Real-Time with Less Downtime: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SAP HANA

The information demands of today’s organizations are, in a sense, limitless. Access to more data, faster, and in more usable formats is the new standard—and for good reason. This big data holds insights that can let enterprises act more surely and quickly…and even create new opportunities. This model of instant access to information is often referred to as the real-time enterprise.

Just as importantly, IT systems and the information they provide have to be available. High availability (HA) has been an important metric for a long time and has been supported by numerous hardware and software solutions over the years. However, the definition has gotten tighter as the digital, always-on economy has become more pervasive. Hence the term “five-nines,” (i.e. 99.999 percent uptime) has become commonplace.

Real-time is good, it's cool, and it enables the future. But uptime is a requirement. So one question that business and technical leaders need to answer before moving to a modern database platform is “what are the trade-offs, if any, between real-time and uptime?”

Getting Real (time) with a Modern Database Platform

The datacenter has become the epicentre for the modern enterprise, but legacy systems were not built to handle the volume and variety of data pouring in. While numerous approaches have been layered on top of the traditional database, reporting can remain slow and inflexible, while managing these systems has gotten more and more complex.

SAP HANA running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA is an enterprise scale, in-memory platform that can transform your business into a real-time enterprise—giving you the performance and the tools to help move your business forward:

• Performance— Both SAP HANA and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA are built for speed, allowing you to process data and provide insights much faster. You can see trends and opportunities, query data from across the enterprise, and more quickly access the granular data behind the trends.

• Innovation—This platform has innovation built-in with a robust development and deployment environment and advanced analytics packages for predictive, spatial, text, and more. These tools can allow you to unlock the value of your data in new ways.

• TCO to love—Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA offers low total cost of ownership (TCO) and reliability and stability have made it a market leader. SAP HANA simplifies your landscape (eliminating redundant systems) and data management overhead (no need for data structures to improve analytics).

OK, so the real-time benefits look promising, but what about uptime?an>

Maintaining High Availability

SAP HANA running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA provides more stability and availability based on each solution’s strengths and by integrating their complementary technologies to provide high availability with automatic, real-time failover that can help to provide continuous uptime.

SAP HANA supports a full range of HA and disaster recovery (DR) solutions to support both scale up and scale out scenarios. SAP HANA also offers several key enhancements, such as 1-to-n asynchronous table replication, streamlined log based replication, and enhanced auto-host failover for dynamic tiering. These capabilities further establish SAP HANA as a solid platform for running mission-critical applications for high availability.

Better Together— Driving Towards Continuous Availability

For availability in scale-up environments, SAP HANA system replication employs a secondary system with a standby node for each primary node. The replication feature uses auto-host failover for dynamic tiering and incremental backups to help reduce system downtime and facilitate business continuity across the enterprise.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA with High Availability automates the native SAP HANA system replication through the Pacemaker cluster management software. Pacemaker maintains application availability in the event of a failure by monitoring and ensuring that backup nodes come on line when the primary system is interrupted. For a detailed technical description, see the guide at: https://access.redhat.com/articles/1466063.

Moving to the world of real-time computing may not require trade-offs in terms of the uptime your organization needs. Visit http://www.redhat.com/sap for more information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SAP HANA.