Hana Linux clusters are in vogue

The increasing penetration of SAP Hana and Hana-based application systems such as S/4, BW/4 or C/4 is associated with the increased use of cluster solutions, particularly for reasons of increased SAP availability or High Availability and Disaster and Recovery.

High availability clustering minimizes data loss due to corruption or failure by protecting data assets with existing IT infrastructure.

Servers are continuously monitored, and if an error or failure occurs, the workload is moved from one server to another or the application is automatically restarted on a properly functioning system.

However, the voices of doubters that SAP cluster solutions or clusters in general are complex or difficult to manage still exist. However, this is not really understandable in view of the many clusters in the SAP environment that function excellently.

On the other hand, it should be noted that SAP cluster solutions with corresponding cluster software from perhaps ten or fifteen years ago are no longer comparable with those of today. In terms of performance, of course, but also against the background of the ease-of-use of such solutions today.

Often gout cookbooks

As is well known, SAP and partners such as Suse support various developed and available cluster characteristics such as performance-optimized or cost-optimized or campus or geoclustering. And they are, of course, continuously being developed further. The fact that they master their tasks with flying colors has been proven worldwide.

However, not all cluster solution providers offer sufficient or as optimal as possible support for an ease-of-implementation with perhaps useful tips for smooth mission-critical cluster operation - we hear from SAP users again and again.

This is precisely the point that Suse addressed more than ten years ago. And it did so with "best practices" provided free of charge. For example, "Setting Up a SAP Hana SR Cost-optimized Infrastructure" or "Setting Up a High Availability Cluster for the AWS Cloud or Azure Cloud" or simply: "Simplified SAP Hana System Replication Setup".

These are, if you will, many times tried (technically quite deep) cookbooks and a "know how", which are constantly being developed and also partly take into account so-called "special curls".

These types of cookbooks also include the deployment or use of various open source solutions. For example, the use of YaST Wizzard in conjunction with Suse SLES for SAP Applications High Availability Extension, which is based on the open source cluster solution called Pacemaker.

Likewise, there are free webinars that also address the topic of HA with D+R in the SAP environment and with SLES for SAP Applications, so that customers are sufficiently informed.

Incidentally, there is talk behind closed doors that SAP customers who use a companion product to Suse HAE fall back on precisely those "Suse best practices" when deploying their chosen cluster solution.

Conclusion

Complexity has always existed in IT. But complexity was and is controllable and manageable - in cluster software as well as in complex SAP landscapes.

Suse's claim has always been that Mission Critical SAP deployment doesn't have to be complicated, and information and automation take a lot of the complexity out of it, and of course that still holds true.