Wharfedale Secures DR in Support of SAP Solutions

Wharfedale Technologies Inc. (WFT), an infrastructure
and consulting services firm offering support of SAP AG solutions, is
helping deploy a DR solution for a global healthcare company with offices in
over 60 countries with major research centers in the US and Europe.

The customer was in the process of migrating one of its critical IT landscapes
running SAP applications from a hosting vendor to its internal data center. The
objective was to provide DR capabilities for SAP applications to the landscape
prior to going live from the in-house data center. WFT was requested to be
involved with the design of the DR solution for the SAP application.

The customer’s environment consists of a number of components, such as the SAP ERP application, SAP
NetWeaver Process Integration technology, SAP Solution Manager and bolt-ons
such as Taxware along with middleware components like Webmethods. Within these
components are combinations of stacks including the ABAP programming language,
Java, and Oracle databases within in a UNIX OS environment.

The
scope of the engagement
for WFT has involved following:

• Provide advisory role for information gathering,
  understanding business requirements and providing solutions to meet the
  customer’s business need
• Provide design for backend disk layout based on requirements related to the SAP
  applications to achieve optimal performance and meet the HA and DR requirements
• Develop the build plan for the hardware at the DR site
• Develop and implement the DR plan in support of SAP applications
• Develop monitoring capabilities for the DR solutions
• Execute technical DR tests and provide support for functional testing of the
  SAP solutions

WFT presented multiple options for DR to
the customer and explained the pros and cons of each option. Based on the
specific requirements of the customer, a database-based replication DR solution
was selected. WFT designed the DR solution encompassing database, application,
database binaries, OS, non-database file systems, archive logs and NFS file
systems using a combination of native database tools and custom scripts to
enable the customer to meet their RTO and Recovery
Point Objective requirements.

The
ability to perform DR testing without impacting the production data replication
and usage of minimal server resources at the DR site with the capability to
scale up when needed, are some of the core capabilities of the solution offered
by WFT to this customer.