For many large enterprises, SAP HANA is quickly becoming the de facto in-memory database management system, and for good reason. SAP HANA allows companies to rapidly process large volumes of real-time data. The in-memory computing engine allows HANA to process data stored in RAM as opposed to reading it from a disk. This distinction is profound, giving enterprises enough of a reason to rely on HANA for real-time analytics and transactions.
Given the growing emphasis on concurrency and managing data at scale, more organizations are relying on HANA for additional use cases such as monitoring networks, optimizing their supply chains, and detecting fraud.
The Need for HANA Data Protection
It’s clear that both the number of deployments and the scope of HANA will continue to grow. What’s less obvious is the imperative need for a comprehensive data protection solution. While SAP offers backup tools that save data from memory to disk at regular savepoints, a modern data protection solution is necessary to complement these native tools to address the following data protection requirements:
- Protecting against disk corruption, logical damage, or human error
- Storing backups efficiently
- Recovering to an earlier point in time in the event of a disaster—and to the right location
Protecting Data Where It Counts
To allow you to bring back your database to a consistent state after a power failure, for example, SAP HANA relies on two elements: savepoints and transactional logs. HANA keeps both savepoints, or the content of database memory, as well as logs that track transactional changes in a persistent layer.
Savepoints and transactional logs are key components of HANA, but believing these components alone are enough for data protection is a fallacy. In the event of logical errors or data loss stemming from hardware failure, data loss can become a reality if the persistent layer is not backed up.
Cohesity provides the ability to back up this persistent layer, protecting the integrity of HANA’s safeguarding measures, and ultimately, your data.
Storing Backups Efficiently and Securely
For many organizations, particularly large enterprises, the key challenge is the fact that there are numerous considerations. It’s not enough to simply protect data. The questions often by organizations allude to the juggling act performed by IT teams: How can we keep guardrails on cost? How do we eliminate silos and make our infrastructure simpler to manage?
Since SAP HANA is a system that encompasses both SAP applications—like SAP S/4HANA—and other non-SAP applications, by backing up HANA with Cohesity, you can eliminate data silos related to both SAP and non-SAP applications. This is relevant regardless of the location of HANA—in a public cloud provider or on-premises. This results in infrastructure that is simpler to manage, reducing the costs, and time that goes into management overhead. Going beyond consolidation, you can reduce the data footprint of HANA by leveraging Cohesity’s global variable-length deduplication. Large organizations consistently report data reductions rates above 26x and TCO savings of $500k, with much of the savings predicated on a differentiated approach to deduplication.
Recover Granularly, Anywhere
Flexibility is important when determining how data should be protected and recovered. Particularly for analytics, it’s necessary to have the ability to restore to a specific point in time and have granular options. To allow enterprises to meet these requirements, Cohesity supports granular and point-in-time restores. In addition, you can recover to any location, regardless of the environment. With multistreaming support, restores, as well as backups, are faster on Cohesity than other solutions.
Native Integrations—SAP Certified Across the Board
Cohesity’s data protection solution for SAP HANA is founded on a native integration. The implication is the ability to allow SAP Basis administrators to continue using their existing tools and workflows such as SAP HANA Cockpit, Studio, and HDBSQL. Backup administrators can also choose to use Cohesity to easily protect SAP HANA data. This is why having a native solution matters. It helps provide flexibility and simpler operations for users.
And Cohesity is more than a native solution. It’s certified. Cohesity is SAP Certified for:
- Intel + SAP HANA 1.0 / 2.0
- IBM Power Systems + SAP HANA 2.0
SAP HANA 2.0 on IBM Power is a configuration that many enterprises rely on. Now, Cohesity is one of the few solutions that is certified for this combination. Leveraging the Backint API, Cohesity delivers a certified solution that has numerous benefits, including direct access to the HANA database through a fast pipe. This means faster backups and restores.
Cohesity offers a comprehensive backup and recovery solution for SAP HANA by protecting nuanced layers within HANA, reducing TCO through a unique approach to data deduplication, and provides flexibility in recovery. These benefits can be attributed to a unique approach to data management and building a native solution for HANA that’s certified by SAP.
