SAP High Availability

What Is High Availability?

High availability (HA) is the ability of a system to operate continuously without failing for a designated period of time. HA ensures a system meets an agreed-upon operational performance level. Availability is expressed as a percentage:

99% = 87.6 hours of annual downtime
9% = 8.76 hours of annual downtime
99% = 52 minutes of annual downtime
999% = 5 minutes of annual downtime.

High availability usually equals 99.999% or better. HA is achieved by eliminating single points of failure and providing the ability to rapidly resume operations after a system outage with minimal business loss.

What Is SAP High Availability?

SAP has put in place plans and procedures that enable SAP ERP and other critical systems to keep on running. A high-availability solution for SAP needs to achieve four core goals:

Minimize downtime
Eliminate data loss
Maintain data integrity
Enable flexible configuration.

For example, SAP offers the Standalone Enqueue Server 2 (ENSA2) as a component of Application Server ABAP to provide high availability. It supports two-node and multi-node clusters, which enables switchover to ENSA2 to ensure continued system availability. In addition, SAP High Availability Failover enables SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE) to work in a cluster of servers in a specific configuration, enabling failover and failback on servers.

Further Resources for SAPinsiders

SAP High Availability Best Practices in AWS. In this webinar, Brett Barwick, Senior Software Engineer of SIOS Technology Corp., and Tamara Astakhov, Senior Partner, Solution Architect for Big Data & Analytics, AWS, discuss best practices for SAP high availability and how to achieve near-zero downtime.

The 15 Most Overlooked Items in Planning for High Availability and Disaster Recovery. In this article, Kurt Bishop, a retired member of SAP America’s Technical Consulting Team, offers advice on how to avoid costly mistakes by sharing the 15 most overlooked items — including the cost of downtime, security issues, loss of personnel and systems, and the importance of testing — and discussing how to incorporate them into recovery planning.

Architecting a High Availability SAP NetWeaver Infrastructure: Strategies for Ensuring a Successful, Cost-Effective Implementation. In this article, Matt Kangas, U.S. Product Manager for SAP NetWeaver Application Server at SAP Labs, provides an overview of HA basics and then discusses the technical details of an HA setup with SAP NetWeaver, including topics such as architectural single points of failure and ways to isolate and protect such failure points.

Vendors that can assist SAP customers with high availability include: AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Managecore, Red Hat, Saberpoint, SIOS, SUSE, Virtustream, and Zebra Technologies.

Maintaining High-Availability for SAP in a Windows World In the intricate landscape of enterprise IT, the choice between Windows and Linux for SAP applications hinges on a delicate balance of cost and compatibility. While Windows offers familiarity and integration benefits, it also demands meticulous high availability (HA) management to ensure uninterrupted operations. Challenges in deploying SAP on Windows include the dual-sided nature of SAP databases, presenting a nuanced approach to system management. Mitigating single points of failure is crucial, necessitating robust HA solutions that prioritize redundancy and data replication. Modern tools like Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and third-party offerings such as SIOS DataKeeper augment HA capabilities, enhancing resilience against downtime and disasters. Adopting a strategic approach to HA ensures continuous availability, supporting seamless business operations and maintaining a competitive edge in today's dynamic market landscape. As technology evolves, IT professionals must remain adaptable, embracing the latest innovations in HA technology to safeguard enterprise systems effectively.

May 13, 2024

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5 minute read

Application-Aware Clustering: The Key to Protecting SAP, HANA, and S4/HANA in the Cloud Configuring high availability (HA) clustering to protect SAP, HANA, and S/4HANA can be a daunting task that involves nearly every part of the IT stack – networking, compute, storage, application, and operating system. Watch this on-demand webinar with Bobby Jagdev for an inside look at how application-aware clustering can simplify this complexity and ensure cluster failovers are reliable and adhere to SAP best practices. In this video you will learn: • Four fundamental options for protecting SAP applications and HANA and S/4HANA databases in the cloud • The importance of application-aware clustering in configuring and maintaining clusters • Best practices for HA and disaster recovery of SAP and SAP S/4HANA

Jun 22, 2021

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1 minute read

Best Practices for SAP High Availability in AWS The global marketplace and its supply chains are complex and volatile. Companies rely on their SAP ERP systems to manage those dynamics and engage with their suppliers and customers. While on-premise control of your SAP landscape and data centers provides advantages, it may be time to consider transitioning to the AWS cloud. The question is, how can an SAP landscape be configured in the AWS cloud to ensure the high availability (HA) you expect? While on-premises, IT knows what to do. But in the AWS cloud? Best practices exist to ensure operational continuity of your SAP landscape in AWS. To begin with, you should build out your HA SAP landscape across multiple AWS AZs. This ensures that if the virtual machines (VMs) or the underlying servers in one AZ go dark, the infrastructure in another AZ can be called into service immediately. For full disaster recovery you should consider creating a shadow landscape in a geographically distinct AWS region. This provides a hedge against a catastrophic failure that could take down multiple AZs in a single region. While distributing the components of your SAP landscape among different AWS AZs is critical for HA, so too is the deployment of a landscape monitoring and management solution. You need a solution that can monitor the health of each of these components, immediately identifying any component that is not performing properly and orchestrate the process of repairing the problem as quickly as possible. At the same time, this suite of tools must also be AWS-aware. They must be able to translate the appropriate responses to issues detected within components of the landscape to actions appropriate to AWS. Read this article and learn: - The difference in how the presentation, application, and database layers of an SAP ERP system are deployed in the AWS cloud compared to on-premise; - What are the best practices to ensure operational continuity of your SAP landscape in AWS; - What to look for in monitoring and HA management tools to examine the SAP landscape across multiple dimensions.

May 28, 2021

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5 minute read

SAP High Availability Best Practices in AWS SAP S/4HANA environments comprise multiple services that need to be maintained in suitable locations and start in the proper order. Running your SAP, NetWeaver, and SAP S/4HANA workloads in the cloud can offer many benefits. When you consider the scalability, with freedom from on-premises system maintenance, flexible disaster recovery options, and the low-cost infrastructure, all while simplifying IT operations, migrating to the cloud seems like a no-brainer. But failing to consider your high availability (HA) protection requirements for these complex systems can negate all of those benefits. Manually configuring and managing HA clusters in these complex environments can be time-consuming and prone to human errors that increase the risk of catastrophic downtime and data loss. In this session, Brett Barwick, Senior Software Engineer of SIOS Technology Corp., and Tamara Astakhov, Sr. Partner Solution Architect for Big Data & Analytics at AWS, will discuss best practices for SAP high availability and how to achieve near-zero downtime. They will also share insights on requirements for disaster recovery for SAP and the benefits of the AWS cloud with SAP-Certified SIOS solutions to optimize your infrastructure with price, performance, and availability. Attend this webinar to: - Assess the business criticality of your SAP S4/HANA environments and determine the appropriate level of availability/ high availability/ DR needed in AWS. - Understand how to implement a clustering solution with wizard-driven application-specific configuration and management to eliminate the complexity. - Learn to create a clustering environment that will detect application operation-level downtime and orchestrate failover quickly and according to best practices. - Identify the disaster recovery strategies to implement for SAP.

Apr 8, 2021

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1 minute read

How to Post Real-Time Usage Decisions with the Automatic Usage Decision Functionality in SAP Quality Management Learn the necessary customizing steps and technical prerequisites to implement the automatic usage decision immediately after posting the results recording in SAP Quality Management (QM). Key Concept Usage decision is a key part of the SAP Quality Management (QM) module. As part of the SAP Customer Connection process, the usage decision was enhanced to be […]

Apr 17, 2017

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15 minute read

Use SAP Solution Manager’s Extensive Reporting Capabilities to Ensure Consistent Performance Across Your System Landscape Through Proactive Monitoring SAP/Solution Manager Learn about SAP Solution Manager 4.0’s reporting options and how to use them to ensure consistent performance across your system landscape. Key Concept SAP Solution Manager 4.0 includes a wide range of reporting options for generating technical and administrative information about your system landscape, including SAP EarlyWatch Alert Reporting, Service Reporting, EarlyWatch Alert […]

Mar 15, 2008

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24 minute read