Veritas NetBackup™ for SAP Administrator's Guide
- Introduction to NetBackup for SAP
- Introduction to NetBackup SAP HANA
- Installing NetBackup for SAP
- Installing NetBackup for SAP HANA
- Configuring NetBackup for SAP
- About configuring a backup policy for an SAP database
- NetBackup for SAP backup scripts
- About SAP configuration files
- Configuring NetBackup for SAP HANA
- Performing backups and restores of SAP
- Using BRTools to start an SAP backup (for Oracle database only)
- Performing an SAP archive
- Restarting failed NetBackup for SAP backups and restores
- Performing backups and restores of SAP HANA
- NetBackup for SAP with Snapshot Client
- How the NetBackup for SAP Snapshot Client works
- About configuring Snapshot Client with NetBackup for SAP
- About configuring NetBackup for SAP block-level incremental backups on UNIX
- Configuring policies for BLI backups with NetBackup for SAP
- About NetBackup for SAP restores of volumes and file systems using snapshot rollback
- NetBackup for SAP on MaxDB databases
- Troubleshooting NetBackup for SAP and SAP HANA
- NetBackup debug logs and reports
- sapdba logs and messages (Oracle-based SAP environments only)
- About troubleshooting NetBackup for SAP HANA
- Appendix A. backint command line interface
- Appendix B. Input and output files for SAP HANA
- Appendix C. backint -i in_file contents
- Appendix D. backint -o out_file contents
- Appendix E. NetBackup for SAP environment variables for backint
- Appendix F. NetBackup for SAP configuration or bp.conf file settings
- Appendix G. Parameters used in initSID.utl
- sort_backup_type <value>
- sort_restore_type <value>
- Appendix H. Configuring split mirror backups
- Appendix I. Register authorized locations
Using NetBackup for SAP with Snapshot Client to back up large databases
Veritas recommends that customers with production databases back up their environments on a daily basis. This daily backup often is not feasible for databases of a size between 100 GB to over 1 TB.
This issue exists due to the following concerns:
Server performance. The backup process for large databases can cause severe performance problems because the process consumes the database server's resources. CPU time, the system bus, the I/O bus, hard disk controllers, and volume controllers become saturated. As a result, online use of the SAP system is limited and system performance is unpredictable during the backup.
System availability. Traditionally, backup activities were carried out when there was little or no system activity. This time window usually occurred at night. In today's production environments, which require little or no system downtime, this window is small, if one even exists.
Network performance. Instability and further performance loss may be experienced with a backup of large databases from the production host and over the network.
NetBackup for SAP with Snapshot Client supports split mirror backups. Split mirror backups are the recommended backup method for large databases because these backups overcome the preceding concerns.
In SAP environments, the Snapshot Client technology supports the following major backup strategies:
Off-host backup, which offers more performance. It offloads database backup activity and CPU cycles from the production host to the backup host. Thus, it improves the performance of the production environment.
Snapshot backup, which requires no downtime of your production system. SAP supports both offline split mirror and online split mirror backups. In an online split mirror backup, the production database remains available for user transactions. The need for backup windows is eliminated and 24/7 uptime functionality is provided for continuous business transactions.
(UNIX or Linux) Block-Level Incremental (BLI) Backup. BLI backups decrease the amount of backup media that is required for incremental backups and to significantly reduce CPU and network overhead during backups. BLI, may not be used for incremental backups with SAP with RMAN.
Split mirror backups. Because the mirrors are split from their standard devices and mounted on the backup server, the backup does not overload the network. The backup is run on the backup server without affecting the network.