High availability is critical to many businesses that can’t afford any downtime. They need redundancy built into the applications themselves so that they can automatically recover in a matter of minutes.

“High availability is a four nines implementation. Four nines mean 99.99% uptime and that translates to no more than 58 minutes a year and no data loss,” said Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS Technology Corp.

SIOS specializes in IT Resilience through intelligent application availability. It’s the first provider of Linux clustering services.

SIOS recently announced the latest releases of SIOS LifeKeeper 9.4 and SIOS DataKeeper 9.4, at the SAP TechEd event. SIOS integrates with SAP to deliver overall availability protection through automation of setup, monitoring, and failure management within SAP environments.

What’s New?

Now customers using SAP ENSA2/ER2 can use any number of nodes in their cluster configuration, dramatically increasing the reliability of their SAP systems.

“SIOS LifeKeeper has built-in tools to ensure SAP best practices are followed to deliver maximum availability. In the event of a failover, LifeKeeper automatically migrates the ERS resource hierarchy to an available node if the ERS and ASCS instances are running on the same system,” explained Frank Jablonski, VP, Global Marketing, SIOS Technology.

Jablonski further explained that this eliminates the need for an Admin to manually relocate the ERS hierarchy and provides redundancy for the lock table data across cluster nodes in the event of a failure. New user interface enhancements make it much easier to access information regarding ASCS/ERS behavior, such as the status of the lock table replication, directly from the LifeKeeper user interface. Customers can administer their SAP systems using SAP GUI or SAP MMC/MC. All administrative actions are redirected back through LifeKeeper to keep the cluster resource states up to date.

This certification recognizes that SIOS provides proven technology and deep expertise in delivering High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) for SAP in physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Tightly integrated with SAP S/4HANA, this new release delivers features that simplify overall management and increase overall availability protection through automation of setup, monitoring, and failure management within SAP environments.

HA is critical to SAP customers

“SAP is a highly complex system that touches every organization in a company. If SAP is unavailable, the entire company stops, making availability a very important part of an SAP environment,” said Jablonski.

SIOS follows SAP best practices for architecting the layout of SAP solutions for maximum availability. HANA does not provide an automated failover capability. SIOS provides this automated failover and ensures that SAP best practices are followed in the process and resulting configuration. SAP is built up of many different components and SIOS provides HA for all those components, ensuring maximum availability of the customer’s critical business applications.

To simplify and accelerate the deployment of high availability clusters in the cloud, SIOS provides Automated Deployment Templates. “Automated deployment templates are wizard-based and allow the user to input some basic information for their SAP S/4HANA environment and perform a customized installation. It checks the user input to validate the information and eliminate errors. This can save the user weeks of work compared to manual setup and configuration requirements,” said Jablonski.

These templates enable easy creation of a SIOS SAP cluster and provide complete Step-by-Step guides for AWS environments, and Red Hat and SUSE operating systems. Deployment templates and Step-by-Step guides for Azure will follow in November.

SIOS makes it easy for a company to get started with high availability. Quickstart guides are available which provide step-by-step instructions for installing SIOS software on Linux cloud platforms with SAP. Automated deployment templates are wizard-based and allow the user to input some basic information for their SAP S/4HANA environment and perform a customized installation. It checks the user input to validate the information and eliminate errors. This can save the user weeks of work compared to manual setup and configuration requirements.

Typical clustering solutions use a shared storage cluster configuration to deliver high availability, which is not available in the cloud. SIOS uniquely provides the ability to create a clustered HA solution in the cloud, without shared storage, ensuring data protection between two separate servers. SIOS DataKeeper continuously replicates changed data between systems in different cloud availability zones and regions, while SIOS LifeKeeper monitors critical SAP system services to ensure availability of SAP applications. If an outage occurs and the services cannot be recovered, SIOS LifeKeeper will automatically orchestrate a failover to the standby systems.

SAP Certification

The SIOS Competence Center team at Computer Concept in Dresden worked closely with the SIOS team and AWS to achieve SAP certification.

SIOS had to meet the strict criteria to get this certification. “The SAP setup has to be based on the ABAP platform 1809 or higher in a 2+ cluster node configuration using the new Enqueque 2 (ENSA2) service. The tests are similar to the NW-HA-CLU 750 (for NetWeaver) but must demonstrate that 2- and n-nodes clusters are handled well. Additionally, it must be demonstrated that the ER2 moves correctly in the case of a hardware or operating system failure,” said Jablonski.

This certification ensures customers that SIOS has been thoroughly tested by SAP to work with SAP S/4HANA and meet SAP’s standards for providing high availability for SAP environments.

SIOS LifeKeeper 9.4 and DataKeeper 9.4 are immediately available in the SIOS Protection Suite for Linux. Customers can now license SIOS Protection Suites on an annual subscription basis to better align with SAP solutions and cloud deployments.