SAP recovery in the event of a complete site loss is often the worse nightmare of an SAP administrator. The SAP recovery process takes much time and planning and is generally very hard to test. In addition to the downtime involved, the recovery could involve a significant amount of data loss due to the fact that the databases need to be restored from the latest available backup. Using The SteelEye Protection Suite for SAP, you are able to easily and quickly resume operations in the event of a disaster with little to no data loss.

WAN Optimized Replication

SteelEye Data Replication is optimized for replication across WAN links. Having nine levels of compression allows you to customize your environment to get the best WAN efficiency, host workload and data throughput. In addition, SteelEye Data Replication is architected is such a way that it is already optimized for the WAN, therefore the use of hardware based WAN accelerators is not necessary to achieve optimal throughput, regardless of the speed or latency of the WAN link.

Unattended or Manual Failover

Disasters can strike anytime, anywhere. Some disasters are localized to a particular room or building, and others are more regional in nature. In times of disaster, it is not always possible to have every staff member available to assist in the recovery process. To help you guarantee SAP recovery regardless of who is available, the SteelEye Protection Suite for SAP can be configured in one of two ways: unattended or manual recovery.

When configured with unattended or "automatic" failover, a prolonged outage of the primary site would automatically trigger SAP recovery in the DR site with no intervention. For those who want more control over when your DR site comes into service, automatic failover can be disabled and manual recovery can initiate with a simple push of the button in the LifeKeeper GUI.

Automated DR Testing

Having a disaster recovery plan in place is only half the solution. It is important that this plan be tested on a regular basis. The SteelEye Protection Suite for SAP allows administrators to easily switch SAP to the DR site for testing purposes and then easily switch SAP back to the primary site when testing is done.

Alternatively, you may wish to leave SAP in service in the primary site while still completing DR testing. In this case, you can simply unlock the target data, bring SAP into service on the backup system and using the tools provided by LifeKeeper, simply redirect a single test user or subset of users to verify recovery. This method allows you to confirm the recoverability of SAP, with minimal impact to your production network.