Consistent Landscape Recovery within defined SLAs
Consistent SAP Landscape Backup
Consistent Landscape Backup is a solution that will allow SAP to recover to the same point-in-time across all SAP components running within an organization. In case of a failure, a consistent landscape backup will provide consistent data in all SAP components, thereby eliminating the need to manually perform a time consuming technical or business recovery.
The Challenge
Consistent SAP Landscape Backup is essential to protect mission critical data and avoid downtime associated with manual and time-consuming business recovery.
The ability to recover landscapes to a consistent point within the defined SLA’s is becoming increasingly challenging given increasing business demands, complexity of SAP and growing amounts of data.
SAP Backup and Recovery Tips and Best Practices
How do we ensure that our backup facilitates a consistent landscape recovery?
- Execute regular backups of all assets and not just databases and application files. Include
- Application & database binaries
- Operating systems
- Archive logs
- Non-database file-systems
- NFS file-systems
- Protect the database logs carefully. Keep a backup on local file system as well as on a remote device (remote file system) to protect them against manual accidents and provide easy retrieval.
- Deploy disk snapshot technologies effectively to help restore/recover each SAP component up to a point in time of crash to ensure consistency across the landscape.
How often should we backup SAP data?
- SAP database: Backup the SAP database at least once a day. For faster recovery databases may have to be backed up more than once a day. Reducing the impact of database backups on production systems is not a choice but integral part of the database backup solution.
- Database log backups: Recovery to point-in-time is facilitated by database logs. Backups of database logs have to be designed based on local Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Frequency & backup destination of the database logs are critical pieces of the backup design.
- Other SAP related non-database files: Backup of non-database files should be done at least once a day. For SAP Java components, backups of these files have to be aligned with database backups to avoid discrepancies.
- OS backups: Though most of the SAP related files within OS is static, it OS backups should be performed at least once a week or whenever any changes are made to the OS. As a best practice, to reduce recovery time in case of complete system crash, once a day OS backups (incremental or full) is recommended.
How to perform landscape backup with minimal downtime?
Explore a combination of the below three options to achieve the optimal solution for your particular needs:
- Perform split mirror backups, integrated with SAP provided tools, of the very large databases.
- Implement a full and incremental (differential) backup strategy.
- Use database vendor provided tools to achieve more granularities in the data set that is backed up.
How do we test our backups and ensure data is consistent and reliable?
- Test restores to an alternate server at least once in six months
- Perform a full SAP technical validation on the test restores at least once a month
- Test individual components – it is more practical although complete landscape restore tests are desirable.
How do we restore in minutes and not hours?
- Leverage split mirror database backups. They allow for restores to be performed within minutes.
- Backup to disks and de-duplication devices to facilitate faster restores.
- Maintain database logs online or near-line to make them quickly available for faster recovery.
- Replicate backup media/device based backups to offsite location for faster recovery in case of a catastrophe.
Do we need new hardware /infrastructure?
- No. Most of the enterprise business already owns the required pieces of the puzzle.
- Existing operating system and different Storage Technologies can be integrated with SAP & Database Vendor provided tools to design the solution.
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