In this video, Todd Doane, Solutions Architect at SIOS, talks about how SIOS provides high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) in the SAP HANA environment.
Highlights of this video interview:
- SAP HANA is a complex environment with three layers: presentation, application, and database. While the presentation layer is easy to protect, the other two present challenges. There are different processes running, there is data moving between the layers and between servers, there is replication going on. There are many possible failure scenarios and many things to monitor, on top of following SAP best practices. To ensure a recovery point objective (RPO) of near-zero data loss is a daunting task.
- The key thing is to reduce the single points of failure, multiple servers at every layer, with replication to a passive and standby server and a disaster recovery server. And those need to be distributed through multiple data centers.
- The biggest cause of failure is when there are a lot of tasks and scripts that need to run and having someone do it manually. This increases the chance of human error. Therefore, to be able to provide a good HA/DR environment, you need 1) automation, and 2) planning and frequent testing to make sure that HA is working as expected, your databases are getting registered, and failover is truly seamless.
- Once the SAP HANA environment is set up, the SIOS Protection Suite installation and configuration can be done through a GUI wizard, which takes about an hour. It orchestrates and automates to make the failover extremely easy. It adheres to all the SAP best practices for fast, reliable continued operation. It also features a “takeover with handshake” of the SAP HANA database.
- SIOS recently added the SAP HANA third-node support. SIOS has always been able to do that at the application layer but now, it can support it at the database layer as well.