| April 28, 2020 |
High Availability and DR for S/4HANA and other SAP platforms
High Availability and DR for S/4HANA and other SAP platformsSAP is the market leader in enterprise application software. Over the span of many years, SAP had helped companies of all sizes and in all industries run efficiently and effectively. As a result of their hard work, they have built an ecosystem of enterprises heavily reliant on its platform. 77% of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system. SAP application touches many critical parts of a company such as its’ ERP, manufacturing, business processes, customer service etc. It has become the lifeline of many enterprises that depends on it for their business to operate properly. As such, high-availability has became one of the top concerns of company managements when it comes to their SAP systems. In this article, we will discuss at a high-level what is HANA system replication and how it works. What are the limitations when it comes to high-availability, and how we can overcome them. We will also discuss about the options for HANA’s high-availability and the key differences. To select the right solution to use for HA, ask yourselves at the end of the day
—– How long can SAP be down before you recover?
—– How old can your data be when service is restored
—– How much uptime do you need? SAP HANA system replicationSAP HANA System Replication is a reliable data protection and disaster recovery solution that provides continuous synchronization of a HANA database to a secondary location either in the same data center, remote site or in the cloud. System Replication is a standard SAP HANA feature that comes with the software. Using this feature, all data is replicated to the secondary site and data is pre-loaded into memory on the secondary site which helps to reduce the recovery time objective (RTO) significantly. So in case of a failover, the secondary site will be able to take over without even performing a HANA DB (re)start and will work as primary DB instantaneously upon failover. However, the failover has to be triggered manually by the admin using the sr_takeover command. For the replication to be reversed, or failback to primary, separate commands will need to be issued as well.  Below are some key points of the HANA system replication method for HA and DR:
Limitations
As you can probably deduce from the above points by now, HANA system replication is designed to protect against data loss. Such that when an issue happens with the primary node, an admin can manually run a “sr_takeover” command, so that a problem with the primary system will not take down the entire SAP setup which depends on the HANA database for the prolonged period of downtime. However, a lot of this work has to happen manually and depends on human manual intervention, which although is good enough for DR, it does not make an ideal situation for HA (where downtime needs to be prevented). SIOS High Availability ClusteringSIOS high availability software for SAP lets you protect SAP S/4HANA in any configuration (or combination) of physical, virtual, cloud (public, private, and hybrid) and high performance flash storage environments. SIOS software provides easy and flexible configuration, fast replication, and comprehensive monitoring and protection of the entire SAP S/4HANA environment. Specifically for SAP S/4HANA and the HANA database. SIOS can be used to complement what SAP is already doing with the HANA system replication. SIOS adds on to what SAP has to provide true high-availability – automated monitoring of key HANA application processes, and provide automated failover, failback, including virtual IP(s), even if you have multi-instance within a single HANA node.  Below are some key points of the SIOS Protection Suite for SAP HANA HA and DR:
Four steps to install and configure HA for HANA databaseWe will not discuss the specific steps of how to configure SAP HANA, since there are already many on-line resources that cover those steps. But at a high-level, what you need to do are 4 basic steps:
The installation process flow are similar for other SAP components (ASCS, ERS, PAS, Web Dispatcher etc.) as well. With the HANA recovery kit included in the SIOS protection suite software, you can basically use a wizard in the SIOS Lifekeeper management GUI, to quickly protect a HANA database instance. You can also assign the virtual IP address for clients to connect to it, and manage the entire stack from it. Build a multi-instance environment and the solution will manage all the instances, virtual IPs etc. within the a fully integrated GUI, which makes it very easy to configure, manage the entire SAP landscape that is on SIOS HA.  Comprehensive HA/DR stack for SAP –Other than HANA database, SIOS Protection Suite also provides protection for key SAP services and supporting applications, all of which can be managed from the same GUI :
Clustering in the cloudWhen moving SAP to the cloud, one of the key challenges is how to protect the SAP database, as well as the SAP applications stack in a SAP supported architecture. SIOS has been forefront of this move and are designed, certified and supported by SAP as well as all the major cloud providers. The diagram below is a high-level design of how a pair of S/4HANA system can be deployed across different availability zones, or even regions. In cloud environments, as the providers do have very low latencies between AZs, it is entirely possible to use synchronous replication across the AZs, thereby creating a pair of highly available S/4HANA system, not just for HA but also for DR at the same time. This is because AZs are geographically separate datacenters, much like how on-premise DR datacenters are, which highly redundant high-speed network connectivity between them.  Why use SIOS over open-source HA for SAP?This question will invariably come up in people’s mind, since some Linux vendors already provide their HA extensions (HAE) or clustering, why would anyone want to use a commercial 3rd party HA solution like SIOS?
SummarySAP HANA system replication feature comes as part of the software and works well to protect the database from dataloss in case a problem arise from hardware or system failures. However if high-availability is the requirement, it would still need a 3rd party solution in order to get some of the automated monitoring, failover orchestration, virtual IP and so on. While there are opensource options in the form of enterprise Linux OS subscriptions for SAP, they certainly do not come free, and technical support is still limited as they purely relying on opensource community to maintain the Pacemaker, Corosync etc. projects. and to get support from contributors. There are also limitations in the native System Replication, opensource HAE which can be overcome by a commercial software solution vendor like SIOS. Hence, SIOS as a reliable 3rd party high-availability solution provider can help to ensure enterprise customers get the reliability and high-availability that they need in their mission critical SAP systems operations. For a peace of mind, SIOS proves to be a very viable complementary solution to SAP HANA system replication, which is also fully supported by SAP and all the major OS and platform vendors. Author:
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| April 26, 2020 |
Toyo Gosei Ltd. Migrates SAP Enterprise System to Azure |
| April 22, 2020 |
SIOS High Availability Solution And Its Benefits |
| April 18, 2020 |
Webinar: Oracle database High Availability In The Cloud |
| April 7, 2020 |
Managing Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeperManaging Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeper
With companies moving to the cloud and having to manage more complex computing environments, this “alert stress” is starting to take a toll on workers’ productivity and mental health. Cloud monitoring solutions are trying to give you more information so you can resolve issues faster, but the depth of information they provide and the volume of alerts can be overwhelming. Is Application Performance Management for AWS Enough?Migrating to an AWS cloud infrastructure means that you often have to adopt new ways of managing and monitoring your applications. You can take advantage of AWS’s native cloud management functionality for your EC2 environment. But many companies quickly outgrow the functionality of these tools and deploy commercial Application Performance Management (APM) solutions for wider coverage and deeper insights. But here’s the thing. These sophisticated APM solutions can be creating more work for you. Yes, they often come with alert notification workflows to put the right information into the right person’s hands quickly. But they do very little to fix the situation without manual intervention. The result: lots of stress-inducing alerts needing your immediate attention. That’s why we created SIOS AppKeeper. It is the industry’s first out-of-the-box solution to automatically respond to service outages on Amazon EC2 instances. AppKeeper allows companies to protect applications from service interruptions and downtime while eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming manual intervention. AppKeeper Automatically Restarts Failed Services in AWS EC2SIOS AppKeeper not only identifies and sends notifications for failures. But it will also automatically attempt to restart failed services or reboot the instance if necessary. Our users have found that AppKeeper automatically addresses almost 85% of the application service failures that occur. Without having to disrupt you, your I.T. or Development team or third-parties. SIOS customers and partners in Japan have been using SIOS AppKeeper since 2017 to protect their AWS environments. ForgeVision is an AWS Advanced Consulting partner, integrates AppKeeper into its cloud management console. It has been allowing it to monitor and recover customers’ failures more cost-effectively. And AppKeeper is allowing Hobby Japan, a publishing company in Tokyo, to create a maintenance-free, low-cost environment. We invite you to learn more about SIOS AppKeeper by watching this short video or by signing up to use AppKeeper for free until June 30th. Then you can see for yourself what it’s like to have systems failures in AWS EC2 automatically addressed. – Daisuke Yoshioka, Manager, Business Development for SIOS AppKeeper.
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“”We got several proposals for both on-premises and cloud, and decided to migrate to Microsoft Azure with Fujitsu’s proposal of SIOS DataKeeper – that best fits our requirements,” said Akihiko Kobayashi, a System Representative.
Has this ever happened to you? You receive an alert about an application issue when you are out of the office, and you don’t have the information you need to address it? And you either need to access your cloud management console from an inconvenient location or pass the information on to another colleague to address? Or you are investigating an alert when another one comes in requiring your attention? Research has shown it can take the average person 23 minutes to recover from unexpected interruptions.