Keep Your Business Running with High Availability and Disaster Recovery for SAP Applications

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This whitepaper is aimed at technical architects and IT decision-makers at customer companies as well as architects and consultants involved in the design and planning of technical solution architectures for SAPcentric business solutions.

Executive Summary 

Many organizations rely on SAP applications to support vital business processes. Any disruption of these services translates directly into bottom-line losses. As organization's information systems become increasingly integrated and interdependent, the potential impact of failures and outages grows to enormous proportions. 

The challenge for IT organizations is to maintain continuous SAP application availability in a complex, interconnected, and heterogeneous  application environment. The difficulties are significant: 

• there are many potential points of failure or disruption 
• the interdependencies between components complicates administration 
• the infrastructure itself undergoes constant change 

To gain additional competitive advantage, enterprises must now work more closely together and integrate their SAP environment with those of other organizations, such as partners, customers, or suppliers. The availability of these applications is therefore essential. 

There are three main availability classes, depending on the degree of availability required: 

• Standard Availability – achievable availability without additional measures 
• High Availability – increased availability after elimination of single points of failure within the local datacenter 
• Disaster Recovery – highest availability, which even overcomes the failure of an entire production site 

Symantec helps the organizations that rely on SAP applications with an integrated, out-of-the-box solution for SAP availability. Symantec's High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions for SAP enhance both local and global availability for business critical SAP applications. 

Local high availability: By clustering critical application components with application-specific monitoring and failover, Symantec's solutions simplify the management of complex environments. Administrators can manually move services for preventative and proactive maintenance, and the software automatically migrates and restarts applications in case of failures. 

Global availability/disaster recovery: By replicating data across geographically dispersed data centers and using global failover capabilities, companies can provide access to essential services in the event of major site disruptions. Using Symantec's solutions, administrators can migrate applications or an entire data center within minutes, with a single click through a central console. Symantec's flexible, hardware independent solutions support a variety of cost-effective strategies for leveraging your investment in disaster recovery resources. 

Symantec provides High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions for SAP, utilizing Symantec™ Storage Foundation, powered by Veritas, Symantec™ Replicator Option, Symantec™ Cluster Server, powered by Veritas, and Cluster Server agents that are designed specifically for SAP applications. The result is an out-of-the-box solution that you can quickly deploy to protect critical SAP applications immediately from either planned or unplanned downtime. 

Download the full white paper below.