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Archives for April 2020

High Availability and DR for S/4HANA and other SAP platforms

April 28, 2020 by Jason Aw 1 Comment

High Availability and DR for S/4HANA and other SAP platforms

High Availability and DR for S/4HANA and other SAP platforms

SAP 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

  • Meet Recovery Time Objectives (RTO)

—– How long can SAP be down before you recover?

  • Meet Recovery Point Objectives (RPO)

—–  How old can your data be when service is restored

  • Meet Availability Service Level Agreements (SLA)

—– How much uptime do you need?

SAP HANA system replication

SAP 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.

HANA System Replication failover high-availability and DR
Figure 1: HANA System Replication failover high-availability and DR

Below are some key points of the HANA system replication method for HA and DR:

  • Redundant Servers / Nodes
  • In-memory database replicated by HANA system replication (in “log replay” mode)
  • Multiple replication options: sync, sync-mem, async
  • Supports active-active (read-only on secondary)
  • Setup and admin through HANA cockpit, HANA studio or command line

Limitations

  • No monitoring of application process or replication failures and automated failover
  • Failover, reverse replication and failback has to be performed manually – many manual steps are needed
  • No virtual IP
  • No integrated HA failover orchestration together with SAP ASCS etc. components

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 Clustering

SIOS 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.

SIOS HANA System Replication failover high-availability and DR
Figure 2: SIOS HANA System Replication failover high-availability and DR

Below are some key points of the SIOS Protection Suite for SAP HANA HA and DR:

  • Works in the cloud cross AZ and AR
  • Provides automated failure detection and failover for key SAP HANA DB components:
    — SAP HANA Host Agent
    — SAP HANA sapstartsrv
    — SAP HANA Replication
  • Enables automated SAP HANA replication takeover, switchback
  • Automatically reverse replication
  • Verifies and monitors that the HANA DB is running
  • Provides Virtual IP
  • “Full stack” failover orchestration with ASCS etc. SAP components

Four steps to install and configure HA for HANA database

We 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:

  1. Install SAP HANA
  2. Configure HANA system Replication
    See – https://help.sap.com/viewer/6b94445c94ae495c83a19646e7c3fd56/2.0.02/en-US/676844172c2442f0bf6c8b080db05ae7.html
  3. Install SIOS protection suite
    See – http://docs.us.sios.com/spslinux/9.4.1/en/topic/sios-protection-suite-for-linux-installation-guide
  4. Use HANA recovery kit (wizard) in GUI to protect HANA
    See – http://docs.us.sios.com/spslinux/9.4.1/en/topic/sap-hana-recovery-kit

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.

SIOS Lifekeeper Management GUI for SAP HANA ASCS and ERS
Figure 3: SIOS Lifekeeper Management GUI for SAP HANA ASCS and ERS

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 :

  • Primary Application Server (PAS)
  • ABAP SAP Central Service (ASCS)
  • SAP Central Services (SCS)
  • Enqueue and message servers
  • Enqueue Replication Server (ERS)
  • Database (Oracle, Sybase, MaxDB, HANA, etc)
  • Shared and/or Replicated File Systems
  • Logical Volumes (LVM)
  • NFS Mounts and Exports
  • Virtual IPs

Clustering in the cloud

When 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.

SIOS Protection Suite for SAP S/4HANA cloud architecture
Figure 4: SIOS Protection Suite for SAP S/4HANA cloud architecture

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?

  1. Open-source HA is being offered as part of certain OS flavors “enterprise SAP” extensions subscription – it comes at a cost, it’s definitely not free, and not all Linux flavors are supported. SIOS supports all the major Linux flavors including Redhat, SUSE, Centos and Oracle Linux. For customers who want to run Windows for their ASCS or Content Server etc. SIOS also has Windows based solution with Windows clustering support, making it a one-stop-shop for the entire SAP landscape regardless of platform.
  2. Commercial HA support – OS vendors depend on open-source community for bug fixes, which can be a problem if the bug requires a longer time to get solved by a less active contributor. SIOS provides commercial support with dedicated support and development team just for its high-availability solution. It has immediate 24×7 support resolution, which would give customers much more confidence when there are issues that may develop.
  3. Complex setup and admin via command line is needed by open-source tools. They are made up of different components like Pacemaker, Corosync etc. maintained by different open-source initiatives. SIOS provides all-in-one GUI for wizards-based setup and admin. It allows one to deploy SAP HA in a matter of hours instead of weeks/months.
  4. SIOS provide pre-built application monitoring and failover orchestration for all SAP and cloud components requiring HA through a wizard in the GUI, as opposed to using HA extensions that still requires a lot of manual configuration.
  5. Automatically ensures SAP ERS is always running in opposite node of ASCS – SIOS provides the intelligence even in a multi-node ASCS setup, if a failover occured and ASCS failsover to the node with the running ERS, when the original ASCS node recovers, ERS gets automatically switched across so that the locks are always getting the redundancy needed. Opensource solution requires this to be done manually, hence impacts reliability and availability especially in times of multiple failures and recovery.
  6. SIOS reduces implementation/management time and costs, the lesser time you spend implementing and maintaining HA, the more time you will have for other more important tasks.
  7. Open-source use its STONITH mechanism which had been hardly reliable especially in cloud environments, SIOS provides multi-throng approach to prevent false failover and split-brain – quorum witness, multiple comm. path (heartbeat) which has been proven for over 20 years to be highly reliable in many scenarios.

Summary

SAP 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:

Jason Aw SIOS Technology
Jason Aw
An IT professional who has been focused on high-availability and disaster recovery for over 20 years. Currently employed at SIOS Technology Corp. as Strategic Business Development for APAC.

Filed Under: Blog posts, Clustering Simplified

Toyo Gosei Ltd. Migrates SAP Enterprise System to Azure

April 26, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

migration to cloud

Toyo Gosei Ltd. Migrates SAP Enterprise System to Azure: To Build a “System That Never Stops” With Replication

“”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.

Toyo Gosei is a long-established chemical manufacturer that has been operating business for 65 years. The company’s main product, photosensitive materials for photoresist, is an indispensable material for manufacturing liquid crystal displays and semiconductor integrated circuits. The company is also focusing on technological development for the most advanced photosensitive materials.

In 2007, the company was required to select the successor system of GLOVIA/Process C1, which had been used as a core business system. While receiving proposals from several companies, they chose to introduce “SAP,” an ERP system of German company SAP because of its solid J-SOX support. Time passed and around 2015, the servers installed when introducing SAP had come to the end of maintenance.

IT Infrastructure

The company’s IT infrastructure is an on-premises VMware-based data center and a remote data center for business continuity/disaster protection. Since most of their applications run on the Microsoft Windows operating system, they used guest-level Windows Server failover clustering in their VMware environment to provide high availability and disaster protection.

The Challenge – Migrating to Azure

Behind the migration to cloud, there were needs to be free from on-premises system maintenance, demands for flexibility of scale-up and preparing for disaster based on the experience during the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Their decision to go to cloud was driven by the fact that the servers in their premises physically moved during the earthquake and it almost led to a failure.

When migrating to Azure, the company built a backup system to address system failures and in case of disasters. “SAP has all the data necessary for our business. If SAP stops, the production process also stops. If the outage continues for two or three days, shipment, payment and billing is also stopped. The SAP system cannot be stopped,” said Kobayashi.

The first step was to set up a SAP backup system on Azure to take a daily backup of the production system in the East Japan region of Azure and a weekly backup of the standby system in the West Japan region.

Implementation

“However, backup is just a backup. Basically we need to make production system redundant in order to prevent it from stopping. On AWS, which was used for information systems, shared disks were available with a redundant configuration. However, Azure does not support shared disks. For this reason, we decided to use DataKeeper of SIOS Technology that enables data replication on Azure,” said Kobayashi.

They created a cluster configuration between storage systems connected to the redundant SAP production system and replicate the data using DataKeeper to make it consistent. This provides the same availability as when using shared disks even on Azure where shared disk configuration is not supported.

“We have been in stable operations after the initial stage where a failover occurred,” said Kobayashi. “Regarding SIOS DataKeeper, the only thing we have to do is renew the maintenance contract.”

The Results

As a mid-term plan in the future, they need to prepare for the “SAP 2025 problem” where support for the current SAP version will expire. They have not built a specific plan, but Kobayashi said, “when moving to the new architecture S/4HANA and if clustering is required, we will implement SIOS DataKeeper because we trust it.“

SIOS DataKeeper is a reliable partner for Kobayashi. “Because you cannot stop the production system, it is IT personnel’s responsibility to choose a reliable tool,” he said.

Get a Free Trial of SIOS DataKeeper

Learn more about SAP high availability on Azure

Download the PDF version of the Case Study

Filed Under: Success Stories Tagged With: Azure, migration

SIOS High Availability Solution And Its Benefits

April 22, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

SIOS High Availability Solution And Its Benefits

SIOS High Availability Solution And Its Benefits

What SIOS can do for you?

With SIOS, get ready to enjoy high availability cluster protection for 70% less than SQL Enterprise Edition, Oracle Enterprise Edition/ RAC. On top of that, save running costs from not having to migrate to a certain vendors’ cloud platform for extended support.

Rest assured. SIOS is SAP certified for all major Linux and cloud providers, hence you can easily achieve High Availability and Disaster Recovery on VMware without RDM (shared storage). Thereby, allowing snapshot-based backups to succeed.

Best of all, overcome technical limitations of native features from application and database software vendors.

No Configuration Limitations

SIOS is a high availability solution that is suitable for use in any Windows/Linus Application on Physical, Virtual, Public/Virtual Cloud.

Why Sell SIOS HA Solutions

SIOS has been a high availability solutions leader for 20 years, with its strength as a simple add-on to fit any HA environment. Specifically focusing on channel sales, the great margins translate to cost reduction for customers by more than 60% . You will be provided with sales support and given marketing opportunities. Most of all, you can be guaranteed access to a world-class technical support team.

SIOS strives to solve customers’ challenges by providing usable solutions. 

  • Benefits for MSSQL customers

Use SIOS Datakeeper with AlwaysOn FCI on SQL standard edition with no need for Enterprise Edition, thereby saving more than 66% of cost. Maintain support even after migrating customers’ old MSSQL 2008 to cloud. SIOS supports multinode cluster (MS limitation), and provides protection for Master System Databases (Master, MSD). Also, it protects other files and applications other than MSSQL

  • Benefits for Oracle customers

SIOS offers protection for Oracle DB and  75% cost savings with Oracle standard edition. Use SIOS with STD edition and continue to get High Availability even as Oracle ends RAC support for STD edition from v.19c onward. SIOS is less complex than Dataguard and RAC, thereby reducing administrative time and costs. Enjoy the ease and flexibility to  run Oracle DB with High Availability on any cloud provider platform. Protect other files and applications not just Oracle DB.

  • Benefits for SAP customers 

With its easy implementation, application protection wizards, and management via GUI, be sure to save time and cost on your projects. No change from on-premises clustering design and versions used as you migrate to cloud by “life-and-shift”.

As a high availability solution, SIOS promises to offer protection that SAP does not cover. Automatic failure detection and failover orchestration for HANA and Central Services with automatic ERS switchover to opposite node (feature not provided by opensource/HAE). Certified by SAP for any cloud provider and and linux flavor. This includes Oracle Linux with SAP in public cloud providers All SAP customers enjoy commercial-grade replication and tech support.

  • Benefits for VMware environments

Achieve High Availability, Data Recovery on VMware without RDM (shared storage). This allows for snapshot backups that is not supported with VMware HA. Additionally, you get to enjoy cost savings since there is no need for single-point-of-failure SAN or SAN-to-SAN replication for High Availability, Data Recovery. Similarly, this ends the need for complex vSphere replication for DR of applications like SQL, SAP, Oracle etc. With SIOS, you’ll easily achieve full application monitoring and automated failover.  Furthermore, this feature is not provided by VMware HA, only VM and host failures. 

The solution is specifically designed for HA with full stack monitoring (server, VM, application, network, split-brain). Like a hybrid our high availability solution works on-premises with any VM-to-any Cloud.

Download PDF

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: high availability solutions, MSSQL, Oracle, SAP, SIOS

Webinar: Oracle database High Availability In The Cloud

April 18, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Oracle Database High Availability In The Cloud

Webinar: Oracle Database High Availability In The Cloud

Oracle DB HA in the Cloud:
Save costs and cut downtime after migrating
your Oracle workloads to the cloud

Moving to the cloud does not have to involve disruptive changes to your architecture and application designs. Nor high costs to keep High Availability redundancy and architectural changes to your HA clusters.

Even when Oracle removed the RAC feature from Standard Edition from 19c onward, and ends support for 12c, you can still achieve high-availability with 3rd party HA solutions like SIOS. Enjoy savings of up to 70% of costs without upgrading to enterprise edition Oracle DB.

In this 1-hour online session, learn how you can achieve the above and more. This includes cost savings when using Oracle and other applications for your organization. All these without compromising your 99.99% uptime requirement in the cloud.

Agenda

  • Benefits of Migrating Oracle DB to the cloud
  • High-Availability Challenges of Moving Oracle in the cloud
  • Why it Matters: Cost benefits compared to using Oracle RAC/Dataguard
  • Oracle and SIOS HA on cloud architectures
  • Q&A

Live Webinar – Thursday, 23rd April, 2020
12pm SGT, 2pm AEST, 11am PHT, 9:30am IST

Used by some of the most demanding enterprises in APAC including – AGL Australia • Perth Stadium • Dept of Transport and Main Roads Australia • Inghams Group Australia • Chris O’brien Hospital • Korea Education bureau • LG Display Korea • Mitsubishi Heavy Industries • NH Bank Korea • Nagaworld Casinos Cambodia • Nomura Research Institute (Shanghai) • Panasonic Asia • Razer Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd • Samsung Korea • Zespri New Zealand

Register Webinar: Oracle database High Availability In The Cloud 

Filed Under: News and Events Tagged With: Cloud, High Availability, Oracle

Managing Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeper

April 7, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Managing Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeper

Managing Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeperHas 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.

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 EC2

SIOS 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.

 

Reproduced from SIOS

Filed Under: Blog posts Tagged With: Amazon AWS, AppKeeper, Application availability, application monitoring

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