Our Problems
I'm working for FIT Consulting for more than 12 years and what makes us different is mainly we're doing/testing (installation, upgrade, migration) something in our office before we do it on customer sites.
For this purposes, we've 2 enterprise servers (1 is HP DL580, other is Fujitsu RX600) and we use VMWARE and Hyper-V technologies to setup many virtual systems as required. We also setup system room, with climate control system and an external NAS backup device.
But, we forget one important thing: Electricity 🙂
Next to our office building, Istanbul Municipality is building the Subway station which is causing electricity outage for more than 2 years and still not finished. UPS only helps us to safely shutdown the servers and we don't have power generator.
This is the problem with availability.
On the other hand, when we need to install a demo system we require the Disk Space, RAM, CPU and installation of Operating Sytem as soon as possible.
But it is not easy to find space as we only use local disks. And installing an OS takes more than 2 hours.
On the other hand, mission-critical system availability and backup is still problem in our environment.
Here is the brief list of our headaches:
- Availability
- Performance
- Scalability
- Backup
- Redundancy
Solution
We started to use Amazon AWS (Cloud based Service and Platform Provider) 3 years before. At that time, cloud was new to market and even most of the IT ecosystem doesn't know what is it.
In first year, we just used the landscape to test the installation possibilities of SAP systems on Cloud.
But, now we installed most of our SAP and NON-SAP systems on Amazon AWS EC2 Instances.
Here is the our AWS System Landscape:
Brief info about the used services is as follow:
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. You can choose your server requirement in CPU and RAM Sizes and can add and remove unlimited number/size of disks on-the-fly to the servers.
When your CPU power is not enough, you can stop the server and start the disks on a new, more powerful servers.
You pay for used hours of servers.
So, for demo, test, training systems, start the system when required, then shutdown when you finished your jobs. And only pay for the hours it is used.
There are 7 regions in map which they provide EC2 service. So, choose the closest one (we're using the EU West-Ireland region).
Also, 2 types of instances can be used. The spot and on-demand instances are created and charged a little bit more than the Reserved ones. For Reserved Instances, you're paying a startup fee to allocate a server for 1 or 3 years and paying less for hourly.
It is possible to attach a real IP address and apply a Security Rules for each instance seperately of in group.
Activating an EC2 instance takes 15 minutes. Your SAP Server is ready to install in 15 minutes, isn't it amazing?
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes are off-instance storage that persists independently from the life of an instance.
You can create unlimited number of disks in almost in unlimited sizes and attach/detach to/from your EC2 instances on-the-fly.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.
We used Cloudberry Labs "CloudBerry Backup Server Edition" software solution to schedule the backups of systems from EC2 to S3 volumes.
The tool provides, scheduling, versioning, retention, compression, encryption options for backups. It also emails you about the backup run status.
More information can be found at their site http://www.cloudberrylab.com/
Result
By using Amazon AWS solutions, our problems are solved as follow:
Availability > EC2 instances
Performance > EC2 instances
Scalability > EC2 instances
Backup > S3
Redundancy > EC2 & S3
I'll share more about other Amazon Services in near future.
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