Fail-Safe Operation of SAP HANA®: SUSE Extends Its High-Availability Solution

“SAP customers invest in SAP HANA” is the conclusion reached by a recent market study carried out by Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC). In Germany alone, half of companies expect SAP HANA to become the dominant database platform in the SAP environment. In many cases, the “SAP Business Suite® powered by SAP HANA” scenario is already being discussed in concrete terms.

Naturally, SUSE is also accommodating this development by providing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications – the recommended and supported operating system for SAP HANA. In close collaboration with SAP and hardware partners, therefore, SUSE will provide two resource agents for customers to ensure the high availability of SAP HANA system replications.

Two Replication Scenarios

The current initial phase of the project includes the architecture and development of scale-up scenarios, which will be tested together with SAP in the coming weeks. System replication will help to replicate the database data from one computer to another computer in order to compensate for database failures (single-box replication). This is to be followed by a second project phase involving an extension for scale-out scenarios (multibox replication). With this mode of operation, internal SAP HANA high-availability (HA) mechanisms and the resource agent must work together or be coordinated with each other.

SUSE implements these scenarios with the SAPHana resource agent (RA), which performs the actual check of the SAP HANA database instances and is configured as a master/slave resource. In a scale-up scenario, the master assumes responsibility for the SAP HANA databases running in primary mode, and the slave is responsible for instances that are operated in synchronous (secondary) status.

To make configuring the cluster as simple as possible, SUSE also developed its SAPHanaTopology resource agent. This runs on all nodes of an SLE 11 HAE cluster and gathers information about the statuses and configurations of SAP HANA system replications. It was designed as a normal (stateless) clone.

Customers Receive Complete Package

With both the SAPHana and SAPHanaTopology resource agents, customers will therefore be able to integrate SAP HANA system replications in their cluster. This has the advantage of enabling companies to use not only their business-critical SAP systems but also their SAP HANA databases without interruption while noticeably reducing their budgets. SUSE provides the extended solution together with best practices documentation. 

SAP and hardware partners who do not have their own SAP HANA high-availability solution will also benefit from this new SUSE Linux development.

Source: scn.sap.com