topic Re: Customer wants SMSAP functionality, but uses DB2 in Data Protection

Customer wants SMSAP functionality, but uses DB2

nickw — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:35:56 GMT

My customer is looking to re-platform their SAP onto FlexPod, and to switch from Oracle to DB2. They use SMSAP today but clearly that's no longer an option once Oracle is out of the picture. I'm fishing to find out how close to SMSAP functionality we can get today, using SnapCreator with relevant plugins (either built-in or community), when using SAP with DB2?

Happy to take your views.

Best regards,

Nick

Re: Customer wants SMSAP functionality, but uses DB2

jcosta — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:30:56 GMT

You'll miss the automatic cloning capabilities, and right-click

point-in-time automatic restore and recovery that you have in the GUI.

But it's not much of an issue as you can still do all those steps

manually, or even script them and automate them (well I'd stick to the

cloning capabilities here).

What you'll gain in terms of performance, Oracle license costs will

certainly pay off the move

Re: Customer wants SMSAP functionality, but uses DB2

nickw — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:07:31 GMT

Hi Jorge,

Agreed. We want to avoid manual steps and direct execution of scripts because of the potential for human error 🙂 Fixed scripts, run behind a GUI interface would be fine.

Lower licence costs, and DB2s ability to do in-database compression, are the key reasons for the customer wanting to switch to DB2.

Best regards,

Nick

Re: Customer wants SMSAP functionality, but uses DB2

jcosta — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:17:53 GMT

the snapmanager tools won't prevent them making human-errors ....

Re: Customer wants SMSAP functionality, but uses DB2

nickw — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:31:41 GMT

Okay.... not ALL human errors. My point was that SnapManager allows customers to manage and automate admin tasks without having to create, maintain or fix command-line scripts.

I'm more interested in discussing what we have for managing SAP on DB2 to give SMSAP functionality around snapshot backup, recovery, and cloning.

Re: Customer wants SMSAP functionality, but uses DB2

ktenzer — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:46:03 GMT

Snap Creator integrates with DB2 or any SAP database but not with SAP directly. For MaxDB there is additional integration but that is because SAP provides that DB and has some added features to integrate better with SAP.

Where SC differs from SMSAP

1. No BRtools integration

2. SC can restore data but doesnt perform recovery for DB2, recovery is manual...but most people actually prefer this.

3. SC can clone data and mount file systems on same host or a clone host but it wont perform any DB2 related steps. You need to change sid or whatever on your own.

Both 2 and 3 can be automated through the framework, just not handled out-of-box.

Regards,

Keith

Re: Customer wants SMSAP functionality, but uses DB2

jcosta — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:07:51 GMT

you can't forget about point 1.

SAP BrTools are only for Oracle databases