Jump to content

LifeKeeper Protection Suite for SAP Disaster Recovery

SteelEye Technology delivers business continuity software for SAP disaster recovery.

The LifeKeeper Protection Suite for SAP provides a comprehensive set of tools to address all areas of SAP business continuity, including SAP data protection, SAP high availability, and SAP disaster recovery. LifeKeeper for SAP was the first commercially available clustering solution for SAP on Linux and continues to be the leader in both the breadth and depth of SAP protection with the latest version of LifeKeeper supporting SAP R/3 4.6C, SAP R/3 4.7, SAP NetWeaver 2004, and SAP NetWeaver 2004s).

SAP Data Protection

SAP NetWeaver and earlier versions have no native method to provide protection of SAP data. The databases the SAP use to store its data provide native tools that can be difficult to manage and many times do not meet all of your SAP data protection requirements. The LifeKeeper Protection Suite for SAP includes SteelEye Data Replication, which provides the "3 R's of SAP Data Protection: Replicate, Rewind and Recover"

Replicate

SteelEye Data Replication is the real-time synchronous or asynchronous data replication engine that assures your SAP data is safely replicated to one or more targets across a LAN or WAN. SAP file systems (which contain SAP profiles, executables, etc.), the database data files, log files, and archive log files can all be replicated, guaranteeing you the highest level of recoverability.

Rewind

SteelEye Data Replication provides true CDP functionality as defined by SNIA, including any point in time rewind on the target system. Using the integrated Data Recovery Wizard, administrators have the ability to easily rewind the SAP file systems and database to any point in time, providing another level of data protection in the event of file system or database corruption, virus outbreak, user error, etc.

SAP Recovery

The SAP data recovery process can be completely automated, as is the case in LifeKeeper HA clusters, or can be triggered in manual fashion as is often the case in LifeKeeper Disaster Recovery configurations. Either way, SAP recovery takes just a few minutes and involves a very simple process where LifeKeeper unlocks the target drives and starts the database and SAP. When you are ready to bring the original SAP server back into service, the switchback process involves a simple push of a button to initiate the recovery.

SAP Disaster Recovery

SAP recovery in the event of a complete site loss is often the worse nightmare of an SAP administrator. The SAP recovery process takes much time and planning and is generally very hard to test. In addition to the downtime involved, the recovery could involve a significant amount of data loss due to the fact that the databases need to be restored from the latest available backup. Using The LifeKeeper Protection Suite for SAP, you are able to easily and quickly resume operations in the event of a disaster with little to no data loss.

WAN Optimized Replication

SteelEye Data Replication is optimized for replication across WAN links. Having nine levels of compression allows you to customize your environment to get the best WAN efficiency, host workload and data throughput. In addition, SteelEye Data Replication is architected is such a way that it is already optimized for the WAN, therefore the use of hardware based WAN accelerators is not necessary to achieve optimal throughput, regardless of the speed or latency of the WAN link.

Unattended or Manual Failover

Disasters can strike anytime, anywhere. Some disasters are localized to a particular room or building, and others are more regional in nature. In times of disaster, it is not always possible to have every staff member available to assist in the recovery process. To help you guarantee SAP recovery regardless of who is available, the LifeKeeper Protection Suite for SAP can be configured in one of two ways: unattended or manual recovery.

When configured with unattended or "automatic" failover, a prolonged outage of the primary site would automatically trigger SAP recovery in the DR site with no intervention. For those who want more control over when your DR site comes into service, automatic failover can be disabled and manual recovery can initiate with a simple push of the button in the LifeKeeper GUI.

Automated DR Testing

Having a disaster recovery plan in place is only half the solution. It is important that this plan be tested on a regular basis. The LifeKeeper Protection Suite for SAP allows administrators to easily switch SAP to the DR site for testing purposes and then easily switch SAP back to the primary site when testing is done.

Alternatively, you may wish to leave SAP in service in the primary site while still completing DR testing. In this case, you can simply unlock the target data, bring SAP into service on the backup system and using the tools provided by LifeKeeper, simply redirect a single test user or subset of users to verify recovery. This method allows you to confirm the recoverability of SAP, with minimal impact to your production network.

SAP High Availability

Proactive Monitoring of Resources

LifeKeeper actively monitors and protects all resources required SAP, including volumes or file systems, file shares or NFS, IP, the database (Oracle, DB2, MaxDB, or MS SQL Server) and SAP itself.

LifeKeeper's active monitoring helps to ensure the highest level of availability; going beyond just checking whether the server is alive, as seen in many other products. LifeKeeper also verifies that SAP is running, file shares or NFS exports are available, and databases are mounted and available and that clients are able to connect.

Protection of additional SAP Components

The LifeKeeper Protection Suite for SAP provides the user the ability to not only protect SAP, but also any other SAP or third-party applications that may be dependent upon the SAP system. Using the LifeKeeper Generic Application recovery kit and the sample recovery scripts, LifeKeeper provides complete protection for your entire SAP infrastructure.

Flexible Configurations

LifeKeeper for SAP server can be configured in any one of the following configurations:

  • Replicated or shared storage clustering
  • 2-node active/passive cluster
  • N+1 cluster (multiple active with single backup)
  • Cascading failover (up to 32 nodes)
  • Cross subnet clustering supported (failover across data centers)