Take Control of SAP with Commvault Software

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SAP is the market leader in many enterprise application software market ... which is optimized for SAP HANA offers incre
Take Control of SAP with Commvault Software SAP applications are the lifeblood for many organizations, from optimizing manufacturing to tracking customer satisfaction and so much more. However, SAP deployments have unique challenges. What can organizations do to take better control of their SAP data in the face of global competition, changing workplace dynamics, and economic uncertainty?

INTRODUCTION SAP is the market leader in many enterprise application software market segments.1 SAP provides a broad portfolio of applications that enable customers to be more agile and seize new growth opportunities. SAP’s Business Suite, with its key solution SAP ERP along with SAP’s vertical solutions, have become essential components for many mid-market and most enterprise-level companies. Organizations usually roll out SAP applications on a global basis, which increases the dependency on SAP, resulting in 24x7 operations which require uncompromised SAP availability and performance. Driven by the introduction of SAP NetWeaver, modern SAP environments have transformed into networks of multiple SAP systems exchanging data and linking business processes. While this represents substantial value to the business, it also adds a significant level of complexity – often attributed to the sheer number of interdependencies between SAP applications and databases. One of the most recent innovations to originate from SAP Labs is SAP HANA. With its revolutionary in-memory architecture, HANA has changed the game in many ways, for instance with real-time analytics. Queries involving millions of data records can be completed in seconds or minutes (rather than hours). Executives now make better decisions in a much shorter time based upon comprehensive upfront research. However, the SAP HANA story doesn’t end with analytics. SAP HANA also forms the basis for the next generation of SAP Business Suite, called SAP S/4HANA. Bringing together analytical and transactional workloads in an application suite which is optimized for SAP HANA offers incredible business value and fosters business transformation. When migrating to SAP’s S/4HANA suite though, organizations will also need to find new ways to manage the ever-increasing amount of complex data to make real-time decisions. While this is exciting news, SAP deployments also bring new challenges for organizations when it comes to building and operating SAP services.

CHALLENGES Most SAP deployments come with several challenges: application availability, performance of SAP deployments, DevOps and Landscape Management, managing the SAP information lifecycle, and operating SAP as a service. Let’s discuss each of these scenarios, looking at their timing and implications on the business.

SAP PROTECTION AND AVAILABILITY SAP systems represent the lifeblood for organizations, as they automate business and manufacturing processes. One of the key requirements is protecting SAP systems against data loss and maximizing availability. However, for most organizations, both planned and unplanned SAP downtime is a reality. 2

1 www.gartner.com/doc/3300322/market-share-analysis-erp-software

Rapid Recovery for SAP on Oracle and SAP HANA This document looks at the features of Commvault snapsot management when used to protect SAP in two common configurations; running on Oracle and SAP HANA databases.



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Planned SAP downtime is inevitable; for instance, to install SAP service packs, update operating systems, or during database upgrades. On the other hand, unplanned downtime of a SAP production system can represent a highly critical situation leading almost immediately to financial impact. To measure this impact, organizations rely on SAP service-level agreements (SLAs) to capture SAP application and data availability requirements. Let’s take a look at the cost of SAP downtime and put it in relation with cost of traditional recovery. SAP SLAs are typically based on Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). SAP availability and downtime costs correspond with RTO. While downtime costs are initially small, it can increase dramatically over time. The shorter the allowed recovery time is, the more money needs to be invested in additional tape drives, high end servers, and fast networks for meeting the RTO goal using traditional methods. The same applies to cost of SAP data loss, though it corresponds with RPO requirements and associated investments. For instance, backing up a 10-terabyte (TB) database multiple times per day to tape does have a major cost implication for secondary storage. For mission-critical SAP systems, both RTO and RPO need to be optimized at the same time leading to a cost explosion when traditional methods are used.



Amount of Lost Data in Time

Amount of Time Required to Resume Business

Figure 1 Cost of SAP downtime vs. traditional recovery cost

SAP test, development, and sandbox systems certainly have less-strict data and application availability requirements. Therefore, the challenge is not only being able to cover all possible database platforms, data sources, and application instances in a typical SAP environment, but also covering a wide range of SLAs while mitigating risks and controlling costs at the same time.

SAP PERFORMANCE Managing SAP performance has become a critical task. SAP end user response time should ideally not exceed the classic 1-second threshold. If end-users experience poor performance over a long period of time, they may become distracted and demotivated. Poor SAP performance can also have a financial impact. For instance, if call center agents continue to experience the “hour glass” in SAP GUI, this may result in booking less orders and missing revenue targets. As another example, performance issues in an SAP supply chain scenario could result in goods to delivered too late causing an assembly line being halted. This would result in lost production, inventory control problems, and once again, increased costs.

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Poor SAP performance can certainly be caused by many different components and issues. One concern is the explosion of data growth. According to a survey conducted by Forrester Research,2 45% of enterprise companies run databases with a size ranging from 2 – 15 TB and larger. Another finding of this research is that roughly 45% of the survey responses say they run mission-critical databases growing at a rate of 25% or more on a yearly basis with some very large applications doubling in the same timeframe. In fact, Forrester also estimates that 75% of the data in larger mission-critical OLTP applications is inactive and rarely accessed. Not only is this a driver for continuously adding expensive tier 1 storage, but it also leads to SAP performance degradation within the database. Data protection can also be a contributing factor. During the entire time of a data protection job, the database needs to be backup mode. This can result in a slight performance penalty, which can be an issue for critical production systems.

SAP LANDSCAPE MANAGEMENT AND DevOps Most businesses running SAP are engaged in development and customization activities in order to ensure that SAP delivers the best possible value to their organization. Many organizations also require constant optimization of their business processes for cost savings, efficiencies, and competitive advantages. In addition, there is always a need to test and deploy SAP service packs and infrastructure upgrades. Clearly, change management in SAP environments is an important task in order to reduce risk and introduce new functionality. As part of a broadly-adopted practice, organization introduce development/test/production landscapes for each deployed SAP application. Apart from these permanent landscapes, SAP business users also need additional SAP sandbox systems for special projects or training purposes. Thus, generating or refreshing SAP landscape systems from production data is a recurring activity for most SAP operations. This procedure, called System Copy, is time-consuming, tedious, and complex (as it usually needs to be implemented across multiple database platforms). Clearly, businesses need intelligent, fast, and automated solutions to gain efficiency and scalability for development cycles while keeping cost under control.

SAP INFORMATION LIVE CYCLE MANAGEMENT AND COMPLIANCE If outdated business-level information is moved out of the database, for instance when optimizing performance, it is important to ensure this data is still accessible for SAP business users – especially when supporting audits. As a consequence of mergers and acquisitions, SAP systems need to be merged occasionally. However, from time to time, organizations also require retirement of entire SAP systems. In this case, SAP’s DART tool can be leveraged to export all business data as DART extracts before deleting the SAP system. Using the DART reader, the extracted data can still be accessed. Once SAP business data is moved out of the database, it needs to be managed according to its lifetime. Country-specific regulations govern the retention time of data and mandate that data access is required throughout its lifetime (in addition to immutability). Once the lifetime has expired, the data is required to be deleted.

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2 www.forrester.com/report/Your+Enterprise+Data+Archiving+Strategy/-/E-RES58169

SAP SERVICE MANAGEMENT As IT organizations are currently transforming into service providers, SAP services need to become more and more utility-based, scalable, automated, and measurable. Provisioning new or refreshing existing SAP sandboxes or landscape systems needs take just a couple of mouse clicks -- including activating associated services like data protection. The same applies to decommissioning systems which are no longer required by the business. As a result, many managed service providers (MSPs) and companies running SAP on-premises are transforming their SAP environments into public or private clouds (often based on server virtualization technologies such VMware). Typically, features such as multi-tenancy, automation, reporting, chargeback, and customer self-service are also implemented as part of managed SAP services.

TRANSFORMING SAP DATA MANAGEMENT WITH COMMVAULT® Commvault® software is a data protection and information management platform that integrates with SAP environments. Commvault helps organizations build, protect and operate SAP infrastructure that can be integrated into private, public, or hybrid cloud environments. Commvault software includes various mechanisms for protecting and managing SAP environments with SAP data lifecycle management. Let’s review some of these features now.

SOLVING SAP DATA PROTECTION AND AVAILABILITY As we discussed before, ensuring SAP data and application availability is key to businesses and usually go hand-in-hand. However, requirements vary based on the criticality of the respective SAP systems. A wide range of SLAs needs to be covered – from sandbox systems to a missioncritical SAP ERP or S/4HANA production system. Traditional data protection technologies based on streaming data transfer are well-suited for test, dev and sandbox systems, but can lead to a cost explosion when trying the meet demanding SLAs. Commvault IntelliSnap® technology can solve this dilemma via integrated and applicationaware storage hardware snapshots. Taking a hardware snapshot can be performed almost instantaneously and recovering from a snapshot is lightning fast. This creates multiple recovery points per day (RPO) and minimizes SAP recovery times. Commvault IntelliSnap technology is also the solution to the cost dilemma, as hardware snapshots can usually be enabled via an additional license key on the storage array. Commvault supports the 20+ industry leading storage platforms with IntelliSnap technology. Let’s review a case study conducted at a Commvault customer from Switzerland. The SAP environment of this customer comprises 45 SAP systems. Total data amount is 25 TB, the largest SAP system has a size of 3 TB. Average backup time per SAP system is less than 4 minutes. Recovery (RTO) SLA is 1 hour for any SAP system. Copy from Snapshot restores perform at ~1.3 TB/hour. Even the largest production system can be restored via the snapshot revert in less than 8 minutes.

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COMMVAULT INTELLISNAP CASE STUDY Environment

45 SAP Systems running on Oracle • Database sizes: 20 GB – 3 TB • Total SAP data amount: 25 TB

Backup Time

Average Backup Time: ~ 4 min Total Backup Time:

~1 hour

Snapshot Copies

~4 hours

Restore Time

Copy from Snapshot: ~380 MB/sec Snapshot Revert:

< 8 min

The IntelliSnap technology story is not limited to SAP on Oracle; SAP HANA, IBM DB2, SAP Sybase ASE and Microsoft SQL Server databases are supported as well. There is also no need for scripting, which streamlines deployment and avoids unnecessary errors. The solution is fully automated including database-level recovery to ensure efficient and scalable operations. Even virtualized SAP environments can also be protected via IntelliSnap. Commvault also supports streaming data protection for less critical SAP systems. In fact, for SAP HANA, Commvault is the only data protection solution on the market that supports both streaming and snapshot-based protection in one solution and GUI. With Commvault software, we centralize management of SAP HANA snapshots and traditional streaming backup of SAP NetWeaver with a unified platform. This can be quantified with an IDC report that shows that Commvault customers experience 13.48 hours of less downtime per year verses traditional data platform solutions.3 Modern SAP architectures usually include multiple SAP databases and data sources in one environment. SAP HANA Vora is a good example here as it forms a bridge between Hadoop and SAP HANA. Additionally, Commvault workflows can be leveraged here, for instance to back up SAP HANA and Hadoop or another SAP database at the same time. Commvault software also makes disaster recovery (DR) simple by eliminating manual steps and increasing reliability with policy-based / automated DR plans which can reduce: • Search time for recovery by up to 60% • Offsite copy time by up to 45% • Annual unplanned downtime by as much as 54%

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3 The Business Value of Commvault Software IDC 2016 US40773815

IDC: Quantifying the Business Value of Commvault Software: Worldwide Customer Survey Analysis IDC helps to quantify and document the concrete value that Commvault solutions have produced for its customers.



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Above all, there is a clear need to test disaster recovery (DR) plans to ensure you can actually recover your systems and data in the event of a real disaster. But testing DR mechanisms specifically for SAP deployments can be extremely onerous, especially if there is a significant reliance on scripting and manual processes. With Commvault, DR testing can be automated. So it is possible to periodically schedule a DR test which, for instance, restores the production system into a DR location and runs custom database checks. This way, any infrastructure issues will be detected and resolved in a timely manner prior to an actual disaster. This significantly reduces operational risk.

MANAGING SAP PERFORMANCE During data protection jobs, the database needs to be in backup mode all the time. This causes a slight performance impact. For highly critical 24x7 SAP systems, this performance impact can be unacceptable if it persists over several hours. With Commvault IntelliSnap snapshot technology, backups usually complete in minutes – instead of several hours with traditional methods. There is no longer a need to find an appropriate time for planning a lengthy backup window, as Commvault snapshots for SAP databases virtually eliminate the backup window and minimize the performance impact. Another way to improve SAP performance is with SAP archiving. The Commvault solution is built on SAP’s ArchiveLink standard and allows aged SAP business data to be archived out of the database. This keeps the database slim and performance at full-speed. The solution also supports archiving SAP business documents (such as scanned invoices). This way, SAP business document storage can be cost-effectively centralized and documents can be kept out of the database to avoid unnecessary database growth and performance issues. SAP print lists can even be archived as well. Archived SAP data can be recalled at any time. Retention management is also applied to archived data – which can be stored on multiple storage tiers for managing cost. Finally, Commvault software can apply deduplication, compression, and encryption to the archived SAP data to keep its footprint small and secure.

TRANSFORMING SAP LANDSCAPE MANAGEMENT AND DEVOPS Instead of tedious, time-consuming refreshes from production for development or testing systems, Commvault’s integration with SAP tools and script-free automation reduces landscape management headache – allowing teams to focus on higher-value initiatives in the business. Commvault software simplifies copy management of SAP systems and landscapes with integration for native SAP tools. For instance, with SAP HANA, Commvault software is integrated with HANA Studio and SAP HANA Cockpit for creating database copies. This allows you to create or refresh existing SAP landscape systems and support new business initiatives quickly and cost-effectively via database copies based on cloned snapshots.

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SAP REFRESH

HANA

DEVELOPMENT SAP

SAP

REFRESH

HANA

TESTING

HANA SAP

BUILD

PRODUCTION

HANA

TRAINING SAP BUILD

HANA

SANDBOX

Figure 2 Logical view of typical SAP Landscapes

In fact, even the backup administrator – with no SAP expertise – can run a backup, restore, or database copy for a SAP on Oracle Database or a clone of a SAP HANA database. Furthermore, with Commvault software, almost everything can be automated: not only backups and restores, but also database copies and new agents can be deployed and updated automatically from the GUI. Data protection software for new SAP systems can be automatically deployed, and these systems can be automatically added to protection policies, as well as included in reports. For example, you can refresh of a cloned SAP database copy to happen during the night and you can also define a lifetime for this clone. This also means no more forgotten database copies scattered throughout the environment; keeping costs under control and increasing efficiency.

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GETTING SAP DATA COMPLIANCE UNDER CONTROL As part of your SAP compliance project, developing best practices for managing data governance can minimize risk; helping your company streamline operations and reduce administrative costs. For example, financial records represent an important area for SAP data archiving. During tax audits your organization will be asked to present financial records, demonstrate how records are used, and identify other records that contribute to financials. Commvault software enables organizations to satisfy these record retention requirements by making all SAP archived data available at all times, stored on WORM-like devices, until the end of its lifecycle. Many organizations also find themselves maintaining legacy systems even after replacing them with more modern SAP systems. Commvault software can reduce IT hardware and software licensing costs by preserving legacy data and allowing organizations to decommission legacy systems. Commvault software can also archive and recall SAP DART extracts for retired SAP systems. This means consolidation initiatives are less risky, as users can view historical data independent of the original system.

SAP SERVICE MANAGEMENT Organizations can improve their own efficiency—and that of their workforce—by helping users to help themselves. Commvault software is tightly integrated with SAP DB13, DBA Cockpit, SAP HANA Studio and SAP HANA Cockpit to support simple DBA self-service and monitoring of data protection tasks. Commvault software also helps businesses improve operational efficiency with enterpriseclass, multi-tenant architecture. This secure separation and management of data protection and archiving resources allows service providers to isolate and logically manage (unrelated) groups of users, policies, and more within a single management server – regardless of whether the underlying infrastructure is shared or dedicated. Another important aspect to SAP service management is virtual machine (VM) lifecycle management. With Commvault software, it is possible to automate management of VMs to limit VM and storage sprawl, automatically deploy VM-based database copies for new SAP environments, and so forth. For example, IT can set-up policies to allow SAP administrators to create, customize, and clone VMs to provision or decommission additional SAP application servers in order to quickly respond to changed SAP workloads. After their lifetime has expired, VMs can be automatically decommissioned or archived. IT can also allow SAP administrators to create snapshots and recover SAP-specific VMs. Taken together, these services transform IT organizations from a cost-center to an innovation leader that is scalable, automated, and measurable.

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NEXT STEPS SAP deployments have several challenges: availability, performance, compliance, DevOps and landscape management and SAP service management. To address these challenges, organizations have been inundated with a long list of point-products to manage their SAP data. However, to maximize the success of SAP deployments, businesses need a unified platform that is integrated with SAP software to protect, manage, and archive all SAP data – regardless of where it lives. Commvault software provides this unified platform to solve SAP application availability, SAP performance, and automate SAP landscape management. Together, SAP and Commvault remove operational complexities in your business to create new revenue streams and bring profitable ideas to market faster.

To see how you can take control of your SAP deployment, visit commvault.com/SAP.

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