The mission-critical nature of the workloads you run on SAP makes backing up your data an indispensable part of doing business. And for that reason, the SAP backup function is a great place to look to find efficiencies – which is often done by taking a problem-solving approach. Over time, we’ve found four common issues that repeatedly pose problems with SAP backups, and they were part of the impetus behind the development of Syntax CxLink Backup, designed to provide organizations with a better, faster and more cost effective solution for backup and recovery.
Problem 1:
Each Policy Must Be Defined Independently
Given the complexity of SAP systems, policies and configurations are usually defined at the environment level. And backup frequency can differ in non-production SAP environments, such as SAP finance, human resource, or CRM, versus production ones. Once the specific policies have been chosen – for example, daily backups that are deleted weekly – for each of these environments, they must be applied to each of the servers in each environment.
On many occasions, when IT administrators are faced with the task of performing any of the types of SAP backup, they are forced to manually configure, one by one, the specific policies they want to apply to the backup of each of their systems or individual databases. This is because there is no commercial solution that allows them to automatically apply specific backup policies. Carrying out this work is often tedious and consumes time that could be used on other tasks that provide greater value to the organization.
This inefficiency can be solved by using CxLink Backup. It is a specific software solution for SAP backup that’s designed to allow you to automate and centralize the backup configuration process. CxLink Backup was developed by Syntax as a cloud backup tool specifically for SAP deployments to simplify this configuration – regardless of the database being used. Using CxLink Backup, you can copy the same configuration file to all servers in the same environment – as long as they share the same retention policy and the same storage space.
Problem 2: High Hosting Costs
One of the biggest concerns SAP system users have is the cost of hosting backups in the cloud. Typically, when you perform a backup, data is copied to an intermediate location and then saved to one of the public cloud providers’ services, such as Amazon S3, Azure Blob, or Google Storage for AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. This represents a high investment, since the intermediate storage has a cost ten times higher than the cost of the object, which is the final destination.
The intermediate storage cost issue can be overcome by using CxLink Backup. It works by directly copying data to the public cloud provider’s object storage, therefore removing the need for any intermediate location. Thus, the cost of cloud hosting is reduced to the price of the object storage provided by the hyperscaler. An additional way that CxLink Backup contributes to lowering hosting costs is that it allows constant review of backups. Thus, those that are no longer necessary will be eliminated and will not take up unnecessary space that add to your hosting costs.
Problem 3: High Recovery Time
In the same way that eliminating the intermediate storage reduces costs, it also has the important effect of saving valuable recovery time as well. It is able to do this because in order to recover data from a backup, the data flow must follow the same path as it used when saving it, but in the opposite direction. Without using CxLink Backup, you would follow a traditional approach of making an SAP backup. In that case, your data would first be copied to an intermediate location and then permanently saved to your cloud provider’s object storage. To recover your files, the path would be the opposite: from the cloud provider’s object store to the intermediate one to finally recover them.
To be clear, the recovery time savings would come from eliminating one of the stages of the backup and recovery process, as a result of using CxLink Backup Software. This time is directly proportional to the size of the databases, so the greater the number of databases, the greater the time savings.
Problem 4:
Difficulty Getting an Overview of SAP Backups
Getting an overview of your SAP data backups’ status can be difficult because it is not a default capability. And without insights such as those, it gets in the way of doing other things, such as detecting human errors or anomalies, or locating inconsistencies in SAP backup policies for files hosted in different environments or databases.
The solution to this problem is through the centralization of backup copies. Doing that enables you to safeguard your data as much as possible, get the most out of it and save time and money. Ideally, you’d have access to a centralized console that consolidates the administration and supervision of all SAP backups that are managed. This centralization applies to both backups and subsequent data recovery and increases flexibility in the SAP backup process.
The time savings of such centralization are evident in the initial configuration of SAP backup but will be even more so when the need arises to modify any backup policy. CxLink Backup avoids having to make the change manually on each system or database, thus drastically reducing the time spent doing so.
Let’s look at an example: when we make a system copy between environments. This scenario is quite common in SAP – such as refreshing data from a non-productive environment with that of a productive one. With CxLink Backup it is not necessary to change the configuration of the destination environment. In addition, this solution presents the possibility of operating in system copy mode, directly restoring backups between environments without having to move them. This way, we don’t spend time reconfiguring each system from scratch.
Syntax CxLink Backup:
One Solution to these 4 Problems and More
If you want to make your work more fluid, gain flexibility and invest your time in more innovative tasks with greater added value, you can count on CxLink Backup, the cloud-native backup solution certified by SAP.
CxLink Backup is compatible with numerous databases from different providers, such as SAP Hana, IBM DB2, SQL Server or SAP ASE – all supported by SAP – and with the hyperscalers AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
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We are so confident you’ll benefit from the features of CxLink Backup, we’re offering it for a
Free 15-day Trial
Here are some of the details:
- It is a licensed software that is managed by CxLink Licenses.
- You can download and install the CxLink Backup software on your servers after configuring it with your CxLink credentials with an active license.
- And at any point, you can contact Syntax experts to answer any questions about backups, or any other questions you might have.
- Once your 15-day trial period is over, continue using the software and continue to see the impacts that better, faster and more cost effective backups and recoveries have on your organization!
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This post originally appeared in Spanish on the blog of the Syntax Spain website as
“Estrategia de backup SAP: problemas habituales y cómo resolverlos.”