In this age of digital transformation, service availability is a business must – the costs to revenue and reputation are too high otherwise.
The top causes for unplanned system downtime are the same ones that have been around for years: software or operator errors; operating system, disk or host crashes; hardware or power failure; and data corruption.
While you might not be able to completely get rid of these issues, there are some important things you can do to minimize their effect on your SAP solutions and other business systems.
Eliminate single point of failure
Eliminating the single point of failure is the key – Single Point of Failure (SPOF) can be hardware or software; a loss of a runtime critical service components from Message Servers, Enqueue Servers, Central File Systems and Databases.
Through analysis, SPOFs can be eliminated or covered by failover services — and you can do this with a well-rounded strategy that focuses on preventing component downtime, maximizing service availability through clustering and live patching, reducing human mistakes, and finding the right provider of DR and HA solutions.
How to leverage open-source to create a sustainable and resilient business
SAP HANA has a business continuity architecture that replicates the in-memory data so administrators can initiate failover to a secondary backup in case of a primary system failure.
SUSE and SAP have been constantly working on improving the scalability and high availability of SAP HANA since 2011, so that customers can grow their deployments to include multiple nodes for system replication and application failover across multiple geographic locations.
Applications such as the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP enhances this capability by providing resource agents that automate that failover action. This means failover happens without needing an action from the administrator, so systems recover automatically while your IT team is focusing on other projects.
Increasing system uptime
Choosing the right infrastructure is critical. Regardless of your choice of server platform or cloud service provider, you need a system that provides the stability and availability features that will help reduce downtime.
OS security hardening can also help reduce downtime due to security issues. Securing the underlying OS is important because hackers often target the OS and not the database directly. As an added layer of protection, open source enterprise software SLES for SAP provides a rewall for SAP HANA systems. SUSE has a history of focusing on IT security, including an aggressive inter- national security certification program as well as an integrated antivirus solution for SAP environments.
From the operating system and HA features to the installation wizard and security features, you get one Linux solution that is optimized for both SAP HANA and SAP application servers that empowers you to do:
- Performance-optimized scale up
- Cost-optimized scale up
- Chain topology scale up
- Performance-optimized scale out
- Maximise Service Availability
Human error
The majority of unplanned downtime events can be tied to human error. Whether it is the result of lack of planning, lack of testing, lack of reactivity or proactivity actions, human error is also the most preventable. With infrastructure management solutions, you can get a single tool that can help you manage Linux systems across a variety of hardware architectures, hypervisors, containers and cloud platforms to reduce operational errors.
In the age of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CPNI (Customer Proprietary Network Information), customers expect their personal data, like buying history and payment information, to be protected. Ongoing security vulnerabilities from both hardware and OS’s are an unfortunate fact of life for IT organizations. It’s critical that these are dealt with swiftly and effectively to minimize risk to your business operations and your customer.
This post was sponsored, for more information on how you can achieve non-stop downtime, browse these resources here