SAP HANA is the in memory source of truth for SAP applications, such a critical component requires regular backup to ensure business operations can be resumed after a failure or corruption. The Veeam plug-in for SAP HANA allows HANA database administrators to use Veeam managed infrastructure as a destination for their backups, while giving Veeam administrators visibility into HANA backup and recovery operations.
Enterprise databases can come with their own built in backup and recovery tools but because they do so does not mean that those backups should live outside of the rest of the data protection infrastructure. A good data protection infrastructure is consistent, reusable and available. If the effort has been spent to build and maintain an infrastructure designed for high throughput data transfer, storage capacity optimisation and lifecycle data management it is in the interest of everyone to reuse this infrastructure whenever possible.
When using Veeam infrastructure to store backups the lifecycle of all HANA backups is managed by database administrators alone. Only they can initiate backups, start restores and clean up expired backup data.
There are three main types of HANA backup, full/delta/incremental backups, snapshot backups and log backups. A full backup contains all the data required to recover a HANA database, or, since HANA allows for multiple logically isolated database containers to share the same HANA deployment, a full backup might contain multiple database tenants.
A delta backup is all the data that has changed since the last full backup, incremental backups capture the changed data from any previous backup, not just the last full backup. A HANA database recovery may use a combination of a full backup, a delta backup and multiple incremental backups to restore the selected database(s) to the desired point in time.
With a snapshot based backups you can synchronise the creation of an internal HANA snapshot with an external storage snapshot, such as a vSphere snapshot or a snapshot on a storage array. This is a full backup that can be recovered from and while fine for DR purposes it should be noted that snapshot based recovery is not supported with multi-tenant HANA deployments.
Log backups utilise redo logs to recover a database to a point in time. As the logging window can be short log backups alone are not enough to recover a database and require a full backup along with any delta or incremental backups to support the recovery operation. By default log backups run every 15 minutes but will not begin until the first full backup is taken from a database server.
When installed on the database server, or members of a database cluster, the Veeam plug-in for SAP HANA contains Veeam transport services which allows HANA data to be piped out through the SAP Backint API an into Veeam managed infrastructure. When data is sent to the plug-in it is compressed, deduplicated and then transmitted to a Veeam backup repository for retention.
A backup repository in Veeam is a storage location where Veeam stores and manages backup data. From the point of view of a HANA administrator the Veeam backup repository is just another storage target.
Using tools such as SAP Cockpit or SQL scripts backups can be scheduled and restores initiated. During such operations a non-editable job appears in Veeam user interfaces providing awareness and logging, but not control, over the backup process. The Veeam administrator can see backup jobs occurring but the control point always remains with the HANA database administrator.
On the matter of control, Backup Copy Jobs carried out by the Veeam Server are undesirable as they would result in databases backups not managed by a database administrator. Copy jobs have therefore been disabled. Object level recovery is not available for HANA so there is no Veeam Explorer to facilitate such a restore operation. Any restore operation is driven through database administrator tools and requires that the database(s) be shut down, and while HANA has built in replication technology backups can only be taken from the active database, not the replicas.
Data is like gas, it expands to fill available storage and when presented with useable general purpose storage database administrators tend fill it with backups that no one else has visibility into. The Veeam plug-in for SAP HANA keeps the control in the hands of the HANA database administrators but provides assurance to the backup administrators that backups are happening and they are being written to centralised infrastructure designed to support the backup and recovery of mission critical systems.
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