With the right solution for DR and HA, digital transformation shouldn’t be scary

⇨ Effective customer relationship management is essential for retailers, particularly those managing large teams and complex data across multiple locations.

⇨ The retailer faced limitations in disaster recovery and high availability with its SAP NetWeaver and SAP HANA systems on Linux servers within the AWS cloud, prompting the need for a third-party solution.

⇨ SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux offers a certified, comprehensive solution for high availability and disaster recovery, successfully integrating with SAP applications and ensuring a reliable failover cluster.

Retailers know, more than anyone,  how crucial customer relationship management is for success. With the management of thousands of employees across various countries and industries, large organizations require technology that is reliable, consistent and handles the complexity of data that comes with these numbers. That kind of reliability can be put to the test in the most important way – disaster recovery and high availability. 

This was the case for the recent SIOS Technology Corp. customer, a retailer with 20,000 employees and 1000 outlets across 26 states in the US, with online sales serving all 50 states and Canada. The company’s tech stack includes a CRM and related customer-serving applications, which all use SAP NetWeaver and SAP HANA software running on Linux servers on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

The company in question chose to add public cloud services from AWS to its own data center because it realized that it could be more cost-effective for its needs. However, with this kind of transformation comes the inevitable question: is your current application software able to cater to your specific technology landscape?

The retailer realized there were two main limitations in its SAP NetWeaver and SAP HANA disaster recovery and high availability (HA) capabilities. First, the Linux operating system lacked robust HA provisions, and second, AWS couldn’t support SAP HANA System replication across multiple availability zones and regions. 

So, the decision was made to find a third-party solution that had been proven in practice for SAP software running on Linux servers across multiple zones on the AWS cloud and that could help the organization establish reliable disaster recovery and HA.

A simple answer to a complex question

Enter SIOS and its SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux solution. Complete with high availability clustering, continuous real-time data replication and disaster recovery functionality for the entire SAP environment in a single, cost-efficient solution, SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux showed that it could provide full protection to the organization’s systems. 

According to the system engineer who led the project, after consulting with an expert who recommended the SIOS software to the retailer, the decision to deploy the solution was made quickly and confidently. 

The specific features that proved to the retailer that SIOS LifeKeeper is the right solution were that SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux has been certified by SAP for integration with SAP NetWeaver and can be optionally used to control SAP HANA System Replication across the SIOS failover cluster. SIOS also provides an Application Recovery Kit for SAP HANA, which simplifies the implementation. To protect against local disasters, the organization can now use different zones for the primary and secondary server instances. 

“We tested and continue to test the high-availability configuration in the QA environment we set up on the AWS cloud,” an engineer from the project shared. “We run the tests again after every change in the configuration or any of the software, and the SIOS solution continues to work as intended every time. 

“This rigor has given us great confidence that our failover cluster won’t fail us when we actually do need it someday.”

So, when it comes to the point where you realize that your organization is growing at a level where disaster recovery and HA processes require software that would match the needs of your complex tech stack, you may look for a solution like SIOS LifeKeeper. With the ability to integrate your diverse tech stack and cater to both on-premise and cloud, you can start feeling secure and confident in your failover cluster.