High Availability and Disaster Recovery Infrastructure for SAP HANA

Running SAP HANA on IBM Systems offers customers a consistent platform for their HANA- based and traditional applications, best-in-class performance, resilience for critical workloads, and most flexible infrastructure. Existing IT assets – servers, storage, as well as skills and operation procedures – can easily be (re-)used leveraging the SAP HANA Tailored Data Center (TDI) concept, instead of enforcing additional investment into dedicated SAP HANA only appliances.

PowerM Solution :  IBM Power, SAP HANA, IBM Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms,IBM Spectrum Protect ,IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager (FCM) and  IBM SVC Stretched Cluster

1. Expected Customer Value

Delivering the reliability required by mission critical systems:

  • HANA needs 30 to 40x memory of conventional DBs – Power delivers comprehensive memory protection by default , not as an option
  • Historic fault resilience, dynamic component deallocation, on the fly repair and fault isolation are unmatched in open systems

Performance:

  • Packing more HANA throughput into few cores leaves room for other requirements, reduces datacenter footprint and environmental
  • Over 3x memory bandwidth, 8 threads per core deliver consistent HANA response time, even during Delta Merge processing

Flexibility:

  • Industry leading, low overhead virtualization included by default, not an option with high overhead and artificial constraints unsuitable for production workloads
  • Capacity on Demand
  • Partition isolation allowing prod, non-prod and HA to be intermixed

2- SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems

SAP HANA on POWER meets the customer requirements for a high degree of configurations and administration flexibility. The hardware assembly is a two folded process of a SAP sizing exercise and an IBM mapping effort

SAP HANA systems can be deployed exploiting PowerVM capabilities. This can lower the entry barrier for SAP HANA significantly, since test systems can be easily installed on a partition using available resources or Capacity Upgrade on Demand (CoD) capacity – there is no need to purchase dedicated hardware for SAP HANA on POWER.

From a technology perspective, IBM Power Systems are very well suited to provide excellent SAP HANA database performance and reliability. The port of the SAP HANA code to POWER architecture benefits from excellent memory bandwidth, SIMD parallelization, and Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) on POWER.

Figue 1: SAP HANA on IBM Power

SAP HANA on IBM Power Summary:

  • Analytics enable decision making, Suite on HANA runs the business: Power Systems delivers the non-stop operations required of these missions critical systems
  • Performance : HANA demands extreme memory and thread throughput: Power Systems delivers 4x threads, over 3x memory throughput compared to x86
  • Flexibility: Power Virtualization built in, not a poorly supported afterthought

3- SAP HANA system replication with IBM TSA

IBM Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms manages the availability of applications running on Linux and AIX clusters. It provides the following features:

Figue 2: SAP HANA system replication with IBM TSA

4- SAP HANA with IBM Spectrum Protect:

IBM Spectrum Protect for Enterprise Resource Planning  protects your vital SAP system data. It provides automated data protection designed for SAP and SAP HANA environments. Now you can improve the availability of your SAP database servers and reduce your administration workload.

IBM Spectrum Protect for Enterprise Resource Planning provides the following features::

  • Delivers business value by protecting SAP and SAP HANA data efficiently and consistently.
  • Helps increase productivity by reducing repetitive administrative tasks.
  • Enables SAP certified processes for heterogeneous environments.
  • Provides more efficient backup of very large SAP databases.
  • Integrates with database-specific utilities of IBM DB2® for Linux, UNIX and Windows, Oracle and SAP BR*Tools.

                                             Figure 3:  Storage HA with basic DR protection + IBM Spectrum Protect

5- IBM FlashCopy backup solution for SAP HANA:

To reduce the time for the SAP backup, the online backup can be combined with storage based backup via IBM FlashCopy. This can be achieved with IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager (FCM).

IBM FlashCopy with IBM FCM delivers high levels of protection for key applications and databases using advanced integrated application snapshot back- up and restore capabilities. It lets you perform and manage frequent, near- instant, non-disruptive, application-aware backups and restores using integrated application.

Figure 4:  IBM FlashCopy backup solution for SAP HANA

6- SAP HANA HA with IBM SVC Stretched Cluster:

The stretched cluster is an extended High Availability (HA) method supported by SAN Volume Controller to enable I/O operations to continue after the loss of half of the system. This is also sometimes referred to as a split cluster because one half of the cluster and I/O group is usually in a geographically distant location from the other; often 10 kilometers or more. A third site is required to host a controller that provides a quorum disk.

RELATED POST : Enhanced Stretched Cluster Architecture for Continuous Availability Platform

Figure 5: Storage HA setup with IBM SVC stretched cluster

7. Detailed reference architecture:

Need more information about this reference architecture? Send us email : [email protected]

8. Reference

  • IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller and Storwize V7000 Best Practices and Performance Guidelines SG24-7521-04
  • SAP HANA on IBM Power Servers and IBM System Storage Supplemental – IBM Installation Guide to the SAP HANA Master, Server Installation and Administration Guides
  • Implementing the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller with IBM Spectrum Virtualize V7.8 SG24-7933-05
  • IBM Spectrum Protect for Enterprise Resource Planning – All Requirements Documents
  • IBM Tivoli System Automation for Multi-platforms Installation and Configuration Guide V3.1
  • IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager Version 4.1 Documentation