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CloudSnap includes a built-in ability to move snapshots off FlashArray to a Cloud

CloudSnap™ enables FlashArray to offload snapshots directly to an S3 bucket, without the need for additional backup software or a cloud gateway. CloudSnap is a key component of Pure’s cloud vision and is now available with Purity 5.2.

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 CloudSnap of an SAP HANA instance for backup purposes and move that snapshot on to AWS S3 bucket. We’ll also show you how to restore SAP HANA from this CloudSnap.

SAP HANA backup on Pure Storage® FlashArray™ using the CloudSnap feature

Previously, snapshots taken for an SAP HANA system were considered as recover points since these snapshots resided in FlashArray only. With CloudSnap the snapshot moves to an external storage system like AWS S3. 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:

SAP HANA backup