Feature Story

By Kat Rollin

March 11, 2008 — The global economy is generating a demand for more round-the-clock services, shrinking the time windows for scheduled downtime — the majority of which is for updates and system maintenance. This is especially true for your business-critical SAP infrastructures* where hundreds of users work concurrently on systems that interact with each other. In this environment, if one system is down, it can create a chain reaction throughout the rest of the enterprise. To help you limit or eliminate maintenance windows, Sun developed a set of best practice procedures using Solaris Containers and Solaris ZFS.

Minimizing the downtime for your next software upgrade

The minimized downtime procedure is designed to reduce downtime of the overall SAP environment and enhance the efficiency of IT operations. For example, upgrading an SAP Portal to a new version of software typically requires multiple hours of downtime. But, you can minimize downtime to a few seconds using Solaris Containers and ZFS and a few basic steps.

With this procedure, you can take all the time you need to upgrade your SAP environment software, and the only downtime your users experience is the time to disconnect and reconnect to the application in the cloned container. Only the IP address is different. In the case of many SAP NetWeaver Portal environments, dynamic data is not stored, so no data is lost when switching to the cloned environment. This innovative use of the advanced features of the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) enable you to take advantage of new SAP functionality without worrying about slowing down your day-to-day operations.

Quickly provision test, training, and development environments

With the competition always close behind, you need to do everything faster than before. That includes implementing new SAP features and training users to use them correctly to derive the most benefit. You need the ability to quickly provision test, training, and development environments, without necessarily having to wait for new hardware to arrive. Unfortunately, the reality is that in many SAP environments nearly 75 percent of the systems are used for non-production purposes, yet these systems require the most administration and maintenance.

With a variation of the minimized downtime procedure, you can dramatically reduce the cost of deploying, administering, and maintaining these non-production systems. Using a Solaris Container with a Solaris ZFS file system, you can create a snapshot, or clone of the entire runtime environment including all running SAP applications within that environment, for example SAP NetWeaver Portal and Oracle Database. The clone is identical in behavior to the original system and is available for use within seconds. The only difference is the IP address. So, with Solaris Containers and ZFS, you can create as many cloned environments as you need to, on the fly.

Minimizing downtime for hardware maintenance

Occasionally you need to take an entire system down for maintenance. You can use the same procedures that enable cloning to move containers on a shared Solaris ZFS file system from one Solaris 10 system to another, providing both systems are at the same patch level. After cloning the container to a second system, you activate it by executing the Solaris commands detach and attach in the global zone of the system through either scripts or through the more automated Sun N1 Advanced Architecture for SAP Solutions user interface. The ability to move containers between systems in an SAP environment allows you to perform system maintenance with system downtime, even on systems with consolidated applications.

Sun and SAP

To deliver the flexibility required to be competitive, you look for partners who intimately understand your challenges and collaborate to provide solutions to address them. Sun and SAP have been doing just that since 1993 when they formed a powerful alliance to provide mission-critical enterprise solutions. As part of the alliance, Sun and SAP work together to develop joint solutions like the minimized downtime procedure so you can keep your SAP environment running, including non-production systems — without worrying about shrinking downtime windows.

*Based on the details of the customer environment, certain restrictions or other options may apply. Please ask your Sun represenative about the best recommendations for your environment.

Formerly a systems engineer for Sun, Kat Rollin now reports on partner solutions for sun.com and develops technical marketing communications for the technology industry.