Challenges

The customer is a multinational company that offers solutions which integrate unified communications, AV presentation, lighting, environmental and HVAC systems. SAP is a key application for the customer. The SAP software is used to run just about every aspect of their business. The landscape consists of ECC, BW, CRM, Portal and Solution Manager running on a Windows/SQL platform. In the age of instant accessibility, it is no longer a viable option to have SAP unavailable for an extended period of time. This unavailability would have dramatic affects to not only internal requirements, but would also directly impact a company’s suppliers, vendors and customer. Downtime can represent a loss of revenue, employee productivity, and cash flow, in addition to fines and penalties.

These factors have made it clear to the customer that the need for Disaster Recovery for the SAP Landscape is no longer a future request, but a real and current requirement.

Solutions

WFTCloud organized a meeting with the key stakeholders and helped define the Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives based on their business requirements. Once these requirements were defined, WFTCloud proposed multiple options for replicating data. These options included replicating to another colocation facility, replicating to a private cloud and replicating to a public cloud.

The customer selected WFTCloud as the DR target site for their SAP landscape because of the expertise WFTCloud demonstrated in understanding the application requirements and designing the recovery solution which includes Application recovery also in addition to data recovery and infrastructure recovery. Site-to-Site network tunnel was setup to provide network connectivity between WFTCloud and the customer datacenter. Pre-seeding of data was done for the initial data load utilizing portable external drives. As the three-tier SAP Production landscape is completely virtualized, Hypervisor based replication was chosen to meet the customer RPO and RTO requirements. In steady state, storage is the only cloud resource consumed and in case of a disaster or during a DR test, CPU and memory resources in the cloud will be consumed, thereby providing cost savings to the customer.