How to Protect Application and Databases – SAP Clustering

How to Protect Application and Databases – SAP Clustering

SAP Clustering: The Best Way to Achieve High Availability

What is SAP Clustering?

Your SAP system is the lifeblood of your organization and if the system is down, your operations stop. To support high availability of your SAP system, your IT team can install SAP in a cluster environment.

A cluster is a group of two or more connected servers that are configured with the same operating system, databases, and applications. These connected servers are referred to as “nodes.” One of the nodes is designated as the primary node. If a primary node fails, clustering allows your organization to automatically fail over application operation to one or more secondary nodes, mitigating downtime, eliminating data loss, and maintaining data integrity.

High availability SAP clustering solutions are available for servers that run in Linux or in Windows environments.

Popular SAP Clustering Solutions

The front-end application needs high availability, i.e. S/4 HANA, as does any other app that is HANA dependent.

There are several open-source HA solutions for SAP from Linux vendors, such as SUSE and RedHat, that include HA extensions with their “Enterprise for SAP” subscriptions. These vendors bundle in open source software you can use to build high-availability clusters for HANA database, ABAP SAP Central Service (ASCS), Evaluated Receipt Settlement (ERS), and other SAP components.^[1]

SUSE HAE (and other open-source clustering options) are highly manual and only protect individual components. For example, integrating SUSE HAE and other open source solutions with SAP or SAP HANA can be time-consuming and complex, requiring careful, manual scripting and tedious confirmation steps. Specific deep expertise in the applications and database are also required to create an application-aware HA solution.

SAP also offers HANA System Replication, a feature that comes with the HANA software. It provides continuous synchronization of an SAP HANA database to a secondary location either in the same data center, remote site, or in the cloud. The data is replicated to the secondary site and preloaded into memory. When a failure happens, the secondary site will take over without a database restart, which helps to reduce the Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Unfortunately, failback to the primary node must be manually triggered with separate commands issued. There is also no integrated HA failover orchestration together with SAP Central Services etc. components. ^[2]

SIOS HA clustering software provides comprehensive SAP-certified protection for your applications and data, including high availability, data replication, and disaster recovery in an easy, cost-efficient solution. SIOS software lets you protect SAP in Windows or Linux environments, using the server hardware of your choice in any combination of physical, virtual, cloud (public, private, and hybrid) and high-performance flash storage environments. SIOS software is easily configured and provides fast replication, comprehensive monitoring, and protection of the entire SAP application environment. It offers continuous data availability in either a shared (SAN) storage or share-nothing (SANless) storage environment.

For SAP S/4HANA and the SAP HANA databases, SIOS can be used to complement what SAP is already doing with the HANA system replication to provide complete automated high-availability – automated monitoring of key SAP HANA application processes, and automated failover and failback.^[3]

SIOS Protection Suite Protects SAP in Linux Environments

The SIOS Protection Suite for Linux provides a tightly integrated combination of high availability failover clustering, continuous SAP application monitoring, data replication, and configurable recovery policies, protecting your SAP application from downtime and disasters. While SIOS Protection Suite can operate in a SAN environment to support a traditional HA hardware-based cluster, the architecture takes a shared-nothing approach to server clustering allowing it to run SANless. It delivers a robust, versatile and easily configurable solution with automatic and manual failover/failback recovery policies for a wide variety of applications.

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux Supports SAP Clustering as Follows:

• SIOS LifeKeeper, which provides flexible failover clustering software that monitors the entire application stack
• SIOS DataKeeper, which provides fast, efficient host-based, block-level data replication for mirroring local storage in a SANless cluster configuration or replicating to remote locations or cloud for disaster recovery
• Multiple Application Recovery Kits (ARKs), with automated configuration and validation tools built into the product to protect your business-critical applications, such as SAP, and data from downtime and disasters.

Application Intelligence Maintains Best Practices Failover

ARKs provide application-specific awareness and connect the application stack to the HA solution in context, including all dependent components. For example, SIOS offers an SAP HANA Application Recovery Kit, which provides host auto-failover, storage replication, and system replication to increase availability.

Lastly, with the SIOS Protection Suite for Linux, you can run your business-critical applications in a flexible, scalable cloud environment, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure, without sacrificing performance, high availability, or disaster protection.

SIOS DataKeeper Protects SAP in Windows Environments

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition is a software add-on that simply and seamlessly integrates with WSFC to add performance-optimized, host-based synchronous or asynchronous replication. With DataKeeper, you can easily create a SANless cluster to achieve high availability and disaster recovery for your SAP application, whether operating in the cloud, in a virtualized environment such as VMware, or on physical servers using only local storage. It adds efficient replication to synchronize local storage on each cluster node, creating a SANless cluster that appears to WSFC like traditional storage. With it, you can create a Windows cluster in a cloud, hybrid cloud, or extend a traditional on-premises SAN-based cluster with a node in the cloud for disaster recovery.

Using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition, you can achieve high availability protection to critical SAP components including ABAP SAP Central Service (ASCS) Instance, back-end databases (Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, MaxDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL), the SAP Central Services Instance (SCS).

SIOS DataKeeper not only eliminates the cost, complexity, and single-point-of-failure risk of a SAN, but also lets you use the latest in fast PCIe Flash and SSD in your local storage for performance and protection in a single cost-efficient solution.

SIOS DataKeeper also provides SAP high availability and disaster recovery in cloud environments, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Services without sacrificing performance.

If your organization does not use WSFC, SIOS offers Protection Suite for Windows, which includes SIOS DataKeeper, SIOS LifeKeeper, and optional Application Recovery Kits (ARKs) for leading applications such as SAP, and infrastructure operations. It is a tightly integrated SAP clustering solution that combines high availability failover clustering, continuous application monitoring, data replication, and configurable recovery policies to protect your business-critical SAP application and data from downtime and disasters.

Conclusion

Organizations across the globe use SIOS HA solutions to protect their SAP application, whether running in a Windows or Linux environment. Here are just a few examples:

• Bonfiglioli is a leading Italian design, manufacturing and distribution company used SIOS DataKeeper to give them an easy way to move their SAP system to the Microsoft Azure cloud while meeting stringent SLAs for availability, disaster recovery, and performance.
• Toyo Gosei, a chemical manufacturer, used SIOS DataKeeper to migrate SAP to Azure and build a “system that never stops” with replication.
• Zespri International, the world’s largest marketer of kiwi fruit, used SIOS DataKeeper to provide the configuration flexibility and high availability and disaster protection the company needed to deploy their SAP/Microsoft SQL Server operations in Microsoft Azure.

For more information on high availability SAP clustering, click here.

References

https://blogs.sap.com/2020/05/03/high-availability-and-dr-for-sap-hana-sap-s-4hana-and-sap-central-services/

^[1] Ibid.

^[2] https://blogs.sap.com/2020/05/03/high-availability-and-dr-for-sap-hana-sap-s-4hana-and-sap-central-services/

^[3] Ibid.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

How to Protect Application and Databases – SQL Server Clustering

How to Protect Application and Databases – SQL Server Clustering

Taking the Mystery Out of SQL Clustering Solutions With SIOS

SQL Server clustering is the term used to describe a collection of two or more physical servers (nodes), connected via a LAN, each of which host a SQL server instance and have the same access to shared storage. Clustering SQL servers provides high availability and protection from disasters whenever a server hosting the SQL Server instance fails.

If you are on a standalone server, a hardware failure can bring your operations to a halt. However, with clustering, if a node has problems, you can automatically failover to another node – with minimal downtime – and continue to let your users keep working while IT works to resolve the problem. When the primary server is fixed, you can quickly revert operations back.

When compared to using a stand-alone server, SQL Server clustering can also limit downtime when applying upgrades and security patches.

While SQL Server clustering provides high availability and minimizes system downtime, SQL Server clustering will not improve the performance of the servers or applications. To improve performance, you need to upgrade the computing power of the servers.

This article introduces SIOS SQL Server Clustering Solutions and provides a high-level comparison of SIOS versus Microsoft’s SQL clustering solutions.

SIOS SQL Server Clustering Solutions

SIOS Technology Corp. offers high availability clustering solutions that help you automatically recover from infrastructure and application failures. To support SQL Server high availability, SIOS offers two solutions:

• SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition runs on Windows and leverages Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) to provide SQL Server clustering with shared storage (SAN) or without shared storage (SANless). A SANless environment eliminates single point of failure, improves replication efficiency, protects applications other than SQL Server, and protects distributed transactions and system databases.
• SIOS Protection Suite for Linux is a tightly integrated combination of failover clustering, continuous application monitoring, data replication, and configurable recovery policies to protect business-critical applications and databases, including SQL Server, in a SAN or SANless environment.

Let us take a closer look at the features and benefits of each solution.

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition

Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) is a feature of the Windows Server platform that improves high availability. WSFC is commonly used to provide high availability for applications using SQL Server. In the event of a server or application failure, WSFC coordinates redundant computing resources and automatically manages the recovery of SQL Server operations and data on a standby node. Unfortunately, if you want to run your SQL Server application in the cloud, there is no SAN available.

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition allows you to easily create a SANless WSFC to achieve high availability and disaster recovery for your SQL Server applications operating in the cloud, in virtualized environments such as VMware or Hyper-V, or on physical servers using only local storage. While WSFC manages the software cluster, SIOS cluster software synchronizes local storage using real-time (synchronous or asynchronous) block-level replication. The synchronized storage appears to WSFC as a traditional SAN-based storage. You can also build hybrid cloud configurations for disaster recovery protection between an on-premises data center and the cloud.

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software is fully certified by Microsoft and operates with Enterprise-Class availability in any configuration across cloud regions and zones.

SIOS SANless clusters not only eliminate the cost, complexity, and single-point-of-failure risk of a SAN, you can also use the latest in fast PCIe Flash and SSD storage for performance and protection in a single cost-efficient solution.

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux

SIOS Protection Suite for Linux includes:

• SIOS LifeKeeper, which provides flexible failover clustering software that monitors the entire application stack; it orchestrates failover of the SQL Server application in compliance with best practices
• SIOS DataKeeper, which provides fast, efficient host-based, block-level data replication for mirroring local storage in a SANless cluster configuration or replicating to remote locations or cloud for disaster recovery
• Multiple Application Recovery Kits (ARKs) which provide application intelligence with automated configuration and validation to protect your business-critical applications and data from downtime and disasters.

While SIOS Protection Suite can operate in a SAN environment to support a traditional HA hardware-based cluster, it can also be used to create a shared-nothing approach to server clustering allowing it to run SANless. It delivers a robust, versatile, and easily configurable solution with automatic and manual failover/failback recovery policies for a wide variety of applications.

SIOS Versus Microsoft SQL Clustering Solutions

There are other SQL Server clustering solutions available on the market. Some of the most popular SQL Server clustering solutions are offered by Microsoft and include:

• SQL Server Basic Availability Groups
• SQL Server Always On Availability Groups
• SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances with Shared Storage

SQL Server Basic Availability Groups runs on Windows and supports a maximum of a two-node cluster. It works like a database mirroring solution. While clustering and mirroring are both methods to improve high availability, mirroring only allows the database to failover. If you have other services, files, and other resources outside of SQL that you need after a failover, or if you have several databases that must stay together, clustering is the better solution.

SQL Server Always On Availability Groups runs on both Windows and Linux and according to Microsoft, it “provides an enterprise-level alternative to database mirroring.”^[1] It requires costly SQL Server Enterprise Edition.

You can save as much as 70 percent on software licensing costs and get enterprise-class clustering features by using SQL Server Standard Edition with SIOS’ SQL clustering solutions.

SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances with Shared Storage runs on both Windows and Linux. It is a single-site solution and requires a SAN.

Unfortunately, SANs are expensive to purchase and maintain, require SAN administrative expertise, and are a single point of failure. A SAN can also negatively impact database performance.

You can find a more detailed comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of SQL Server Always On, SQL Server Failover Cluster, and SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition here.

SQL Server Clustering in the Cloud

SIOS DataKeeper and SIOS Protection Suite for Linux provide high availability and disaster recovery protection for Windows and Linux applications respectively, operating in any combination of physical, virtual, cloud, or hybrid cloud infrastructures. For example, SIOS DataKeeper can:

• Protect critical on-premise or hybrid business applications, including SQL Server, to high availability Windows or Linux environments in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Protect your SQL Server cloud application by creating a Windows or Linux cluster in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Provide sitewide, local, or regional high availability and disaster recovery protection by failing over SQL Server instances across cloud availability zones or regions.

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition and SIOS Protection Suite for Linux both simulate clustered shared storage and can provide fully certified high availability cluster protection across cloud regions and availability zones.

Final Thoughts

SIOS provides offerings that support a breadth of applications, operating systems, and infrastructure environments, providing a single solution that can handle all your high availability needs. Here are just a few examples that demonstrate the power of SIOS.

• PayGo (paygoutilities.com) implemented SIOS DataKeeper with WSFC to provide high availability for SQL Server on AWS.
• A healthcare information service provider uses SIOS DataKeeper to protect their important SQL Server in more than 18 cluster nodes, eliminating bandwidth issues, improving data protection, and reducing downtime in their critical healthcare network environment.
• Mavis Discount Tire uses SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition to deliver high availability for their business-critical SQL Server.

If you are looking for a high availability/disaster recovery solution to protect SQL Server in either a Windows or Linux environment, you can find more information here.

See blog posts about SQL Server high availability and disaster recovery.

References

https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/1541/getting-started-with-sql-server-clustering/

https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2012/02/introduction-sql-server-clusters/

^[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/availability-groups/windows/always-on-availability-groups-sql-server?view=sql-server-ver15

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Why You Need Business Continuity Plans

Why You Need Business Continuity Plans

FaceBook, Instagram And WhatsApp Just Had A Really Bad Monday

It’s the end of the work day here on the east coast and I see that the Facebook is still unavailable. Facebook acknowledged the problem in the following two Tweets.

While we don’t know the exact cause of the downtime, and whether it was user error, some nefarious assault, or just an unexpected calamity of errors, we can learn a few things about this outage at this point.

Downtime Is Expensive

While we may never know the exact cost of the downtime experienced today, there are a few costs that can already measured. As of this writing, Facebook stock went down 4.89% today. That’s on top of an already brutal September for Facebook and other tech stocks.

But what was the real cost to the company? With many brands leveraging social media as an important part of their marketing outreach, how will this outage impact future advertising spends? Minimally I anticipate advertisers to investigate other social media platforms if they have not done so already. Only time will tell, but even before this outage we have seen more competition for marketing spend from other platforms such as TickTock.

Plan For The Worst-Case Scenario

Things happen, we know that and plan for that. Business Continuity Plans (BCP) should be written to address any possible disaster. Again, we don’t know the exact cause of this particular disaster, but I would have to imaging that an RTO of 5+ hours is not written into any BCP that sits on the shelf at Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp.

What’s in your your BCP? Have you imagined any possible disaster? Have your measured the impact of downtime and defined adequate recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for each component of your business? I would venture to say that it’s impossible to plan for every possible thing that can go wrong. However, I would advise everyone to revisit your BCP on a regular basis and update it to include disasters that maybe weren’t on the radar the last time you reviewed your BCP. Did you have global pandemic in your BCP? If not, you may have been left scrambling to accomodate a “work from home” workforce. The point is, plan for the worst and hope for the best.

Communications In A Disaster

Communications in the event of a disaster should be its own chapter in your BCP.

One Facebook employee told Reuters that all internal tools were down. Facebook’s response was made much more difficult because employees lost access to some of their own tools in the shutdown, people tracking the matter said.

Multiple employees said they had not been told what had gone wrong.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-instagram-down-thousands-users-downdetectorcom-2021-10-04/

A truly robust BCP must include multiple fallback means of communication. This becomes much more important as your business spreads out across multiple building, regions or countries. Just think about how your team communicates today. Phone, text, email, Slack might be your top four. But what if they are all unavailable, how would you reach your team? If you don’t know you may want to start investigating other options. You may not need a shortwave radio and a flock of carrier pigeons, but I’m sure there is a government agency that keeps both of those on hand for a “break glass in case of emergency” situation.

Summary

You have a responsibility to yourself, your customers and your investors to make sure you take every precaution concerning the availability of your business. Make sure you invest adequate resources in creating your BCP and that the teams responsible for business continuity have the tools they need to ensure they can do their part in meeting the RTO and RPO defined in your BCP.

Fixing Your Cloud Journey

Fixing Your Cloud Journey

In some way or another, the world-changing events of 2020 and 2021 have reshaped nearly everything that we knew, and high availability was no exception. Despite closures and restrictions, many IT teams traded on-prem data centers for the cloud.  Many are asking, ‘Now what?’  Here are five things to do to fix your cloud journey in 2022.

1. Add high availability

   In the push to the cloud many IT and business leaders found themselves rushing to move services and applications from data centers that they were closing due to COVID-19 into the cloud. Others rushed to the cloud, not because of data center closures, but to deal with the wave of exploding demand. For some, the journey to the cloud was so fast that HA wasn’t included, and now they’ve discovered the hard way that applications still crash in the cloud and that unexpected outages and unplanned downtime are still the nemesis of AWS, Azure and GCP as much as they were in their previous data center.

   The first step in fixing your cloud journey is to add a c. This will mean several things to your enterprise:

   • Designing and architecting a highly available and redundant architecture
   • Choosing software and services that will protect critical components and applications
   • Defining and documenting associated processes and procedures, and at least a minimal governance
   • Deploying production copies for quality assurance, procedural testing, and chaos testing

2. Expand for higher availability for disaster recovery

   Of course, not everyone made the move to cloud without considering some form of HA. Some IT teams had the foresight to not leave HA on-premises, but in the rush to cloud moved all of their critical servers to the same cloud Availability Zone. While having some HA protections is better than complete vulnerability, if you’ve only deployed your servers and applications in a single Availability Zone (AZ), now is the time to expand to multi-AZ for your standby cluster node, or even build in disaster recovery by deploying a third node in a different region. SIOS’ has helped dozens of customers plan multiple-AZ architectures and add disaster recovery solutions.

3. Build your team

   Overnight some companies, and their IT teams, went from being fully on-premises to wrestling with Cloud Formation Templates, QuickStart Guides, IAM roles, internal load balancers, Overlay IPs, and deciphering what exactly that VM size means.  Now is the time to build a team to support the journey to the cloud.  This will mean several things:

   • Adding capacity.  Unless you were able to pull off a complete lift and shift, you likely have the same staff managing cloud and on-premises applications.  Legacy solutions are known for being temperamental and requiring a lot of work to keep them stable and available.To navigate the cloud journey ahead you’ll need capacity capable of addressing availability requirements, understanding cloud architecture, and plotting the course forward for enterprise needs.
   • Augmenting skills with training.  Give your team training for the cloud.  To manage and plan the course forward, look for ways to augment the IT excellence within your organization with additional training on cloud solutions, architecture, best practices, and trade-offs.  A confidently trained staff will not only pay dividends in increased availability, but they will also pay dividends by addressing availability, maintenance, and growth in an economic, scalable and logical way.  Translation: they’ll avoid wasting money as they build out the rest of your cloud infrastructure.

4. Integrating automation and analytics

   As VP of Customer Experience at SIOS Technology Corp. I have worked with several companies that made the move to the cloud in 2021 without sacrificing HA, DR or their team.  If you took achieving the required number of nines of uptime (99.99%)  seriously and having a disaster plan was non-negotiable then it’s time to add the rigor of analytics and additional monitoring. Ensure that your availability solution has application-aware automation and orchestration for recovery in the event of a disaster or unplanned downtime. Add analytics and automation to solidify your solution and take your cloud migration up another notch from one of reactive failovers to proactive notification and mitigation of the failure before it occurs.  Imagine being notified of underperforming applications, or of increasing latency, errors, or VM non-responsive behavior in time to avoid downtime in the peak business times. Analytics are also important as they can reveal systems and applications that may have escaped your original availability architecture.

5. Update processes and governance

   Many things we think of as a failure are rooted in a failure of process. Make sure that your organization’s processes are up to date, well-documented, properly communicated and adhered to. These processes should contain a few key minimums related to who, what, when, where, and how all tied back to the business strategies, goals, and organizational needs as they pertain to the customer.

   Make sure that ownership and sign-off processes for your new cloud environment are well-documented. I have seen firsthand the frustration that comes from conflicting, clashing or unresolved roles and responsibilities for customers who have moved from hardware teams that acquire infrastructure to cloud teams. Muddling through a migration is one set of pain points, digging out of a disaster without clear governance is a much bigger, more costly issue.

   If you’ve made the leap to cloud, staying there and making it work for you is the next part of the journey.  If your cloud journey was sudden or rocky, consider these five points for fixing your cloud journey and know that SIOS Technology can help you improve not only your high availability in the cloud, but also your processes for running in the cloud.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

How to Install a SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition License Key

How to Install a SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition License Key

Once you have installed SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software and have activated your license, you will need to install your license key before you can get started. This 4 minute video will review how to install SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software and demonstrate how to activate your license to get started protecting your critical applications.

Watch as a SIOS support representative demonstrates each of the three key prerequisites required to install SIOS licenses: ensuring you have the latest version and updates of SIOS DataKeeper software; use our simple license key manager to validate your activated licenses from purchased entitlements, download and apply license keys and start your SIOS DataKeeper software.

This video also walks through the process of access our SIOS Documentation portal, where you can find release notes, installation guides, technical documentation and information detailing SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition as well as a wide range of topics on everything SIOS.

View tips and convenient insights on how to complete steps fast and simply.  Now you and begin protecting your critical applications with SIOS DataKeeper clustering software