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NetApp Solutions

TR-4908: Hybrid Cloud Database Solutions with SnapCenter Overview

Contributors kevin-hoke
PDFs

Alan Cao, Felix Melligan, NetApp

This solution provides NetApp field and customers with instructions and guidance for configuring, operating, and migrating databases to a hybrid cloud environment using the NetApp SnapCenter GUI-based tool and the NetApp storage service CVO in public clouds for the following use cases:

  • Database dev/test operations in the hybrid cloud

  • Database disaster recovery in the hybrid cloud

Today, many enterprise databases still reside in private corporate data centers for performance, security, and/or other reasons. This hybrid cloud database solution enables enterprises to operate their primary databases on site while using a public cloud for dev/test database operations as well as for disaster recovery to reduce licensing and operational costs.

Many enterprise databases, such as Oracle, SQL Server, SAP HANA, and so on, carry high licensing and operational costs. Many customers pay a one-time license fee as well as annual support costs based on the number of compute cores in their database environment, whether the cores are used for development, testing, production, or disaster recovery. Many of those environments might not be fully utilized throughout the application lifecycle.

The solutions provide an option for customers to potentially reduce their licensable cores count by moving their database environments devoted to development, testing, or disaster recovery to the cloud. By using public-cloud scale, redundancy, high availability, and a consumption-based billing model, the cost saving for licensing and operation can be substantial, while not sacrificing any application usability or availability.

Beyond potential database license-cost savings, the NetApp capacity-based CVO license model allows customers to save storage costs on a per-GB basis while empowering them with high level of database manageability that is not available from competing storage services. The following chart shows a storage cost comparison of popular storage services available in the public cloud.

Figure showing input/output dialog or representing written content

This solution demonstrates that, by using the SnapCenter GUI-based software tool and NetApp SnapMirror technology, hybrid cloud database operations can be easily setup, implemented, and operated.

The following videos demonstrate SnapCenter in action:

Notably, although the illustrations throughout this document show CVO as a target storage instance in the public cloud, the solution is also fully validated for the new release of the FSx ONTAP storage engine for AWS.