How SUSE and Intel® Help Enterprises Achieve High Availability When Migrating to SAP S/4 HANA

Migrating to SAP S/4 HANA – Background

The migration from your SAP legacy system to S/4 HANA brings a lot of benefits due to its tight integration with the HANA database.  However, it also brings its challenges, particularly as you implement your availability requirements with the new application infrastructure stack.

Certainly, the SAP system features built-in intelligent technologies including AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics. And yes, it helps enterprises adopt new business models, manage business change at speed, orchestrate internal and external resources, and use the predictive power of AI.

But a challenge of migrating to SAP S/4HANA is maintaining high availability—during the move and afterwards. However, achieving high availability is more than a possibility because of the many ways SUSE and Intel® collaborate to help enterprises along their migration paths.

SUSE provides many ways to avoid downtime and achieve non-stop IT

Automated system fail-over and recovery is one way SUSE helps enterprises achieve high availability, with automated system fail-over and recovery. In any SAP S/4HANA migration, the more steps that can be automated, the more likely it is that downtime will be minimized.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching helps organizations implement multiple SUSE Linux Enterprise Server kernel fixes on the fly — without interruption, without a reboot for up to a year, and with zero downtime. Both these solutions are included with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications subscriptions.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server High Availability Extension improves service uptime. This integrated suite of open-source clustering technologies helps organizations maintain business continuity, protect data integrity, and reduce unplanned downtime for mission-critical Linux workloads. It enables enterprises to implement highly available physical and virtual Linux clusters, and eliminate single points of failure, ensuring the high availability and manageability of critical network resources including data, applications, and services.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server High Availability Extension ships with essential monitoring, messaging, and cluster resource management functionality, supporting failover, failback, and migration load balancing of individually managed cluster resources. It is included with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications subscriptions.

High availability takes the right mix of hardware and software technologies

Intel® scalable processors and Intel Optane persistent memory support high availability for SAP S/4HANA in physical and virtual Linux clusters. Intel® Xeon® scalable processors and Intel® Optane^TM persistent memory (PMem) enables customers to achieve larger scale-up configurations, since PMem carries a much lower price per gigabyte. The scale-up setup reduces the complexity of the environment and improves reliability. SAP HANA also uses Intel® Optane^TM PMem to persist data in memory. In the event of planned or unplanned downtime, the restart time of an SAP HANA system is significantly reduced. Combined with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Live Patching, your Availability and Resiliency is greatly improved.

In general Intel® Optane^TM PMem accelerates any reboot, and delivers a 75% faster recovery than on an all DRAM system. That means a reboot takes 35 minutes with Optane^TM PMem for a 7TB DB vs. 150 minutes with an all DRAM system.

SUSE Linux Enterprise utilize Intel Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) technologies for increased resiliency such as:

• Intel® Run Sure Technology: New enhancements deliver advanced Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) and server uptime for a company’s most critical workloads like SAP HANA. Hardware-assisted capabilities, including enhanced MCA and recovery and adaptive multidevice error correction, diagnose, and recover from previously fatal errors. And, they help ensure data integrity within the memory subsystem.
• Intel® Key Protection Technology (Intel® KPT) and Intel® Platform Trust Technology (Intel® PTT): Deliver hardware-enhanced platform security by providing efficient key and data protection at rest, in-use, and in-flight.
• Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel® TXT): Enhanced platform security, while providing simplified and scalable deployment for Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel® TXT).

SUSE and Intel^® collaborate to deliver high availability for SAP S/4HANA

Migrating to SAP S/4HANA, on-premises or in the cloud, is one thing. Keeping SAP services running optimally once migrated is another. Enterprises require a broad set of high availability scenarios to avoid downtime and achieve non-stop IT for their SAP services.

That’s one of the reasons both SUSE and Intel® have engineers located on-site at SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. They work with SAP engineers to ensure that both SUSE and Intel® Technologies are optimized and integrated into SAP S/4HANA on all supported Intel Xeon based server and cloud instances.

SUSE and Intel® are collaborating to ensure enterprises maintain high availability during and after their migrations to SAP S/4HANA.

For more information visit: www.suse.com/intel