SQL HyperBac 5.4

Case study

Hermes puts SQL HyperBac to the test

Database Administrators (DBAs) should be excused when it comes to cynicism about tools – it's often a healthy attitude in an environment where there's a lot at stake and vendor's claims sometimes don't approach reality.

That's why testing is so important – before a company can commit to a tool for its critical database assets, it needs to make sure that tool can deliver what it promises.

When Hermes Fund Managers decided to further strengthen its SQL Server backup, it turned to Red Gate's SQL HyperBac, but not before extensive real-world testing by Adam Zacks, Database Administrator, Hermes Fund Managers.

A growing need

Hermes Fund Managers is a multi-boutique asset manager with over thirty years experience in responsible investing. The company currently has £22.6bn in assets under management across a range of asset classes including Commodities, Real Estate, Fund of Hedge Funds and Global Government and Inflation-Linked Bonds.

As a member of the SQL DBA team at Hermes, Mr. Zacks manages 24 SQL Servers supporting its business-critical databases, which range from a few hundred megabytes to a few hundred gigabytes. Therefore, the decision was made to test Red Gate's SQL HyperBac because of a growing need for time and space savings when refreshing databases in the company's virtual development environments.

Adam Zacks, Database Administrator, Hermes Fund Managers, said, "Disk space on a storage area network is always an expensive commodity. Add to that the need to maintain production-size database replicas (and multiple copies) in multiple test and dev environments and the cost grows. Further to this, the environments require frequent refreshes to bring them back in line with production; this not only requires space, but time. As developed code is tested, inevitably databases must be backed up and restored to maintain baselines; this also uses space and time."

Testing reveals savings

The results of controlled testing to substantiate the purchase of SQL HyperBac licenses are summarised below:

• SQL HyperBac backups ran up to 84% faster when compared with standard .bak backup files.
• SQL HyperBac restores ran up to 76% faster when compared to standard .bak database restores.

Mr. Zacks said, "Performance has been markedly better than the tests indicated. SQL HyperBac has completely revolutionised the way we backup, restore, retain and refresh our databases and do our log backups."

"Simply a marvel"

Mr. Zacks also cited the less quantifiable, but still very real, benefits of simplicity, stating, "Both backups and restores can be run through the standard SQL Native backup and restore client so maintenance plans and jobs do not require any change other than to have the file extension changed to .hbc."

Hermes now has SQL HyperBac deployed on 18 servers, 12 in development and six in production, with more on the way.

"For the cost, SQL HyperBac is simply a marvel. It is a standing procedure now that if and when new SQL servers are added, they will automatically include additional SQL HyperBac licenses," said Mr. Zacks.