Six Important Steps for Deploying SAP ERP High Availability

SAP ERP – For companies that run their day-to-day business operations on SAP ERP (enterprise resource planning), it’s important for IT teams to make sure they comply with mandated high-availability service-level agreements (SLAs).

As part of the formal SLA process, many companies require their internal IT teams to set specific recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). This helps that ensure the ERP application is protected and that services for end-users, customers and vendors can recover as rapidly as possible if an outage occurs.

As your IT team takes on this challenge—whether implementing new high-availability capabilities or to validate your current capabilities, there are six key steps to follow to make sure your SAP ERP system is fully protected. These best practices were compiled for this eWEEK Data Points article by Harry Aujla, EMEA Technical Director at SIOS Technology Corp.

Data Point No. 1: Eliminate single points of failure

Any high-availability solution needs to eliminate single points of failure, such as the case when connecting cluster nodes to a single SAN or other shared storage. If your SAP system runs in the cloud, you can also take advantage of geographically separated availability zones and regions. Although a high-availability cluster can be deployed within a single availability zone, the zone itself presents a single-point-of-failure. That is, if the zone becomes unavailable, you can potentially lose access to the entire high-availability cluster and its associated data.

Data Point No. 2: Separate SAP cluster nodes across cloud availability zones

To eliminate single points of failure, separate the SAP cluster nodes across cloud availability zones, such as deploying Node1 in Zone1, Node2 in Zone2, and a witness or quorum node in Zone3. If necessary, the SAP application can then fail over from one zone to another. You can also address disaster recovery requirements by adding a third node to the high-availability cluster in an additional zone or region.

Data Point No. 3: Ensure allocation constraints do not impact performance

Configure separate high-availability clusters for each protected SAP instance (ASCS/ERS, PAS, AAS) and any associated databases. This allows for maximum performance for both the SAP software and the databases—rather than forcing them to fight over system resources if running on the same cluster nodes. Taking this approach is especially important when using a memory-intensive database solution such as SAP HANA.

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Article Credit: EWeek