Symantec High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution for SAP

[Venkata_Reddy_C]

Written by: Venkata Reddy Chappavarapu, Sr. Software Engineer, Symantec Data Center Management Group

Introduction

Many organizations rely on SAP applications to support vital business processes. Any disruption of these services translates directly into bottom-line losses. As an 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 solution for SAP enhances 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 solution simplifies the management of complex environments. Administrators can manually move services for preventative and proactive maintenance, and the software automatically migrates and restarts applications in the 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 solution, administrators can migrate applications or an entire data center within minutes, with a single click at a central console. Symantec’s flexible, hardware independent solution supports a variety of cost-effective strategies for leveraging your investment in disaster recovery resources.

The Symantec High Availability and Disaster Recovery solution for SAP utilizes the following products: Veritas Storage Foundation™, Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System™, Veritas Cluster Server™ HA/DR, Veritas Volume Replicator™, 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 which protects critical SAP applications immediately from either planned or unplanned downtime.

This paper describes the overall SAP availability environment and Symantec’s solution for High Availability and Disaster Recovery. It then offers a technical overview of both local and global availability in a SAP environment, and steps through a number of scenarios using the Symantec solution.

To read the complete technical white paper, please download the PDF.

[mrioux]

Hi,

We recently developped an automated solution to build SAP (ERP,EM,EBP,EAI, etc) Cluster Configuration base on standard described in your documents. If you have some interest let me know.

Thanks,

[ruahr]

Hello,

I' m interested in a easy Configuration for a SAP Solution in Veritas Cluster.
The Cluster has 2 Servers. On one Server the Oracle DB and the ABAP Central Instance and on the second Server the ABAP Dialog Instance.
The actual config: 2 Failover Service Groups (Veritas Volume Manager with VxFS)
Oracle Service Group: mounts the Oracle Database and starts the Database
SAP Service Group: mount the sap images and Files, export the /sapmnt/SID and /usr/sap/trans, start the SAP Central Instance:
Application Service Group: mount the sap Instance diretory and NFS-Filesystems (sapmnt/SIG, /usr/sap/trans),
start the SAP Dialog instance

We build the NFS Share into the Central Instance for easy handling.
Oracle Service Group and SAP Service Grout are linked (local online firm).

Do you have Configuration Examples ?

regards