Given the mission-critical nature of SAP applications, high availability, and performance for SAP environments is a primary focus for IT organizations. Do you run SAP and have multi-9 SLA’s? Are you looking for better resource utilization and performance for your SAP environment, at a reduced cost? If so, you need InfoScale! We’ll talk about how InfoScale ensures that SAP is both highly available and performing as expected (or better).
Veritas InfoScale is a software-defined optimization solution for mission-critical applications that abstracts applications from their underlying hardware and software resources. That abstraction enables enterprise-grade optimizations around business continuity, performance, and infrastructure agility across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.
One might ask: “Doesn’t SAP natively provide HADR and resiliency features?” “How does InfoScale improve on this?” “Do I even need InfoScale?”
The short answers are “yes,” “we’re going to talk about that,” and “yes!” The challenge is maintaining optimal performance and continuous SAP application availability across complex, interconnected, dynamic, and heterogeneous infrastructure. With minimal or no ability to tolerate downtime, IT organizations need the ability to upgrade, test, maintain, and deploy SAP infrastructure components without disrupting operations.
Veritas InfoScale Enterprise is an SAP-certified solution for managing all these things. It manages performance, high availability, and disaster recovery for SAP applications. It helps keep your SAP applications and databases – whether you’re using SAP HANA or a third-party database – up and running all the time. Here are some key benefits InfoScale provides for SAP:
- Business continuity – Leveraging InfoScale Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS) technology to build shared storage clusters for SAP applications to increase application performance and data resiliency significantly.
- Instant fault detection – InfoScale SAP agents ensure that application downtime is minimal in the event of a system-level disruption or failure. There are SAP-specific agents to provide high availability for application components as well as supporting databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle, MS SQL Server, etc.
- Geographic redundancy – with the InfoScale Global Cluster Option, SAP applications can be configured for high availability across data centers – on-premises, in the cloud or hybrid-cloud – minimizing the likelihood of downtime in the event of a local or regional outage.
- Service level management –InfoScale’s Virtual Business Service (VBS) feature is aware of the complete business service provided by the SAP Business Suite or S/4HANA applications. VBS manages high availability for all the application tiers as a single logical service. This means faster recovery and minimal downtime – with no manual intervention. Figure 1 will give you an idea of what this might look like in your environment.
Figure 1. Example configuration of an InfoScale Virtual Business Service for SAP
How InfoScale and SAP work together
InfoScale makes it easy to provide high availability and disaster recovery for SAP workloads with customized agents for NetWeaver, S/4HANA, and SAP HANA databases. InfoScale protects the SAP components that are critical for overall application availability in a distributed SAP environment:
- Databases (including SAP HANA, Oracle, SQL Server, and IBM DB2)
- Central Services Instance
- Enqueue Replication Service
- Primary Application Server (Dialog)
- Additional Application Servers (Dialog)
This gives you the flexibility of configuring your SAP applications to be associated with your disk, IP, and DNS resources. When a resource managed by InfoScale fails, InfoScale can initiate a failover operation to a secondary node or standby cluster in a different location (including cloud!). InfoScale even has a unique feature called FireDrill that enables non-disruptive SAP application testing and recovery validation. See section 3.1 in Veritas InfoScale: Managing Mission-Critical Applications in a Software-defined Data Center for more information on how this works.
So that’s high availability, but how does InfoScale improve application performance? The Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS) feature included with InfoScale Enterprise is a unique feature that provides high performance shared storage using Direct Attached Storage (DAS). FSS simplifies SAP implementations and can be combined with SmartIOintelligent caching to significantly increase SAP application performance while reducing overall storage costs compared with traditional SAN. Figure 2 shows how this works.
More information on FSS can be found here.
Are you either looking at or currently using SAP in the cloud? Take a look at our technical library for more information on how this works, including how to build highly available SAP environments in Microsoft Azure.
Summary
InfoScale combines industry-leading data management and resiliency technology to create a highly available, robust foundation for SAP applications and data. InfoScale’s high-availability agents for SAP are directly integrated with application resources and the underlying storage to provide maximum uptime. Some other key features: simplified service level HADR orchestration, optimized resource utilization, and better performance for a lower cost with FSS and SmartIO. InfoScale is an SAP-certified solution that provides the tools needed to run SAP applications with maximum uptime and performance – on-premises, in a hybrid cloud configuration, or entirely within a cloud environment.
Please check out our SAP white papers in the InfoScale technical library for more details.
