Validation

Abstract

ESG tested backup, recovery, and performance of a disaster recovery (DR) copy of a 500GB SAP HANA in-memory database leveraging both high performance disks and object storage with Actifio on Google Cloud Platform running production transactions. We measured recovery times and calculated cost savings.

Whether you are a CIO, VP of IT, or a database administrator (DBA), you are looking at ways to reduce costs while ensuring the performance, resilience, and integrity of your high-performance databases like SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server.

Organizations are already leveraging the cloud for backup, disaster recovery (DR), and analytics. Actifio technology makes it possible to leverage object storage in the cloud and recover directly from it, while maintaining performance on par with production systems.

The Challenges

Databases, both in-memory and traditional, are central to driving the digital economy. IT organizations, including DBAs, struggle to balance operational mandates such as maintaining performance, controlling cost, application agility, test/dev, availability, and fast recovery. These demands require more database copies and IT must be able to provide those copies quickly, easily, and cost-effectively. At the same time, IT is working to implement self-service database provisioning, cloud integration, and instant database recovery solutions.

Cloud today is an integral part of most organizations’ strategy to increase agility while improving performance and reducing costs. Whether protecting on-premises data by replicating to a public cloud, or replicating data on one cloud region to another, managing SLAs must be balanced against controlling costs.

Public clouds offer high performance storage—which comes at high cost—and more economical nearline object storage. A solution that offers the cost effectiveness of object storage without incurring a performance penalty would offer a compelling advantage.

ESG research reveals that cloud-based data protection has become mainstream, with 61% of organizations currently using cloud as a backup target, up from 25% just a few years ago. When asked about benefits of this strategy, reduced costs (31%) and improved SLAs/recoverability (21%) were at the top of the list.¹ When ESG asked about the use of secondary copies for other purposes (development/test, analytics, etc.), only 37% of organizations said they do. Among the top reported challenges or barriers to re-using data include cost (38%) and complexity to deploy (25%).²

What is needed is a solution that provides both high-performance backup and DR and self-service data delivery so developers, data scientists, and application owners can achieve faster development cycles and less risk at the lowest possible cost.

About Actifio

Actifio pioneered multi-cloud copy data management software, designed to enable organizations to virtualize and deliver their data instantly, anywhere. A software platform engineered for the enterprise, powered by their Virtual Data Pipeline technology, Actifio helps accelerate adoption of hybrid, public and multi-cloud strategies; build higher quality applications faster; and improve business resiliency and availability.

ESG Testing and Validation

ESG performed evaluation and testing of Actifio software with SAP HANA on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This involved backing up a 529GB SAP HANA in-memory database to Persistent Disk in one GCP region (US West) and then replicating across a WAN to another region (US East) where it was stored on GCS Nearline storage. During the testing, we looked at backup and restore performance, time savings, and compared transaction performance at the primary site on Persistent Disk storage with transaction performance at the DR site on Nearline storage. The test bed is shown in Figure 1.

First, we measured the time to complete the first backup to Persistent Disk in the local region. We created a policy for backup and DR replication using Actifio Global Manager (AGM).

In just 20 minutes and 30 seconds, Actifio completed the first full backup and replicated to Nearline storage in the remote GCP region. From this point on, Actifio backed up and replicated using a proprietary incremental forever scheme. This shrinks the backup window and enables a tighter recovery point objective (RPO), especially important for multi-terabyte SAP HANA databases.

To test DR, we spun up an on-demand Actifio appliance in the DR region. Next, we used AGM to bring up an on-demand HANA host and triggered Actifio’s app-aware mount technology to mount the backup image from GCS Nearline directly to the HANA host through the Sky appliance without having to rehydrate the backup to GCP Persistent Disk storage. At this point, Actifio brought the HANA database online in region two. It’s important to note that this is the same process for performing a migration or bringing up a test/dev instance. The recovery took just seven and a half minutes from start to finish.

Finally, the performance of the DR database was measured with the production version as the benchmark. This was a hard look at how well the DR database performed while running on lower cost Nearline Disk versus the production database running on SSD Persistent Disk block storage with the same server hardware. We ran a workload against the production database in region one and the DR copy running in region two using Load Runner to assess Actifio’s accelerated caching and optimizations for object storage.

It’s important to note that SAP HANA cannot use object storage directly; it requires block storage. All HANA reads are read by Actifio from GCS Nearline storage and cached in Persistent Disk storage, ensuring future reads are served by the cache. All HANA writes are stored in GCS Persistent Disk. Actifio uses caching in Persistent Disk to deliver performance on par with production systems as can be seen in the graph above. This is significant, considering the latency and performance sensitivity of SAP HANA.

Three-year Infrastructure Cost Analysis

ESG modeled and compared the costs that could be expected when deploying a disaster recovery plan with Actifio versus a traditional method where backups are replicated to a DR location, reconstituted, then presented to an online server instance.

Direct HANA to HANA replication is a hard sell for many organizations due to the extremely high ongoing costs, so we did not include it in our three-year model. Direct HANA to HANA replication requires an always-on second HANA instance with appropriate licensing, the same specs as the source instance, and Persistent Disk. Each of these comes with a significant monthly cost. By ESG’s estimation, the DR VM instance and the Regional SSD Persistent Disk storage alone would cost more than $3,600 per month.³ This does not include the SAP HANA license cost.

ESG modeled and compared the VM and storage-related costs that could be expected when deploying DR with a traditional backup/replication methodology compared with using Actifio. ESG modeled the expected costs for a company that needed to support a 500GB SAP HANA production environment. Calculations used a simplified model based on costs that would be incurred over a three-year period without taking into consideration capacity and performance growth requirements or soft costs like administration.

The model looked at the hard costs associated with producing a DR copy of the SAP HANA database using Actifio. This was compared to the more traditional model of running backups and replicating full copies of the database for each DR copy that was needed. We did not include the costs for the production database. In the analysis shown in Figure 4, we assumed a fully burdened storage cost of $170 per TB per month for the traditional model using Persistent Disk SSD and DR copies on Nearline at a cost of $10 per TB per month. With Actifio, the DR copies are served directly from Nearline with a small Persistent Disk cache (20% of total data set size) that is only accessed when testing or executing DR.

The cost of storage and VMs for Actifio over three years is $18,020 compared to $131,686 in a traditional model. This represents a cost savings of $113,666, an 86% cost reduction. For an organization with dozens or hundreds of production databases, this represents millions in annual savings and a simplified model of DR testing and execution.

The Bigger Truth

ESG asked IT and data protection professionals what risks their organization faces due to its inability to get a holistic view of all its data due to too many data silos. Wasted IT budget (52%), focus taken away from strategic tasks (44%), and difficulty meeting SLAs (29%) all figured prominently.⁴ Considering that nearly a quarter of organizations (23%) reported a problematic shortage of data protection skills in 2020,⁵ leveraging Actifio with GCP is a strong combination that reduces cost and complexity while delivering on the promise to reduce the time to DR readiness.

ESG validation testing has confirmed that:

• Actifio was simple to deploy and use to protect an SAP HANA database—creating a tailored recovery plan took only a moment and a few clicks.
• Actifio provided the ability to use Nearline storage for DR copies with equivalent performance to the production environment, a significant capability for performance-sensitive applications like SAP HANA. In addition, other groups like developers, testers, data analysts, and security specialists can leverage additional copies with the same characteristics.
• Automated policy-based backup, replication, and DR resulted in a three-year infrastructure cost reduction of 86%.

The results that are presented in this document are based on testing in a controlled environment. Due to the many variables in each production data center, it is important to perform planning and testing in your own environment to validate the viability and efficacy of any solution. ESG is confident that the conservative methodology and lack of locality of reference of the workload generators mean that organizations should see slightly better results than were presented in this report.

If your organization is looking to streamline data protection for your SAP HANA databases and optimize disaster recovery, then ESG believes that you should consider the technical and economic advantages of Actifio and Google Cloud Storage.