Making HA and DR Easy in an SAP HANA Environment

⇨ SAP HANA allows organizations to process large amounts of data with near-zero latency, thus helping to prioritize a data-driven strategy in the modern day of innovation.

⇨ The complexity of SAP HANA, particularly regarding disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA), requires careful planning, automation and frequent testing to minimize single points of failure and ensure seamless failover.

⇨ SIOS Protection Suite offers automated solutions to simplify DR and HA processes within SAP HANA environments, allowing IT professionals to focus on more critical tasks by covering all failover scenarios.

As SAP users know, SAP HANA has become the ultimate go-to for modern enterprises. Offering a multi-model database that stores data in its memory, SAP HANA allows organizations to process large amounts of data with near-zero latency and quickly extract data, thus helping to prioritize a data-driven strategy in the modern day of innovation.

Additionally, available both on-premise and cloud, SAP HANA offers advanced search, analytics and data integration capabilities for all types of data – structured and unstructured. It also functions as an application server and helps companies build applications based on real-time data, in-memory computing and machine learning technology.

Yet, an advanced technology with as many functionalities as SAP HANA comes with baggage of its own complexity, especially when it comes to disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA). As noted by Aaron West, solutions architect at SIOS, in the webinar “How SIOS Makes High Availability & Disaster Recovery Easy In SAP HANA Environment”, SAP HANA is a complex environment with three layers: presentation, application and database.

According to West, the presentation layer may be easy to protect but the other two pose challenges because they include multiple processes running at the same time. For instance, data may be moving between the layers and between servers while, simultaneously, there is replication going on. Additionally, many possible failure scenarios need to be monitored, on top of following SAP best practices.

“The key thing is reducing the single points of failure, […] and the biggest cause of failure, when you have a lot of tasks and scripts that need to run, is having a human do it,” West said. “Automation is the absolute best strategy to being able to provide a good HR and DR environment.

“The other thing is, you know, planning and frequent testing you need to have, you need to test these systems and make sure that HA is working the way you expect, that your databases are getting registered, and that you know failover is truly seamless.”

Understandably, maintaining all this and developing a DR and HA strategy can be an overwhelming task for IT professionals. This is why vendors like SIOS provide solutions to help maintain successful DR and HA. The specific solution that SIOS offers for that is SIOS Protection Suite.

How it works is that once the SAP HANA environment is set up, the SIOS Protection Suite installation and configuration can be done through a GUI tool. The unique feature of the software is that it automates the entire DR process, thus covering all failover scenarios in the system. Additionally, SIOS also added the SAP HANA third-node support, introducing assistance at the database layer as well.

When faced with the necessity to do it, the establishment of thorough and streamlined DR and HA practices in SAP HANA may seem like a daunting and unsustainable task. However, with solutions like the ones offered by SIOS, organizations can rely on the protective services that automation offers, catering to all failover scenarios. This way, IT professionals can dedicate their valuable time to more critical tasks at hand.