Commvault has worked intensively to extend IntelliSnap support to databases running in public clouds over the last V11 Service releases. This means, regardless if your Oracle, DB2, MS SQL Server or SAP HANA database workloads are running on-prem or in AWS or Microsoft Azure you can always enjoy values like low impact backups, snapshot copies, fast recoveries as well as rapid databases cloning. For this, we leverage is AWS EBS snapshots and Managed Disk snapshots in Microsoft Azure. Support for SAP HANA on Azure Netapp Files has been added with FR 11.22. Some of you might be concerned about the cost of IntelliSnap in the cloud. One or more snaps per database and per day kept for 7 days can quickly generate a good amount of snapshot consumption. Both AWS and Microsoft Azure are billing snapshot consumption on a per GB basis.
Game over? Not at all! The good news is that with FR 11.21 Commvault has introduced support for incremental snapshots for Microsoft Azure complementing the incremental snapshots already available in AWS. There are no additional settings needed to take advantage of this new feature. What actually now happens is that as IntelliSnap sends requests for taking snapshots, only the first job actually creates a full snapshot. All subsequent snap requests to the cloud will be automatically executed as incrementals. That means only the changed data gets included in the new snapshot and on your bill. And all this magic happens completely transparently. For instance, at restore time IntelliSnap just picks a snapshot and the cloud platforms automatically aggregate the full snap with all incrementals to provide an up-to-date full snapshot which gets used for the restore. Check it out and let us know about your experience. Also, let us know if you have more questions.