Given the mission-critical nature of SAP applications, high availability and performance for SAP environments is a primary focus for IT organizations who rely on it to run their businesses. Do you run SAP and have multi-9 SLA’s? Veritas InfoScale works with SAP applications and SAP HANA databases to help you achieve better resource utilization and performance for your SAP ecosystem at a reduced cost. Let’s talk about how InfoScale ensures that your SAP applications are both highly available and performing as expected (or better!). This blog post briefly describes the InfoScale HA solution and provides an insight into the relevant InfoScale agents for SAP and their capabilities.
Consider a scenario where a failure or a disaster has occurred in your SAP environment. As part of the recovery process, you need to perform a manual takeover, which involves longer downtime for the SAP database, servers, and applications. Consequently, your organization may suffer downtime that could affect business opportunities.
Veritas InfoScale provides an HA/DR solution for SAP ecosystems, which helps reduce application downtime. It does so by automating the manual tasks that you need to perform as part of a takeover operation. You can also employ the InfoScale HA solution to automate the takeover operation during planned maintenance activities. It can help you achieve Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for your SAP ecosystem by enabling faster recovery without any manual intervention.
Comprehensive monitoring
The InfoScale HA solution for the SAP ecosystem provides application-aware SAP agents that perform comprehensive monitoring for the following components:
- SAP HANA database
- SAP NetWeaver—S/4HANA components
- SAP MaxDB
- SAP LiveCache
- SAP LiveCache Hot Standby
- SAP Replication Server
- SAP Replication Management Agent
This is in addition to the monitoring for the various other components that are standard in InfoScale, in the physical, virtual (e.g. VMware), and cloud environments (e.g. Azure, AWS).
The agents make the SAP services highly available by providing the following levels of application monitoring:
- Primary or basic monitoring: Monitors the SAP processes in the process table, performs a health check, and maintains PID files based on search patterns to expedite the monitoring process.
- Secondary or detailed monitoring: Uses an SAP utility to verify the status of an SAP instance.
- Intelligent Monitoring Framework: Uses the Asynchronous Monitoring Framework (AMF) kernel driver to provide asynchronous event notifications to the SAP agents enabled for intelligent resource monitoring.
- External monitoring: Uses an external user-customized monitor program to perform an additional health check of the SAP instance.
Additionally, the agents also provide support for:
- system-enabled environments,
- fast failover of faulted instances, and
- various levels of debug logs for troubleshooting.
For details about the SAP HANA (SAPHDB) agent capabilities, refer to the Cluster Server Agent for SAP HANA Installation and Configuration Guide.
For details about the SAP NetWeaver—S/4HANA components—agent capabilities, refer to the Cluster Server Agent for SAP NetWeaver Installation and Configuration Guide.
Supported configurations and deployments
The InfoScale agents for SAP support the following elements:
- Configurations where data is replicated by using SAP HANA System Replication within a site or across sites, such as:
- Two replicated, single-node SAP HANA database instances
- Three replicated, single-node SAP HANA database instances, where two instances are in a local cluster and the third instance is in a global cluster
- A scale-out deployment
- HANA tenant databases
- Distributed HANA databases
- Synchronous, Synchronous in-memory, and Asynchronous modes of replication
- delta_datashipping, logreplay, and logreplay_readaccess modes of operation
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 infrastructure to provide maximum uptime. Some other key features include simplified service level HADR orchestration, optimized resource utilization, and better performance for a lower cost. InfoScale is an SAP-certified solution that provides the tools needed to run SAP applications with maximum uptime and performance.
