openSAP

High Availability and Disaster Recovery with the

SAP HANA Platform
Week 01 Unit 01

00:00:09 Hello. My name is Prasad Illapani from SAP HANA Product Management and Strategy team
at SAP Labs America. I like to welcome you all to the open SAP course High Availability and
Disaster Recovery with the SAP HANA Platform.
00:00:23 This is the second course of the openSAP HANA Core Knowledge series and in the course,
we will be covering various operational topics
00:00:31 with the HANA platform as part of the data center integration.So let's talk about the structure
of the course where it will last for the next three weeks
00:00:41 and end with a final exam in the fourth week. We will have three units per course week.
00:00:47 During the first week, we're going to cover the topics like introduction, overview, setup
options in high availability and disaster recovery,
00:00:55 and backups within the platform.In the second week of the course, we will be covering the
topics on HANA system replication options
00:01:03 in details with their capabilities in reference to data center operations.In the third and final
course week,
00:01:11 we will cover the details of different options in backup and recovery for SAP HANA
platform.At the end of the fourth week, you will be taking the final exam.
00:01:19 The questions in the final exam will cover the content of the slides and my presentation of
the first three course weeks.
00:01:27 For better understanding and for system demonstration, I will show you system recorded
demos
00:01:32 and the links to the complete videos that are available on YouTube delivered by SAP HANA
Academy in the download section.
00:01:40 If you are interested in getting deeper and broader information on the topics of this
openSAP course, I would like to recommend you the SAP customer classroom training:
00:01:50 HA200 SAP HANA Installation & Operations.So let's get started with the content of the
first course of the unit week.
00:02:00 The topic is introduction to HA/DR. Enterprise customers managing their IT landscapes try
to make sure
00:02:11 to keep the systems' downtime as minimal as possible without affecting their businesses on
a day- to-day basis.
00:02:18 According to a DataXstream research article, "on an average, enterprises lose between
$84,000 and $108,000 for every hour of downtime".
00:02:29 Customers who are working on mission- critical applications consider a minimum system
downtime while designing their IT landscapes
00:02:37 so the end users can access their systems at any time, 24x7.In the next slide, we'll take a
look at the
00:02:49 SAP applications where we can differentiate the system downtimes at the application level
and also at the HANA database level for both planned and unplanned use case scenarios.
00:02:59 The slide here shows a list of examples for SAP ABAP applications and SAP HANA
platform areas
00:03:07 where customers can consider these examples into their IT infrastructure planning and
design for both planned and unplanned downtimes.

1
00:03:17 In the case of SAP HANA platform, both planned and unplanned downtime activities have to
be considered in order to accomplish
00:03:24 continuous availability of the systems to the end users for their day-to-day operations. From
a data center readiness perspective, the unplanned downtimes
00:03:36 for the system operations have to be prioritized to overcome not only from hardware and
software failures
00:03:42 but also from power outages and natural disasters as well.In this slide let's state the
definitions about high availability and disaster recovery.
00:03:54 Availability is defined as a measure of a system's operational continuity which is expressed
as a percentage of time, inversely proportional to downtime.
00:04:04 For example, if a system is designed to be available for 99.9%, which is three 9s, of the
time, the system downtime per year is less than 0.1%, or 9 hours.
00:04:17 Downtime is a consequence of outages, which may be planned (for example, system
upgrades)
00:04:23 or unplanned (for example, power failures, natural disasters), which finally brings down the
data center operations.
00:04:32 Fault recovery is the process of recovery and resuming system operations after an outage
in the data center due to a fault.
00:04:41 And then finally, disaster recovery is the process of recovering operations after an outage
due to a prolonged data center or site failure
00:04:50 which requires preparations to back up data over long distances.Now let's take a look at
what is Recovery Period Objective and Recovery Time Objective.
00:05:02 Let us find out more about them. In general, customers normally use two key measures
00:05:08 in order to specify the recovery parameters of their systems following an outage: Recovery
Period Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
00:05:21 Let's take a look at Recovery Period Objective which is defined as mainly the maximum
tolerable period of time
00:05:27 during which operational data is lost without any ability to recover.Recovery Time Objective
is the maximum permissible time it takes to recover the system
00:05:38 after an outage for operations to resume.In order to achieve fault tolerance, you have to
eliminate single points of failure by introducing redundancy.
00:05:50 SAP HANA platform appliance vendors deliver several levels of redundancy to avoid
outages due to various component failures.
00:06:00 Now let's take a look at hardware redundancy.SAP HANA appliance hardware vendors
design multiple layers of
00:06:08 redundant hardware components and sub- systems, which include redundant and hot-
swappable power supply units, fans, network interface cards,
00:06:19 error-correcting protected memories, etc.The second redundancy we're going to take a look
at is network redundancy.
00:06:29 To avoid network failures within the systems, network equipment and network connectivity
is required from affecting the system availability.
00:06:37 This is typically accomplished by deploying switch topology using the Spanning Tree
Protocol (STP) to avoid loops.
00:06:46 Another option is to use routers with the Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) for automatic
failover in case of a network failure.
00:06:56 And the third one is data center redundancy.Data center redundancy can be avoided with
SAP HANA platform solutions
00:07:03 where they are equipped with uninterrupted power supply (UPS), backup power generators,
and redundant cooling systems.
00:07:12 Apart from the hardware redundancies, SAP HANA platform also provides additional levels
of defense
00:07:21 against failure-related outages in the areas of software where it provides security
preconfigurations,
00:07:29 a watchdog function to automatically restart configured services in case of detected
stoppages.
00:07:37 In the area of persistence, SAP HANA provides persists transaction logs, savepoints, and
snapshots to support system restart and recovery from host failures.
00:07:49 And then finally, standby and failover where separate, dedicated standby hosts are used for
failover which improves the system availability
00:07:57 by significantly reducing the recovery time from an outage.With this I come to the end of the
first unit in course week 1.
Week 01 Unit 02

00:00:10 Welcome back to the openSAP course High Availability and Disaster Recovery with the
SAP HANA Platform. In the last unit, we have talked about high availability and disaster
recovery introduction
00:00:22 and now in this unit we will cover an overview of high availability and disaster recovery
support for SAP HANA platform areas.
00:00:30 As you all know that, SAP HANA is an in- memory platform supporting both OLTP and
OLAP applications,
00:00:37 taking advantage of the capabilities provided by modern hardware innovations which
increases the application performance,
00:00:44 where all the data from the database is kept in main memory and the data processing
operations are significantly accelerated.
00:00:53 SAP HANA platform can be distributed across many multiple hosts to achieve scalability in
terms of both data volume and user concurrency.
00:01:04 Unlike clusters, distributed HANA systems also distribute the data efficiently,
00:01:10 achieving high scalability without any inbound and outbound locks.What is high availability?
Let's take a look at the details here.
00:01:21 High availability is a set of techniques, engineering practices, for business continuity in
enterprises.
00:01:27 It is achieved by eliminating single points of failure, like fault tolerance, and providing the
ability to rapidly resume operations
00:01:39 after a system outage with minimal business loss, which is referred as fault resilience.
00:01:46 Customers commonly use two key measures to specify the recovery parameters of a
system following an outage.The first one, Recovery Period Objective, is defined as the
maximal permissible period of time
00:01:59 during which operational data may be lost without ability to recover like, for example, the
time between the last backup and the crash.
00:02:09 The second parameter is the Recovery Time Objective which is defined as the maximal
permissible time it takes to recover the system
00:02:19 so that the operations can resume after a failure.From a data reliability perspective, the
different phases of SAP HANA platform
00:02:27 high availability are as follows: prepare, detect, recover, and failback. The first phase,
prepare, is the readiness being prepared for the inevitable fault in the system.
00:02:40 During the planning stage, business needs are evaluated against the cost and complexity of
the different solutions.
00:02:48 Prevention and preparation for high availability includes the selection of hardware and
installation and configuration of redundant components, standby systems, and replication.
00:02:58 During this time, the data is backed up and standby systems are ready to take over in the
event of an outage.In the failure detection which involves the integration within existing
network/system monitoring
00:03:12 and management systems that provide fault indicators via alarms and other messages. A
fault is detected either automatically or administratively
00:03:22 and a recovery process is put into action. In the recovery phase, based upon the selected
high-availability solution,
00:03:31 recovery from failures may be automatic or manual.Finally, during the failback phase, the
fault must be repaired
00:03:39 and the system must be reverted to the original configuration to be ready again for the next
fault.
00:03:47 Let's take a look at the high availability support within SAP HANA platform. SAP HANA high
availability solutions address all major faults
00:03:56 for example, operating system crash, software errors, data corruption, disk crash,
component failures, host crash (for example, general hardware faults),
00:04:08 intermittent memory errors, power outage, cooling failure and network faults, etc. In
addition, SAP HANA platform also provides recovery solutions
00:04:19 in case of entire data center failures, for example, disasters where these solutions are used
to manage planned downtimes and software upgrades.
00:04:29 From a business continuity perspective, SAP HANA platform offers the following solutions
with reference to a downtime business scenario:
00:04:38 System Replication, offering business continuity for planned downtime, software fault, host
crash, or disaster.
00:04:47 The second one is Storage Replication, which offers business resumption after a disaster,
recovery from local storage corruption.
00:04:56 The third one is a persistence for restart from software fault, power outage, or host
crash.The next one is called Backups and offers recovery from storage or data corruption,
host crash, or disaster.
00:05:10 Host Auto-Failover where the solution offers automatic recovery from software fault or host
crash.The next one, Service Auto-Restart, offers automatic recovery from software fault.
00:05:23 SAP HANA platform offers complementary design options, including three levels of disaster
recovery support
00:05:29 and two automatic fault recovery support capabilities from a Recovery Period Objective and
Recovery Time Objective perspective,
00:05:38 summarized in the table here. The mission-critical application systems are expected to
operate with an RPO of zero data loss.
00:05:48 In the case of local faults or disasters, the tradeoff decisions are mainly around the
attributes of fault recovery functionality, cost, and complexity.
00:06:01 Next let's explore the various high availability measures within the platform. SAP HANA
platform supports the following high availability measures.
00:06:10 The first one is host auto-failover, which is a local fault recovery solution for high availability
where the failover from a crashed host to a standby host happens automatically in the same
system landscape.
00:06:24 The second one is storage replication, which is a continuous replication mirroring between
primary storage and a backup storage over a network provided by the storage partners.
00:06:36 In this replication, the SAP HANA transaction is completed when the locally persisted
transaction log has been replicated remotely
00:06:45 which is also called synchronous storage replication.The third one is system replication,
00:06:51 which is a continuous update of secondary systems by the primary system, including in-
memory table loading.
00:06:58 System replication is an alternative high availability solution for SAP HANA, providing an
extremely short Recovery Time Objective
00:07:07 and compatible with all SAP HANA hardware partner solutions. There are various
replication modes available in the platform, like
00:07:17 synchronous, synchronous-in-memory, and asynchronous modes for data and log
replication, which will be discussed in detail in the week 2 units.
00:07:30 In this slide let's take a look at the details of various fault recovery measures. SAP HANA
platform supports the following fault recovery measures from failures.
00:07:40 The first one is service auto-restart, where in the event of a failure or a manual intervention
by an administrator that disables one of the SAP HANA services,
00:07:51 the service auto-restart function automatically detects the failure and restarts the stopped
service process.
00:07:59 Service auto-restart acts like a watchdog function for any failures. Upon restart, the service
loads the data into memory and resumes its function,
00:08:09 where all the data remains safe and the service recovery takes some time.The second one
is host auto-failover.
00:08:18 We have talked briefly about the host auto-failover in the previous slide. For the host auto-
failover to be successful,
00:08:27 when the active host fails, the standby host takes over its role by starting its database
instances using the persisted data
00:08:35 and the log files of the failed host. The name server of one of the SAP HANA instances acts
like a cluster manager
00:08:43 that pings all the hosts regularly. If a failing host is detected, the cluster manager ensures
00:08:51 that the standby host takes over the role and the failing host is no longer allowed write
access to the files.
00:09:00 The third one, system replication capabilities, can also be used from a fault recovery
perspective.
00:09:08 The data pre-load option can be used for fault recovery to enable a quicker takeover than
with host auto-failover in this case.
00:09:20 Let's check out the various disaster recovery measures that SAP HANA platform supports
from failures.
00:09:28 The first one is storage replication. As discussed before, storage replication can be used a
DR measure
00:09:36 with continuous replication of persisted data between primary storage and backup storage
over a network.
00:09:45 The second one is system replication. In this case, the secondary system can be installed in
a remote site,
00:09:52 which can be used in a disaster recovery scenario and can be chained together with
multitier system replication.
00:10:01 Like storage replication, the disaster recovery option requires a reliable connection channel
between the primary and the secondary sites.
00:10:12 System replication is flexible enough that it can also be used for both fault and disaster
recovery purposes in order to achieve high availability.
00:10:22 The third one is the backups, which are periodic saving of database copies in a safe place.
Customers can use backups for disaster recovery purposes
00:10:32 but SAP is not offering backups as a full-blown solution for disaster recovery. One of the
drawbacks of backups is the potential loss of data
00:10:43 of the last backup and the time of the failure. A preferred solution therefore, is to provide
continuous replication
00:10:51 of all the persisted data like, for example, system replication.The table shown in this slide
reflects SAP HANA platform
00:11:03 from a data center readiness perspective where the capabilities of the platform are grouped
together
00:11:10 in the areas of backup and recovery, fault recovery, and disaster recovery. We have
discussed these topics and their capabilities briefly earlier.
00:11:21 We will discuss more details on these topics in the next week course units.From a design
and setup perspective of the HANA platform,
00:11:31 there are several deployment options that are available for HANA customers like multi-
tenant database container,
00:11:38 SAP NetWeaver central instance on SAP HANA instance, etc. Also for virtualization
purposes,
00:11:47 SAP HANA platform can be used for production usage as well.If the customers already
have a hardware storage and network infrastructure in place in their data centers,
00:12:00 they can leverage SAP HANA tailored data center integration capabilities to integrate their
existing tools with SAP HANA platform.
00:12:10 From a security and auditing perspective, there is a comprehensive set of security
framework capabilities
00:12:17 that are available inside SAP HANA platform with fine-granular authorizations for various
types of users, encryption, and compliance for audit logging
00:12:27 with secure hardware and software setups.With this, we will come to the end of unit 2 in
course week 1. Thank you.
Week 01 Unit 03

00:00:09 Welcome to unit 3, the last unit of course in week 1 of this open SAP course. Our topic for
this week is High Availability, Backup, and Disaster Recovery Setup Options.
00:00:24 In this slide, let's explore the various HA/DR setup options and their capabilities that SAP
HANA platform supports.
00:00:31 The first one is host auto-failover, which is a cluster-like solution which includes high
availability via the internal cluster manager
00:00:40 and communicates via storage connector API with external storage environments.The
second one is system replication, which is the classical shadow database solution
00:00:51 supported for both HA and DR between primary and secondary data centers with an
external cluster manager automation for automatic failover.
00:01:01 The third one is storage replication. Customers already use some sort of storage replication
in their datacenters
00:01:08 with external storage vendor tools mainly used for disaster recovery purposes where an
external cluster manager is also leveraged for automation.
00:01:20 Let's take a look at the host auto-failover setup option for HA/DR in detail here. Host auto-
failover is a local fault recovery solution
00:01:30 that can be used in addition or as an alternative measure to system replication. As long as
they are in standby mode, the databases on these hosts
00:01:40 do not contain any data and do not accept requests or any queries. This means they cannot
be used for other purposes such as quality or test systems.
00:01:52 Once the primary system crashes, the failover happens automatically to the standby
system.The second one is system replication,
00:02:04 which is a continuous update of secondary systems by the primary system, including in-
memory table loading.
00:02:11 System replication employs an "N+N" approach where each service and instance of the
primary SAP HANA system
00:02:19 communicates privately with a counterpart in the secondary system. System replication
supports multiple data centers
00:02:27 where the secondary standby system will have the same number of active nodes as the
active primary system.
00:02:36 The third one is the storage replication solution which is offered by several SAP hardware
partners
00:02:43 where it delivers a backup of the volumes or file system to remote, networked storage and
communicates via continuous replication, which we also call mirroring,
00:02:55 between primary storage and the backup storage over a network. Storage replication also
supports single or multiple data centers
00:03:04 where data is not preloaded in the secondary site.In this slide, let's take a look at the
various backup and recovery setup options
00:03:14 that SAP HANA platform supports and their capabilities briefly.The first one is backup and
recovery to file system
00:03:22 is a common solution leveraged by customers to back up SAP HANA database to a local or
remote file system
00:03:31 where the checks for physical consistency is maintained regularly.In this option, manual
work is required
00:03:38 to transport the backup files to the saved location.The second option is backup and
recovery to a third-party tool
00:03:46 is the most comfortable solution leveraged by customers who have third-party backup
server tools in their landscapes.
00:03:53 Backups are executed and managed via the BACKINT API provided by the SAP HANA
platform.The third one is backup and recovery using storage snapshots
00:04:04 is often useful to create ad hoc backups in seconds to minutes via storage snapshots
provided by external storage vendors
00:04:13 where the checks for physical consistency is not maintained with this option.SAP HANA
platform persists transaction redo logs
00:04:24 and data changes in the form of savepoints to a storage area. While these two types of data
protect against power failures,
00:04:32 it does not help when the persistent storage is damaged or logical error occurs. File system
is a common method to back up data to a local or remote file system
00:04:44 which protects the database against any disk failures and resets the database to an earlier
point of time.
00:04:54 In the second backup and recovery option, SAP HANA platform provides third-party backup
agent via the BACKINT API
00:05:02 to back up data to a backup server selected by the vendor of choice. SAP provides
certifications for different backup vendors for the BACKINT API
00:05:13 to make sure the external tools are tested and supported from an administration and
management perspective.
00:05:22 In the third backup and recovery option, storage snapshots are used where a set of
reference pointers to data stored on a disk.
00:05:31 SAP HANA platform provides backup capabilities with split-mirror snapshots via plugins and
the storage vendor tools provide all the capabilities
00:05:41 to perform the backup operations and administration.With this, we come to the end of
course week 1
00:05:49 where we briefly covered the details of SAP HANA platform HA/DR, backups overview, and
the various options that are available to the customers
00:06:00 leveraging SAP HANA platform HA/DR capabilities. Thank you.
 www.sap.com

2016 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or for any purpose without the express permission of SAP SE or an SAP
affiliate company.
SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their
respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an
SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other countries. Please see
http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/legal/copyright/index.epx#trademark for
additional trademark information and notices. Some software products
marketed by SAP SE and its distributors contain proprietary software
components of other software vendors.
National product specifications may vary.
These materials are provided by SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company for
informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind,
and SAP SE or its affiliated companies shall not be liable for errors or
omissions with respect to the materials. The only warranties for SAP SE or
SAP affiliate company products and services are those that are set forth in
the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services,
if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional
warranty.
In particular, SAP SE or its affiliated companies have no obligation to pursue
any course of business outlined in this document or any related presentation,
or to develop or release any functionality mentioned therein. This document,
or any related presentation, and SAP SEs or its affiliated companies
strategy and possible future developments, products, and/or platform
directions and functionality are all subject to change and may be changed by
SAP SE or its affiliated companies at any time for any reason without notice.
The information in this document is not a commitment, promise, or legal
obligation to deliver any material, code, or functionality. All forward-looking
statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause
actual results to differ materially from expectations. Readers are cautioned
not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which
speak only as of their dates, and they should not be relied upon in making
purchasing decisions.