Centrally Manage SAP HANA Database Backup Through the AWS Backup Console

By Hongzhu Qiao, Technical Architect and AWS SME – Deloitte
By Dylan Tey, Technical Architect – Deloitte
By Sachin Bhatt, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect, SAP – AWS

Deloitte

More than 5,000 active SAP customers are hosting their SAP environment on Amazon Web Services (AWS). These organizations are securing, modernizing, and innovating SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications with a broad and deep set of services and features provided by AWS.

Deloitte is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with AWS Competencies in SAP, DevOps, and Migration, among others. Deloitte is also a member of the AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) Partner Program.

Deloitte’s Cloud Managed Services (CMS) practice helps clients design, build, and operate end-to-end solutions in addition to managing critical business applications running in the cloud. Deloitte OpenCloud is a platform that automates and accelerates best practices in multi-disciplinary areas that are designed and customized based on client needs.

Currently, AWS Backup provides data protection, monitoring, and restoring of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Aurora, and more.

In this post, we introduce a new feature of AWS Backup for SAP HANA databases running on Amazon EC2. We’ll show how to integrate HANA database with the AWS Backup service and how to perform a full HANA database backup and restore using AWS Backup.

This AWS Backup integration with AWS Systems Manager and AWS Backint for SAP allows customers to identify and tag SAP HANA databases, as well as perform fully-supported transition to cold storage tiers, cross-account copying, and cross-region copying for additional compliance and protection.

All of the steps in this post are based on the beta version testing of this new feature of AWS Backup for SAP HANA.

Key Features and Advantages

AWS Backup offers the following features for all of its supported AWS services and the third-party applications it supports:

Automated backup schedules and retention management.
Centralized backup monitoring.
AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)-integrated backup encryption.
Cross-account management with AWS Organizations.
Automated backup audits and reports with AWS Backup Audit Manager.
Write-once, read-many (WORM) with AWS Backup Vault Lock.

Figure 1 – AWS Backup offerings.

Here are some additional features for SAP HANA:

Performs backup directly to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and cold storage.
Up to 100 years of retention.
Backup is optimized to provide the best performance while keeping the load on SAP HANA applications under control.
By integrating with SAP HANA Backint API, AWS Backint Agent utilizes the data integrity and reliability of SAP HANA’s built-in backup processes, thereby meeting recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
With Amazon S3 storage, S3 cross-region replication (CRR), and other AWS compute and networking services, you can create disaster recovery (DR) architectures to quickly and easily recover SAP HANA database from outages caused by natural disasters, system failures, and user errors. For more details on how to set up passive disaster recovery for SAP applications using AWS Backup, refer to this AWS blog post.
AWS Backup can be automated through Backup API and command line interface (CLI).
Integration with Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS CloudTrail.

Prerequisites

To enroll the HANA database into the AWS Backup service, the following conditions must be met:

Instance running SAP HANA 2.x or above.
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role with the following policies attached to the server:
- AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore
- SapHanaOnAmazonEc2BetaSecretsManagerReadOnlyAccess
- SapHanaOnAmazonEc2BetaBackupStorageAccess
To perform backup and restore jobs, IAM roles with appropriate policies attached and trust relationship setup for AWS Backup to assume them.
HANA database credentials registered in AWS Secrets Manager.
AWS Systems Manager and AWS Backint Agent installed and running inside HANA database EC2.
Register your SAP HANA database via AWS Systems Manager for SAP.

After the completion of all the prerequisites above, you will be able to see your HANA database in the AWS Backup console.

Performing HANA Database Backups

After completing the prerequisite setup of the server and IAM roles, users can trigger the SAP HANA database backup by heading to the AWS Backup dashboard.

Figure 2 – AWS Backup dashboard.

From there, users can choose to create a backup plan by either starting with a template or a new plan. AWS Backup provides a wide array of templates that serve as a starting point.

Figure 3 – Creating a backup plan.

Specify a name for the resource assignments and select the IAM role created as part of the prerequisites.

Under resource selection, select Include specific resource type, and then select SAP HANA on Amazon EC2. You can either include all SAP HANA databases like Figure 4 or select individual database IDs.

Figure 4 – Assigning resources to the AWS Backup plan.

You have created your first backup plan for SAP HANA databases on AWS Backup!

Figure 5 – Overview of the AWS Backup plan for SAP HANA.

The figure below shows a HANA database instance on a backup plan with two completed backups.

Figure 6 – View of a HANA DB backed up by AWS Backup and its recovery points.

Conversely, you can create on-demand backups instead of a backup plan for any ad-hoc requests from the AWS Backup dashboard.

Performing a HANA Database Restore

To restore your HANA database, first locate a recovery point on the AWS Backup console by navigating to Protected Resources > [Resource] > Recovery Point. Then, select the recovery point (1) as marked in Figure 7 to restore and click on Restore (2).

Figure 7 – Restoring a HANA DB through AWS Backup.

Next, change any parameters in the prompt and click Restore.

After confirming the restore job, you can find the status of the job in the Jobs section on the console. The restore job will take some time to complete, and when it does the job status will change to Completed.

Figure 8 – Backup job details page for SAP HANA DB restore.

Conclusion

AWS keeps enhancing or adding new features to its products and services to simplify the overall experience for wide range of user base.

In this post, we have shown how easy it is to integrate HANA database with AWS Backup. You can now centrally manage HANA database backup operations along with other AWS services in the AWS Backup console. You can also enforce data security and compliance by streamlining backup plans to prevent backup conflicts or backup gaps.

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