Trust SUSE for maximizing SAP system availability! (Part 2 of 2)

Continuous uptime for SAP systems is now achievable with SUSE!

Guest Blog by : Sivakumar Varadananjayan, Cognizant

Part1 of this series: “How to maximize your SAP System availability by using SUSE ”- provides a view on how SUSE helps in achieving continuous uptime and also a step by step guide to SAP S/4HANA High Availability Design.

Your enterprise needs a choice of where to run its solutions and what can be better than SUSE. The Open Open Source Company,SUSE delivers capabilities for you to maintain your business continuity and increase the uptime for your SAP services. Scroll down to learn more.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications (SLES for SAP)

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is the number-one Linux platform for SAP in a physical, virtualized, private or public cloud environment. It is the preferred Linux platform of SAP and for more than 30,000 customers.

SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP Applications delivers more than a Linux operating system by combining products and services like:

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
• SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension
• SAP HA Resource Agents
• Performance Optimization Tools
• Built-in Firewall and Encryption Management
• End-to-End Installation Framework
• 5 years support for each Service Pack
• Integrated 24×7 support with one-call support for application and operating system through SAP Solution Manager

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension

An integrated clustering solution, SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, enables compliance with business continuity requirements. It helps reduce downtime with the flexibility to configure and deploy your choice of multiple high availability / disaster recover scenarios for SAP HANA and applications.

It supports multiple SAP HANA cluster scenarios:

• Performance Optimized
• Cost Optimized
• Multitenant Database Containers (MDC)
• Multi-Tier / Chained
• Scale-Out Cluster
• Multi-Target Cluster

SAP SUSE Cluster Connector

The SAP SUSE Cluster Connector ( sap-suse-cluster-connector ) integrates the SUSE High Availability cluster with  the SAP control framework. The current version of sap-suse-cluster-connector implements the API version 3 for the communication between the cluster framework and the sapstartsrv service.

The latest sap-suse-cluster-connector supports features like:

• SAP Rolling Kernel Switch (RKS)
• Migration of ASCS
• Maintenance mode of cluster resources triggered from SAP tools

Avoid Unplanned Downtime

Maintaining system security is very important for mission-critical SAP systems, but so is maintaining uptime. Patches to fix kernel security vulnerabilities usually require downtime to reboot the server. But for mission critical SAP HANA systems even few minutes planned downtime is not acceptable by business.

Live Kernel Patching using SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching

SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching allows you to perform live Linux kernel patching for stability and security issues, all without rebooting. No interruption, no downtime. That means it reduces the lengthy downtime of recovering huge in-memory databases like SAP HANA. Even better, it works independently from the applications that run on top, so you can use it on an SAP application server or on SAP HANA or other databases.

Manage and Monitor your SAP infrastructure

In any data center operation, manual processes to configure, monitor, update and patch servers can be time-consuming, labor-intensive and error-prone. Automated Linux server management and monitoring with SUSE Manager reduces administrative effort, increases productivity and reduces outages.

SUSE Manager

SUSE Manager is the best open source solution to manage Linux system configuration and compliance across all Enterprise Linux distributions and CentOS.

SUSE Manager provides:

• A single centralized console to manage Linux systems independent of hardware architecture, hypervisors, containers, cloud platforms and IoT devices.
• Comprehensive monitoring for SAP systems including clusters, SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver with customized dashboards, all built using Prometheus and Grafana
• Automated deployment of SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver workloads, including cluster configuration, using Salt
• Content Lifecycle Management to manage patching of SAP systems

SUSE Manager helps reduce significant cost and complexity by automating management tasks for SAP and non-SAP Applications. It helps you get an early warning on potential server performance issues and helps in reducing incidents that can adversely impact uptimes.

In Summary

SUSE is playing a critical role in assuring maximum system availability, minimizing incidents and supporting automation for all Enterprise Application management. That’s the reason why customers are selecting SUSE as a partner for SAP deployments on Public Cloud.

Thanks for reading!

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