B&R challenge because data breaches can have even more serious consequences arising from the value and sheer amount of information involved. As a supplier of the Linux operating system (OS), SUSE helps SAP HANA users to accomplish this task quickly, effectively, and cost-efficiently.
Key Topic for Data Center Readiness
Even during the development of SAP HANA, B&R was identified as a key topic for the data center readiness of the in-memory database – along with high availability, disaster recovery, design and setup, and security and auditing. SUSE was involved right from the start, contributing sophisticated technologies and functions that are reflected in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications and its interplay with SAP HANA – whether it involves S/4HANA, BW on HANA, or Suite on HANA (SoH).
The ability of SLES to ensure a sufficiently high level of data throughput is of central importance when it comes to B&R (and high availability) requirements – in the case of SAP HANA, this is between 0.5 and 1 TB per hour. Furthermore, the SUSE OS supports the SAP-certified tools of various backup manufacturers through Backint for SAP HANA, including those of Symantec (NetBackup), IBM (Tivoli), Commvault (Simpana), HP (Data Protector), EMC (Data Domain, Networker), and SEP (Sesam). The backup suppliers also receive support with certifying their tools for the SLES for SAP Applications platform.
Many Additional B&R Benefits
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications offers SAP HANA customers many additional B&R benefits, such as its Page Cache Limit feature. Use of the working memory/Linux kernel with file system cache operations when performing backups can have a negative impact on performance in the SAP system. This can be prevented with the Page Cache Limit, which allows limits to be specified for the kernel parameter in the working memory.
SAP HANA customers can be assured that further important B&R features will be added to those that are currently available and will also be supported by SUSE. This includes extended SAP HANA scale-out support for removing a host without having to create a new data backup. Other significant features are the support for multitenant database containers with B&R for SAP HANA and the support for SAP HANA multitenant database container setups.
Avoiding Data Breaches
These examples show that a sustainable B&R strategy is necessary in order to avoid costly data breaches in the SAP HANA environment. An integral part of this is a high-quality OS infrastructure with a wide range of functions such as those provided by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.
* IBM and Ponemon Institute: “2015 Cost of Data Breach Study: Global Analysis”, May, 2015
http://www-03.ibm.com/security/data-breach/
