Live Patching is cool – especially for SAP customers!

The one thing I constantly hear is that SAP is one of those applications that nobody wants to bring down – ever! We run it internally and it’s constantly in use. If it ever went down, I know it would cause quite a bit of pain for many people on my team. But if you think of how critical SAP must be for a company like BMW, you can instantly imagine the financial impact of any downtime.

Unfortunately though, it seems that planned downtime is a necessary evil even for the most important applications. In fact, we conducted a survey and found that 66% of respondents said they implemented planned downtime at least once a quarter. I mean, there’s never a good time to do it in today’s 24X7X365 global business – but server kernels need to be patched to run efficiently and securely so you have to sometimes – right?

Well no – not now! SUSE’s kGraft technology actually allows you to keep SAP running while you make critical patches. How? As my colleague, Hannes Kuehnemund explained for Sean Michael’s post on serverwatch, ‘we do not install a new kernel; we patch the most severe security flaws of the running kernel so there is no interruption of the application, be it SAP HANA, SAP NetWeaver or anything else…’

This product is so cool it actually makes me quite excited. And if you want to watch an entertaining ChalkTalk to explain how it works – see here https://www.suse.com/products/live-patching

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