Protection objectives and test methodology
Data protection testing descriptions
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We used two different SAP HANA configurations for the data protection tests.
The first test used a Dell EMC Ready Node for SAP HANA. The Ready Node for SAP HANA enables customers to choose between the Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd server and the more powerful PowerEdge R940 server. Both PowerEdge servers have been validated, tested, and certified for SAP HANA. In our protection tests, we chose the PowerEdge R940 because of its capability to scale from 192 GB up to 3 TB for analytic workloads and up to 6 TB for transaction workloads such as the SAP HANA Business Suite on SAP HANA. Appendix: Ready Solution configuration details provides the specifications.
The following figure shows our test configuration for the Ready Node for SAP HANA.
Figure 1. Ready Node for SAP HANA test configuration
The second test used a ReadySolution for SAP HANA Scale-out configuration. The Ready Solution for SAP HANA Scale-out integrates PowerEdge servers, Dell EMC networking switches, and Compellent storage arrays. The solution can scale from 2 to 16 compute nodes with up to 48 TB of memory. For these data protection tests, we used two PowerEdge R940 servers. Appendix: Ready Solution configuration details provides the specifications.
The following figure shows our test configuration for the Ready Solution for SAP HANA Scale-out.
Figure 2. Ready Solution for SAP HANA Scale-out test configuration
All our tests shared a single Data Domain 6300 system as the final destination for the SAP HANA backups. We used Dell EMC 10 GbE S4048 switches to provide a redundant network fabric and configured them with Virtual Link Trunking (VLT) domains to implement an active-backup bonded network on the SAP HANA servers.
We configured two 10 GbE network interface cards (NICs) on the Data Domain 6300 in a dynamic interface group for each SAP node. The dynamic interface group feature is part of the DDBEA API. The dynamic interface group is recommended for efficient load-balancing, failover, and other advanced features that are not available with a standard Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) configuration.