A leading global supplier of engineered chemical and mechanical treatment programs for wastewater, and process systems runs its SAP R/3 4.6C Financials on Symmetrix DMX800 in a HP-UX Oracle environment. In this particular environment the customer was backing up SAP production data directly to tape, using SAPs BRBACKUP tool for hot backup of its Oracle 9.2.0.4 database.
BRBACKUP is a tool designed by SAP specifically for customers using Oracle databases. Although the customer followed the SAP-certified BRBACKUP process, it took twelve to sixteen hours to back up 1600 GB of data and application performance was negatively impacted. The customer also had instances where the backups were not finished within the backup window. When online backup ran into busy production hours, this affected overall SAP production system performance and made it difficult to choose an appropriate point in time if recovery is needed. The challenge was to design a solution that minimizes the impact on production, with minimal maintenance as it can become quite complex and error-prone if manual scripting is used to manage the replicas.
