Presentación

High Availability in an SAP Environment

Keep mission-critical SAP operations running no matter what.

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PA P E R

Your business depends on SAP. What happens if it Stops?
Your enterprise has embarked on a major project to implement an SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application. Approval for the project came only after a full executive review determined that it woulddeliver long-term efficiencies and productive growth for the enterprise. Once developed, installed and coordinated to re-engineer long-standing workflow processes, your enterprise can begin to reap the rewards. Inevitably, as time goes on, the software works its way deeper into the organization, operations come to depend increasingly upon it, and the ERP application becomes a critical factor in yourbottom line. Due to its integration into every aspect of your business, any lack of availability of the ERP application or its data represents a serious impediment in the way of your company’s effectively delivering world-class service and products to its clients. Given this growing dependency, the need to minimize your servers’ planned and unplanned downtime becomes paramount. Yet, to-date,neither the System i platform, nor SAP ERP software offer inherent protection against planned or unplanned downtime. Thus, taking additional steps to ensure high availability (HA) is now critically important for your company.



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W H I T E

PA P E R

Why is High Availability Important?
Simply stated, high availability is crucial because server outages can result in lostrevenue, increased costs and, therefore, reduced profits. For example, the Gartner Group determined that the typical outage at a Fortune 1000 company lasts, on average, for 4 hours, at an average cost of $0,000 per outage. The less your server is available to run your business, the less capital your company can generate from its operations. This loss of capital can result from missedopportunities, unclosed sales, shipments not delivered within a contractual period of time, incorrect or incomplete information for the company’s management to make critical strategic decisions, and ultimately poor customer satisfaction. With regard to an SAP ERP solution running on the IBM System i platform, the business parameters for ensuring HA are no different than for other platforms, including UNIXand Windows.
The less your server is available to run your business, the less capital your company can generate from its operations.

Planned outages, such as the following, account for a large portion of system downtime: • Backups that require that all users sign off from the system (also known as dedicated backup procedures) • Operating system and hardware upgrades • File reorganizationprocesses to purge old and deleted records • Batch jobs that require significant systems resources or that may require a static image of the database (which is simply a legacy issue) Unplanned outages are usually caused by: • Failure of system capabilities and capacities • Failure of the CPU or other non-resilient system components • Internal or external storage disk failure • Software failure resultingin application downtime • Human error causing disruption of the application or system • Natural disasters such as fires, earthquakes, tornados, or power outages If your operating environment has a single point of failure, any dedicated maintenance process stops the company’s operations if the organization has come to uterly depend on a fully integrated ERP application such as SAP. Keepingup-to-date with operating system changes and daily database backup processes is an IT audit necessity, required so that the company can restart its business on a replacement or recovery System i server should the primary server be shut down. Thus, IT departments are often caught in a conundrum. Planned downtime for daily backup processes, as well as for i5/OS CUMs, PTFs and upgrades, must occur to...