This topic provides an overview of the SAP HANA backup feature provided by Cloud Backup, including the benefits, working principles, procedure, and billing of the feature.
Introduction
SAP HANA backup is a data protection solution provided by Cloud Backup for self-managed SAP HANA databases that are hosted on Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances. You can efficiently back up data from an SAP HANA database to a backup vault in a simple and reliable manner. If a logical error occurs in your database or the database encounters ransomware attacks, you can restore data from the backup vault.
This feature has some limits. For more information, see Limits.
Benefits
SAP certification
Cloud Backup is compatible with SAP HANA 2.0 and supports high availability (HA) and scale-out deployment modes.
Ease of use
Cloud Backup automatically pushes the backup client to the ECS instance that you want to back up, and installs the client on the instance. You can manage backup jobs in the Cloud Backup console.
Flexible backup policies
Cloud Backup supports full backup, incremental backup, and log backup to meet your requirements for recovery point objective (RPO).
High backup performance
The backup speed can reach 380 MB/s and the recovery speed can reach 220 MB/s. This meets your requirements for recovery time objective (RTO).
Deduplication and compression
The Cloud Backup client compresses and deduplicates the source data. Multiple full backup versions are retained, but the data does not consume a large amount of storage space.
Immutable backup against accidental deletion
Cloud Backup provides the immutable backup feature based on backup vaults. Backup data cannot be deleted by any account or method before the configured retention period expires.
How it works
You can specify the ECS instance that hosts the source SAP HANA database in the Cloud Backup console. Cloud Backup automatically pushes the backup client to the ECS instance. You must make sure that Cloud Assistant Agent is installed on the ECS instance. The Cloud Backup client backs up the source SAP HANA database based on the backup plan that you configure.
When a full backup, incremental backup, or log backup job is running, the Cloud Backup client initiates a backup command for HANA, exports the source data by using the Backint agent of SAP HANA, deduplicates and compresses the data, and then uploads the data to the backup vault.
Cloud Backup uses the Backint API for SAP HANA to back up and restore data. Backup data is not stored as files. Cloud Backup calls the Backint API for SAP HANA to read data from or write data to SAP HANA instances.
Procedure
The following procedure shows how to back up an SAP HANA database deployed on an ECS instance in the Cloud Backup console.
You must obtain the host address, instance number, username, and password of the source SAP HANA instance from the SAP HANA administrator. Cloud Backup registers the SAP HANA instance based on the preceding information.
You are not charged for activating Cloud Backup. You are charged for the Cloud Backup client that you use to back up SAP HANA databases. You are also charged for backup vaults based on the storage space occupied by the data that is deduplicated and compressed. For more information, see Billing methods and billable items.
Register an SAP HANA instance in the Cloud Backup console. Cloud Backup automatically installs a backup client on the ECS instance that hosts the SAP HANA instance.
To ensure that your SAP HANA database can be backed up as expected, Cloud Backup allows you to configure parameters that are related to Backint, Catalog, and log backup.
When you create a backup plan, configure the backup vault, data source, backup cycle, retention period, and backup policies (such as full backup and incremental backup). Cloud Backup starts the backup plan and continuously backs up data from the specified SAP HANA database.
If an exception occurs, you can restore the SAP HANA database based on the data that has been backed up. The following restoration methods are supported:
Billing
You are charged for SAP HANA backup based on the following billable items:
Cloud Backup clients for SAP HANA backup
You are charged based on the number of installed Cloud Backup clients. A Cloud Backup client is installed on each SAP HANA instance regardless of whether the instance is deployed in a standalone or primary/secondary architecture. For more information, see Pricing of Cloud Backup.
Storage usage
Cloud Backup provides two types of backup storage: locally redundant storage (LRS) and zone-redundant storage (ZRS). You are charged based on the storage usage of the backup vaults. You can view the storage usage of backup vaults on the Overview page in the Cloud Backup console. For more information, see Pricing of Cloud Backup.
In addition, Cloud Backup charges the following backup fees based on specific configurations or operations:
Geo-redundancy fees: If you create a remote mirror vault to copy data from a backup vault in an Alibaba Cloud region to another region for geo-redundancy, you are charged for the storage capacity of the mirror vault and the cross-region replication traffic. The size of the mirror vault is the same as that of the source backup vault, and the pricing is the same.
What to do next
Learn about how to back up SAP HANA databases. For more information, see Back up an SAP HANA database.
View answers to some frequently asked questions (FAQ). For more information, see ECS backup FAQ.
Learn about the best practices of Cloud Backup. For more information, see Best Practices.
For more information about FAQ related to SAP HANA backup, see FAQ about SAP HANA backup.