Written by Ralitza Deltcheva, Principal Architect Lead
This post was co-authored with Sherry Yu, Director of SAP Success Architect, SUSE.
In today’s business world, service availability and reliability are key to a successful digital transformation. Extensive downtime not only costs a business revenue and productivity, but may also cause reputational damage. SUSE and Microsoft have been working closely to provide a trusted path to SAP Solutions in the cloud, including solutions to reduce unplanned and planned downtime.
SUSE and Microsoft work together
SUSE is the leader in SAP Solutions, especially the developer of high availability (HA) solutions. HA Solutions are first tested, supported on-premises, and documented in the official configuration guides that are published on SUSE’s site. Microsoft tests the solutions in Azure’s infrastructure, tunes the settings and configurations, then releases Azure-specific HA configuration guides on Microsoft’s documentation site. Microsoft actively provides feedback and requests support for new scenarios from SUSE. The working process can be summarized in the chart below. It’s been a smooth collaboration between SUSE and Microsoft to support customers’ digital transformation journey.
Solutions to reduce unplanned downtime
High availability solutions—that can prevent 24/7 SAP systems from being disrupted by various issues caused by hardware, network, and applications—are commonly based on cluster technologies. Pacemaker is an open source cluster, used by various HA solutions.
For SAP HANA, the HA solutions are based on HANA System Replication (HSR). SUSE has developed resource agents to automate the failover of HANA System Replication in scale-up and scale-out scenarios.