SAP AG introduced new high availability and disaster recovery functionality with SAP Sybase Replication Server for SAP Business Suite software running on SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP Sybase ASE). The low impact, warm standby solution uses database replication software for high-speed transaction log replication that enables real-time failover to a secondary site and failback to the primary site when operation is restored.
“After only a year and a quarter supporting the Business Suite, ASE has already garnered about 2,000 customer installations. This easily provides that near zero-downtime for HA/DR that is non-intrusive to the system using Replication Server as the key enabling technology,” said Dan Lahl, vice president, Database Product Marketing, SAP, in an interview with 5 Minute Briefing.
Benefits of New Functionality
The new functionality helps customers with SAP Business Suite applications running on SAP Sybase ASE avoid the cost and business risks of downtime during system disruptions, such as database upgrades, hardware failure, power outages, natural disaster or human error. SAP says this capability is achieved without disruption or impact to performance for Business Suite production environments based on an extensible architecture rather than simply automating database transaction log backup and restore.
Log-based transactional replication technology in SAP Sybase Replication Server creates a secondary site or multiple secondary sites at any distance from the primary site without degrading the performance of the primary site, keeping the data safe while enabling it to be where an organization needs it to be. The technology enables users to distribute and synchronize data across geographies to multiple systems, provide real-time availability of application data for reporting servers and data warehouses and migrate data to new databases, hardware or OS platforms, all while supporting industry regulations requiring strict transaction tracking.
Scalability and Resiliency
“ASE and Rep Server have been scalability- and resiliency-proven on Wall St. for the last 20 years. We developed Replication Server with Goldman Sachs back in ’93 and we have had numerous occasions – 9/11 being just one example – of failovers for disaster recovery in very, very short time periods, all of those from New York to remote sites, whether that be New Jersey or other places on the East Coast,” says Lahl.
With SAP Sybase Replication Server, Business Suite customers running applications on ASE now have the ability to easily create an integrated, highly available environment that allows them to continue to operate at full speed while mission-critical business data is synchronized continuously to a warm standby, enabling a near-zero downtime environment, should the production system fail.
Beyond HA/DR, says Lahl, SAP sees Replication Server being used for many use cases, including real time analytics, with transactional data pushed into either HANA or IQ in real time and then reported on in real time; for sharing distributing and consolidating information across data centers; as well as offloading transactional and batch workloads for ODS (operational data store) reporting.
The new active standby support for Business Suite on ASE is available immediately for both new and existing SAP Sybase ASE Runtime customers at no additional cost.