Protect Your Database with Zerto
Simplify the protection of your business’s most precious assets by providing disaster recovery for databases at scale
SAP HANA Data Management Using Zerto
Learn how Zerto offers efficient and robust disaster recovery, ransomware recovery, data mobility and data management capabilities for SAP landscapes on-premises and in the cloud.
SAP HANA Data Management Using Zerto
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Why is Database Protection Important
For a business, databases have become more valuable than diamonds, as they often store millions of dollars in value. However, unlike diamonds, databases are dynamic and therefore require protection from a plethora of vulnerabilities and data loss. Database contents change depending on the applications they serve, and they need to be protected alongside other application components. Ensuring that the integrity of the data is preserved while handling the dynamic characteristics of databases complicates data protection requirements for a business’s most precious asset.
Zerto simplifies the protection of a business’s most precious assets by providing disaster recovery for databases at scale, leveraging its continuous data protection (CDP) to best preserve these instances.
Microsoft SQL Server
For MS SQL, data loss is critical, which is why it is important to always recover to the latest point in time possible. With Zerto, this is typically seconds before the data loss.
- ACID Compliance: An important characteristic of an MS SQL server is that it must maintain ACID compliance, meaning it guarantees atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) of the data. This is important to consider when replicating MS SQL servers, as replicating and restoring the database incorrectly could break compliance, causing data loss. When protecting MS SQL servers, Zerto helps maintain ACID compliance by ensuring write-order fidelity is maintained on all replicated data.
- Application Consistent Replicas: Application consistent replicas of MS SQL instances are achieved using the Microsoft VSS SQL Writer service. Once this is enabled, MS SQL database transactions held in memory are flushed to disk in order to maintain a failsafe point in time for recovery. Application-consistent points in time will be indicated as a checkpoint in the Zerto journal of changes to ensure visibility when performing a move, failover, or failover test in Zerto.
Zerto for Microsoft SQL Server
Oracle Databases
Deploying Zerto in Oracle database environments provides key benefits such as continuous data protection (CDP) to achieve the lowest RPO and RTO in the event of failures, ransomware attacks, or natural disasters.
- Requirement: It is important to note that an Oracle database must be placed into hot backup mode to achieve database application consistency. Hot backup mode freezes the system change number (SCN) in the redo logs, and it gives Oracle a specific application-consistent location to which to recover. After Oracle is in hot backup mode, the Oracle specific checkpoint for Zerto is recorded. After the checkpoint is complete, hot backup can be disabled.
- Consistent Recovery: In the case of crash consistency, because all the database objects in a specific database instance are part of the same VPG, the data is consistent and proper write ordering will take place. In the event of a crash recovery, the database will recover from a specific checkpoint and behave like it is recovering from a failure.
Protecting Oracle Databases on VMware with Zerto
Zerto In-Cloud Manager
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NoSQL Databases - Cassandra
Cassandra is a popular NoSQL database server, which has a versatile cluster architecture making it simple to deploy and manage as an instance on-premises or in the cloud.
- Challenge - Unprotected Cluster: Cassandra has some built-in disaster recovery (DR) functionalities that can replicate copies of itself between hosts, whether onsite, or to a remote location. However, the replication only protects the data and not the cluster itself, so a failover to a remote node would still require a recovery that could take hours, if not days, to recover all the cluster nodes fully.
Zerto for Kubernetes Architecture Diagram
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- Limited Native Tools: Cassandra’s internal backup and recovery tools do enable the user to recover objects or tables within the database structure without any interruption in the online status of the database. This granular recovery capability would still be useful but does not provide the complete cluster protection required for a competent disaster recovery solution. Zerto continuous data protection (CDP) keeps track of all the writes and changes for files on its protected Cassandra instance and can replicate those changes in real-time offsite.
- Recovery with Zerto: In the case of a local site failure, Zerto can failover the local Cassandra nodes to the remote site without taking the database offline. Cassandra clients can be redirected to the new cluster nodes in minutes and remove the need to store a cluster node offsite just to protect the databases. Plus, since all the nodes can be protected, the entire cluster can be brought online immediately, instead of rebuilding new nodes at the remote site with Cassandra. This reduces the total cluster rebuild time to minutes rather than hours or days.
Zerto’s CDP can be leveraged in a variety of workload scenarios to provide data management solutions for a Cassandra database cluster. It is a significant improvement in disaster recovery over the native Cassandra DR functionalities.
Managing Cassandra Data with Zerto - Multiple Scenarios
SAP HANA
SAP HANA has been adopted by thousands of large, medium, and small enterprises across all verticals. This widespread use makes SAP HANA data management a challenge that Zerto solves using a unique approach.
- Continuous Data Protection: Zerto can be used with SAP HANA to achieve continuous data protection, disaster recovery, and data migration to and from on-premises data centers or the cloud. Because Zerto works at the hypervisor level, it is agnostic to the application running inside the instance (or virtual machine, VM) hosting the instance of SAP HANA. Therefore, its operations are crash-consistent by default. Zerto’s continuous journaling mechanism logs all writes that occur on the virtual disk of the instance.
- Recovery with Zerto: Zerto offers a crash-consistent recovery for databases such as SAP HANA which uses the last good HANA savepoint and replays all the transaction logs from the savepoint timestamp until the time before the crash. A major benefit of Zerto is that it can instantly create copies of a protected VM. Unlike other data protection applications that restore to the same VM or instance, Zerto creates a copy of the protected SAP HANA database on the recovery host.
After the copy is created, SAP HANA services must be started manually. In this fashion, Zerto restores business continuity as soon as possible, and the failed, corrupted, or compromised VM can continue to be analyzed for root causes.
SAP Data Management Using Zerto
- How It Works: As an in-memory database, SAP HANA does not write data to the disk as soon as the transaction is committed in memory. Rather, it writes in bulk, at intervals called savepoints, every 300 seconds to the persistent storage. The Zerto journal is updated when a savepoint occurs. For every committed transaction, however, SAP HANA does write a log to a volume, thereby updating the Zerto journal for the log virtual machine disk (VMDK).
Zerto for Kubernetes Architecture Diagram
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Key Benefits of Protecting Your Databases with Zerto
FEATURED SUCCESS STORY
Regional Bank Protects Data, SQL Databases and Servers with Zerto
In 2016, the bank decided to use Zerto as their DR solution. When the bank was hit with ransomware multiple times in one month, Zerto saved the day avoiding business disruption and data loss.
FEATURED SUCCESS STORY
Ritchie Bros. Wins Bid for Modern DR, IT Resilience Strategy
Ritchie Bros. has brought IT resilience to the forefront when choosing Zerto for its in-house Disaster Recovery (DR) capability. Now their SQL server and applications, including Oracle E-business suite, are protected with Zerto.
FEATURED SUCCESS STORY
Leading Chemical Corporation
Finds Chemistry Between Azure
and Zerto for IT Resilience
The organization’s IT team uses Zerto to protect 150 VMs with applications that include SQL, standalone apps, Oracle, JD Edwards, and more.
FEATURED SUCCESS STORY
AmesburyTruth Combines Rapid Growth and IT Resilience with Zerto
Amesbury selected Zerto as its IT resilience solution and uses it to protect its critical applications, that include ERP software, databases and web servers.
WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY
"The first benefit [of Zerto] was being able to sleep better at night knowing that we can recover instantly. Because we do public safety, we have some databases that are terabytes in size, and were we to have to recover them using standard backup software, it would take a significant amount of time. With Zerto we can recover instantly in the event of an emergency."
System Administrator, Government
WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY
"We have four SQL servers running, each of which is about six terabytes, so our continuous replication is a lot larger than others. We also have multiple secured file storages in the two-terabyte range, so we replicate around 140 terabytes continuously, utilizing about 60 VM servers.[...] The last time we had an issue, we recovered within about 36 minutes, which was probably the most valuable thing for us because, previously, it took four to seven days."
Network Engineer, Price Transfer, Inc
WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY
"Near-synchronous replication is incredibly important for us because we have transactional applications that work on financial and transactional databases. The fewer the number of transactions that are potentially lost, the better it is for our organization. It means we don't have to go through rebuilding those transactions. It limits the amount of data that we could possibly lose in a disaster recovery situation, amounting to just a few seconds' worth.
The near-synchronous replication with Zerto has enabled us to reduce our RPOs to two seconds instead of hours and, sometimes, days."
Senior Analyst, IS Infrastructure, Energy/Utilities
WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY
"We mostly use Zerto to replicate applications and database servers between our primary data center and our disaster recovery site. We have a number of business applications, Oracle servers, and three sites that we replicate to our DR site, and Zerto works well."
Team Lead / Virtualization SME, Retail
WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY
"We previously used a site recovery manager from vCenter. It's effective, but it requires a lot of manual steps, especially when we deal with databases and so forth. Zerto is quicker, more efficient, and easier on the eyes. I'm a huge fan."
Wintel Administrator, Financial Services firm
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