Challenge

The customer develops and manufactures chemicals, plastic resins and end-products that make everyday life safer, healthier and easier. Headquartered in western Canada, the customer is a wholly owned subsidiary of a petroleum investment company. The customer depends on SAP applications to run their critical business processes. The SAP landscape consists of ECC, BW, CRM, SCM, Portal and Solution Manager running on a SUSE Linux and HANA platform. Over the years, the criticality availability requirements for SAP systems has dramatically increased. Any extended SAP downtime will have a huge impact on the company’s suppliers, vendors and customers. Downtime can represent a loss of revenue for the customer in addition to partner and customer dissatisfaction.

• Failover multiple SAP production applications to DR with 8-hour Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and 15 Minutes Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
• Achieve maximum availability for critical SAP Applications by minimizing or eliminating downtime.
• Real-time visibility to Disaster Recovery through a single dashboard
• Easy to maintain and operate Disaster Recovery solution
• Efficient compression of data and optimal bandwidth usage by DR solution.
• Low implementation and cost and hosted solution (OpenX)

Solution

WFT Cloud worked with NOVA IT and business team to validate and finalize the application availability requirements. Once these requirements were defined, WFT Cloud proposed various disaster recovery solutions, target disaster recovery sites included colocation facility, private cloud and public cloud.

The customer selected WFTCloud as the target disaster recovery site for their SAP landscape because of the expertise WFTCloud demonstrated in designing and implementing business continuity solutions. WFT, Parent company of WFT Cloud also poses deep expertise in SAP infrastructure solutions.

The customer data center and WFT cloud data center then connected through a site to site VPN tunnel Site-to-Site network tunnel was set up to provide network connectivity between WFTCloud and the customer data center. A Hypervisor-based replication is selected since the SAP environment was fully virtualized. Large systems are copied to DR target using secure external drives and Pre-seeding of data. 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.

• Real-time visibility into application availability and DR through a Unified Monitoring dashboard.
• Combined two powerful, proven technologies i.e. Virtualization and Hypervisor-based replication.
• Hypervisor-based replication resulted in no impact to production server performance.
• Reduced Bandwidth utilization because of the high data compression by replication solution.

Benefits

WFT’s extended knowledge of designing and deploying disaster recovery solutions for enterprise customers played a large role in implementing a DRaaS solution for NOVA chemicals. After the implementation of the DR solution customer realized the following benefits:

• Achieved RPO of 5 Minutes and RTO of 1 Hour.
• Achieved 65% savings each on bandwidth costs within 6 months of implementation.
• Dependency on the manual procedures and resources for DR failover was considerably reduced.
• Carried out 2 DR failover tests within the first 6-month period with minimal manual intervention.
• NOVA decided to expand DR solution to critical applications other than SAP.
• High level of confidence in availability of SAP applications and Data in case of disaster.
• Reduced revenue loss and customer dissatisfaction.
• Lower downtime during DR through automated failover processes.
• Visibility to DR health through dashboards.
• No impact to source SAP Production server performance.

‍