This blog is about one of the important feature which was quite recently added to our Pure Storage® FlashArray™ which is Snap-to-NFS.Snap-to-NFS includes a built-in ability to move snapshots off FlashArray to any NFS storage system. Examples of storage systems that can be used as NFS targets include the Pure Storage FlashBlade™ product; third-party NFS storage systems and disk-to-disk backup systems; and generic Linux servers with NFS exports.
Backing up SAP HANA on Pure Storage® FlashArray™ is now extremely simple using the Snap-to-NFS feature. Previously, snapshots taken for an SAP HANA system was considered as recover points since these snapshots resided in FlashArray only. With Snap-to-NFS the snapshot moves to an external storage system like FlashBlade. A storage snapshot will never be considered as a backup because SAP HANA does not do database internal integrity check(checksum calculation) on page respectively block level. Nevertheless, it is still the fastest way to protect and recover your SAP HANA system. It adds an additional layer of protection to the mission-critical SAP HANA systems.
I have tested it with SAP HANA 1.0 and SAP HANA 2.0 MDC. In order to test this concept, the following environment has been set up in our lab with the following entities:
This document will attempt to showcase this feature for a very common use case: backup and recovery of an SAP HANA instance. We will go over the necessary steps to take a snapshot of an SAP HANA instance for backup purposes and move that snapshot on to Pure Storage FlashBlade. We’ll also show you how to restore the database via Snap-to- NFS.
