Resilience for SAP HANA Application using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery
Introduction
A comprehensive disaster recovery plan is essential for ensuring business continuity and maintaining data integrity. Implementing a thorough disaster recovery (DR) plan helps organizations minimize application downtime, data loss, and potential financial impact. An effective disaster recovery strategy is essential for resilient mission-critical and business-critical applications like SAP.
Organizations typically adopt a DR strategy based on balancing costs with the business impact of recovery time (RTO) and acceptable data loss (RPO). AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) is a service that supports business operations by reducing downtime and data loss during disruptions. Organizations can leverage AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) to enhance the resilience of applications operating in data centers, cloud environments, or AWS platforms by utilizing AWS as a recovery site. AWS DRS allows customers to use AWS as a flexible recovery site, eliminating the need to invest in on-premises DR infrastructure. AWS DRS provides a reliable and scalable disaster recovery solution for SAP HANA applications and databases.
Scenarios:
The following sections provide information on reference architecture diagrams for various scenarios.
Scenario 1: Cross-region Replication
AWS DRS replicates the SAP servers to another AWS account in the DR region in this use case. One account runs production workloads in the US-EAST-1 region. At the same time, another handles disaster recovery in a separate AWS region (US-WEST-1) as it can host high-availability solutions across two AZs.
Oracle Data Guard syncs Oracle databases to the DR region, and the data sync service synchronizes EFS data to the DR site, ensuring data integrity and availability.
SAP HANA on-premises to cloud disaster recovery using AWS DRS
Scenario 2: On-premises to Cloud Replication
This scenario involves replicating an on-premises SAP workload to AWS using AWS DRS.
SAP HANA multi-region DR using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery
Best Practices for Implementing AWS DRS for SAP Workload
- During an actual DR event, one must follow a recovery plan or runbook with the necessary steps.
- An IaC (CloudFormation) template must specify which servers and applications should be launched in DR.
- Mock exercises/drills must be conducted periodically.
- Understand the failover cost upfront.
- Safely store PIT snapshots and confirm before terminating the instances.
- Enable termination protection for recovery instances in a real DR scenario.
Benefits
- AWS DRS replicates only the necessary volumes, allowing users to pay for what they need and eliminating the need to replicate idle resources.
- It reduces the infrastructure cost and licensing for DR solutions by provisioning DR instances only during recovery or drills.
- It offers robust, non-disruptive, and continuous replication. Additionally, it reduces the time, complexity, and cost of implementing and managing disaster recovery in AWS.
- It is a fully automated system that requires minimal skill sets. It facilitates easy, non-disruptive drills and provides a streamlined, unified testing, recovery, and failback process.
Conclusion
Utilizing AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS) ensures reliability and scalability for SAP HANA applications within disaster recovery solutions. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS) is a resilient, cost-effective solution that provides robust, non-disruptive, continuous replication to ensure business continuity during unforeseen circumstances. With DRS, we can safeguard critical data and readily access them at a secondary site in a different geographical location.
