Actifio Enables Massive Cost Reductions While Maintaining the Same High Performance for SAP HANA Backup on GCP

By AIT News Desk On Jul 31, 2020

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Testing Finds 86% Cost Reduction Without Compromising Performance

A new technical validation report by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), a leading independent analyst firm, found that Actifio, the pioneer of multi-cloud copy data management, reduced backup and disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure costs by 86 percent when protecting SAP HANA workloads leveraging Google Cloud Platform (GCP) object storage compared with legacy backup approaches using high-performance block storage. Even with the dramatic cost savings, ESG found the same high levels of performance from a DR copy running off Google Nearline object storage as their production instances running on Google Persistent disk block storage.

ESG evaluated Actifio software backing up and recovering a 529GB SAP HANA in-memory database from GCP region (West) to GCP East using Google Nearline object storage.

The study’s author, ESG Senior Validation Analyst Tony Palmer, summarized some of the key findings: “Cloud object storage is typically 10x inexpensive than the cloud SSD/flash block storage. Actifio’s ability to recover SAP HANA database in just minutes from cloud object storage, while delivering the I/O performance of an SSD/flash block storage is very unique in the industry and reduces cloud infrastructure costs by more than 80% for enterprises. We found Actifio’s user interface to set-up backup & replication SLAs, and perform rapid recoveries to be very simple and easy to use.”

Actifio’s incremental-forever data capture minimizes the required compute, bandwidth, and storage to reduce costs. Its deep integration with SAP HANA databases and all other enterprise databases ensures consistent data capture and recovery on GCP.

ESG’s Palmer continued, “We looked further into the analysis to identify some of the [Actifio] soft benefits, which include self-service provisioning, compliance-driven automated data masking, role-based access controls, and real-time updates from the database to DevOps copies. Combined, these benefits help an organization to be more agile, deliver solutions to market faster, and tighten recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTO) since the DR copies are always current.”

ESG research shows 52 percent of IT and data protection professionals cite wasted IT budget as a major risk they are currently facing. Actifio’s ability to reduce the cost of backup and DR infrastructure by leveraging GCP Cloud Object Storage compared with traditional SSD storage can reduce costs by 86 percent – freeing up budget to help IT teams thrive.

The validation testing confirmed:

Actifio ease-of-use to protect SAP HANA databases
Actifio’s ability to support GCP Nearline object storage for DR copies with post-recovery performance that is equivalent to the production environment
Automated provisioning of many multi-TB SAP HANA test environments for DevOps within minutes in the cloud