Challenge:

Pothys is a chain of textile showrooms in South India, as they currently have their 14 active servers running SAP S4 with HANA workloads on AWS that run on a diverse set of SAP releases and versions. They wanted to have regular backup for their HANA database, but their main concern was to configure a cost-effective backup. One of the major cons of EBS snapshots is, it incurs significant cost over weeks and years. It is not designed to be a long term backup solution. Also to avoid vulnerability, snapshots can be replicated to another region like a cross region snapshot replication solution, but the replication of snapshots incurs an additional transfer fee and adds to the total bill.

Solution:

Redington worked with Pothys to identify use case before designing a tailor-fit backup and recovery mechanism specific to their needs by considering the following parameters in the infrastructure:

By storing the HANA database backup in cheaper storage like S3 it helps to reduce the cloud storage costs.
Amazon S3 offers robust infrastructure for the storage of crucial information as S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (11 9’s) of data durability because it automatically creates and stores copies of all S3 objects across multiple systems. This means the user data is available when needed and protected against failures, errors, and threats. S3 also provides cost-effective and scalable solutions to help organizations balance their requirements for backup and recovery.

Redington helped Pothys in building scripts for backing up your files to the S3 storage and easily restore them as needed to ensure data is recoverable in case of catastrophic failure. With help of scheduled task (or cron job) to handle the backup operation, it automates their backup process faster, more reliable, and more programmatic. Once the data is in Amazon S3, based upon client’s requirement, we optionally create S3 Lifecycle policies to automatically archive data to lowercost storage classes or delete objects after specified time.

• Create and automate script to backup HANA database locally daily at a specified time to a backup folder.

• Create and automate script at a designated time to transfer backup files daily to S3.

• Create and automate script on the local server to remove files older than 1 day.

• Customize a lifecycle policy in S3 storage to remove files older than 3 days.

Architecture:

Outcome:

In order to create the most safe and cost-effective backup and restore solution, Redington followed AWS well-architected framework. Hence, a cost-effective strategy for backup and reconstruction was accomplished in Pothys Implementation.

Because of not going for the cross regional snapshot solution we have helped the customer to save around 50 per cent of their backup commercials by using S3 storage for their HANA backups, where their DB backup files were scheduled to be moved into S3 by using automation scripts and taking advantage of the durability and reliability provided by Amazon S3, they streamlined their backup operations and reduced their storage costs.

Also S3 provides unlimited capacity and needs no volume or media management as backup data sets expand, S3 storage helped Pothys to protect their data in a cost-effective manner with the pay-as-you-go model and low cost per GB/month