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Author's profile photo Haroon Shahzad

SAP Services on the Cloud with High Availability and 100% uptime

Cloud computing’s infrastructure makes possible for enterprise software solutions like SAP to run in high performance hosting environments and to handle much higher loads compared to the stand-alone servers and traditional clusters.

Probably the best Cloud computing platform on the market is VMware. It virtualization platform is used by the biggest financial institutions. If anyone needs to host and provide SAP solutions from an infrastructure build with the VMware standards, VMware VSPP accredited Cloud service providers like HCE are an excellent option.

They are at least three good reasons to create a Cloud-based dedicated SAP infrastructure with any company that offers VMware base infrastructure.

High Availability SAP on the Cloud

The cloud providers who use VMware virtualization platform can deliver “out-of-the-box” High Availability SAP infrastructure with a maximum uptime with automatic restart and failover. High Availability (HA) is a service that will monitor the cloud servers used to deliver SAP-based solutions to detect any failure on the underlying physical hosts or Operating System failures inside the cloud servers. If any outage is detected on any server, the HA function restarts the machine on another physical host, part of the cloud infrastructure. All the SAP-based operations resume automatically and all services that run on the cloud server return online. There is no need to reboot the server manually.

The fallouts of a system that can run downtime in case of failure can be disastrous for a firm that’s into real-time data crunching, as often financial institutions are indulging in. On top of this, the elimination of manual inputs into the system allows for greater efficiency to go into the system, thereby allowing for much better reliability than otherwise could be accounted for.

Continuous Availability – 100% Uptime for SAP based operations?

It is possible through a service called Automated Fault-Tolerance. It eliminates the risk of a service outage. Unlike the High Availability, which reduces any service outage, the Automated Fault-Tolerance function will provide continuous availability for the SAP applications in an event of cloud server failure.

Automated Fault Tolerance creates a live shadow Failover instance, which is synchronized and up-to-date with the primary Cloud server which runs the SAP based services. In an event of a hardware outage or an OS failure, the AFT automatically starts the failover Cloud server and completely eliminates any service interruptions. This is a zero downtime service for SAP and other application service environments. This failover service also prevents data loss on the operational setups and during the process of the host to host migration live workloads. Beautiful, isn’t it?

Cross-Platform Maneuverability and Data Protection:

VMWare can allow you to easily perform cross functionality without worrying for any data loss, a primary concern of organizations that indulge in financial undertakings. A risk of data loss of any scale can be quite a nightmare, making firms apprehensive of performing advantageous acts like data transfers of live loads from one host to another. This can result in lethargy that VMWare offers an easy solution for.  The ability of this platform to perform this task without any inherent data loss or even embedding forced down time can allow for greater flexibility.

On top of this, VMWare offers greater protection for all sorts of data through newer, more coherent methods. Abilities like NSX security hardening and the allowance for creating single security architecture are only available through VMWare.

And although, things like easier data transfers from host to host and having hardened security doesn’t look like it contributes much towards keeping the system up and running thereby maintaining a 100% uptime rate, even supporting acts likes these are incredibly important to support the functionality and uptime of your system. Firms don’t just keep their data in one place.

Transfers are bound to happen, so VMWare offers cover even for that, ensuring that no downtime or data loss is experienced at all when such an act is planned to take place or becomes necessary.

Security also plays a crucial role here in maintain 100% uptime, since a data breach or similar security fallacies can wreak havoc on the system. Even if the system is running well, a breach can mandate a shutdown, resulting in forced downtime. VMWare is perhaps the best solution for not just financial, but all firms looking to maintain a running system that can deliver with zero downtime issues.

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