ERP Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

An integrated concept of High Availability includes a dedicated focus on Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. True Disaster Recovery requires one or several standby application servers. Those servers should reside at a remote location and should be able to take over the responsibility of serving as database and application server in case of the loss of a complete datacenter. However, traditional implementations of Disaster Recovery solutions are facing serious restrictions such as distance limitations and network latency However, there is a much easier approach to cover Disaster Recovery requirements with BusinessShadow. Read more about Disaster Recovery here.

High Availability is more than just redundancy

High Availability of applications and databases is not to simply implement redundant hardware! That would be far too easy. Critical applications such as the mySAP Business suite (SAP R/3) or other Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications based on one or multiple relational databases require an integrated High Availability concept. High Availability does of course include protection against hardware failures but this can be easily covered by hardware redundancy. However, the true threat to today’s database and various ERP application environments are potential downtime incidents due to software and human errors and not hardware failure.

Traditional High Availability concepts such as RAID and cluster solutions are failing to cover disruptions of critical Enterprise Resource Planning systems caused by logical system failures. For example: if a SAP R/3 application database is becoming corrupt, the complete ERP environment – including the corruptness - is replicated throughout an entire redundant High Availability architecture. Or: a server cluster, which is offering High Availability for server hardware, cannot rebuild deleted system tables within a relational database. So far, the only way to cover software and human errors was, to rely solely on the last backup and recover data manually from e.g. tape. Still, High Availability based on manually restoring databases and applications is requiring massive intervention and hour-long downtime to rebuild business-critical ERP applications.

SAP R/3 High Availability – Our special solution for SAP customers

During the last couple of years we paid special attention to those of our customers working with the world’s leading Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution SAP R/3 (mySAP Business Suite). In addition, we are offering a dedicated version of our BusinessShadow software for the special needs of SAP R/3 customers which includes a SAP-certified interface. With an integrated concept of High Availability, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity we are protecting hundreds of critical SAP R/3 applications against hardware failures, human error, software failures and downtimes incidents due to a potential loss of the complete primary datacenter in charge of the SAP R/3 operation.

This integrated concept is including DBShadow to protect the customers’ critical SAP R/3 database (DB2 UDB, Oracle, Microsoft SQL-Server or MySQL MAXDB/SAPDB databases), FSShadow to protect critical files like such as the SAP R/3 user profiles or the SAP R/3 spool files and SwitchApplication to enable clients to switch their complete ERP application environment smoothly to a second server. More about SAP High Availability here.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery – Two projects. One solution

BusinessShadow is offering both – High Availability and Disaster Recovery. No expensive and complex cluster or Storage Area Network technology is required to have full application protection. The BusinessShadow solution is based on database and application layers instead of simply moving low-level storage blocks around in an ineffective way with questionable data consistency of the involved databases and applications. Without any distance limitation between production system and mirror system(s), every Business Continuity requirement for leading Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems such as SAP R/3 can be implemented with ease.