Challenge

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 option to have SAP systems unavailable for an extended period of time. This unavailability would have dramatic affects not only on internal requirements, but also a company’s suppliers, vendors and customers. Downtime can also result in a loss of revenue, less employee productivity, fines and penalties.

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

Solution

Wharfedaleorganized 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, Wharfedale 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 data center. 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.

Benefits

WFT has been integrating technologies within the SAP Landscape formany years and has developed an approach for planning and deploying a recovery architecture that will handle SAP Data, Infrastructure and Application Recoverability in cloud environments. The customer realized the following benefits after the deployment of this solution.

• Complete DR solution for production environment including application recovery
• Capability to test DR at any time
• Reduction in cost as compared to operating a similar solution in a traditional data center model
• Increased operational agility, flexibility and scalability
• Customer realized cost savings by paying only for storage utilized in steady state.

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