Reliability - General SAP Guides
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Reliability

Reliability is one of the six pillars of SAP Lens - Amazon Well-Architected Framework. For more information, see Reliability.

Amazon cloud offers reliability with multiple Availability Zones within an Amazon Region. This enables your SAP applications on Amazon to be more resilient. Each Region is further isolated from other Regions, providing the greatest possible fault tolerance and stability. Within each Amazon Region, there are a minimum of three, isolated, physically separate Availability Zones. For more information, see Regions and Availability Zones.

Availability Zones enable you to operate production applications and databases that are more highly available than would be possible from a single data center. Distributing your applications across multiple Availability Zones provides the ability to remain resilient in the face of most failure modes, including natural disasters or system failures.

Each Availability Zone can be multiple data centers. At full scale, it can contain hundreds of thousands of servers. They are fully isolated partitions of Amazon Global Infrastructure. An Availability Zone is physically separated from any other zones. There is a distance of several kilometers, although all are within 100 km (60 miles of each other). This distance provides isolation from the most common disasters that could affect data centers, such as floods, fire, severe storms, earthquakes, etc.

All Availability Zones within a Region are interconnected with high-bandwidth and low-latency networking, over fully redundant and dedicated metro fiber. This ensures high-throughput, low-latency networking between Availability Zones. The network performance is sufficient to accomplish synchronous replication.

Availability Zones enable you to run your applications in a highly-available manner, with synchronous data replication and automated failover between Availability Zones. RISE with SAP can offer such high available designs for your workload in every Amazon Region.

Considerations

SAP has options available for RISE to meet different resiliency requirements. The following key requirements are adjustable for RISE via option packages available from SAP.

  • Service Level Agreement (SLA) – describes the targeted availability of the solution.

  • Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – describes the targeted duration within which a recovery from a disaster event should be completed.

  • Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – describes the targeted level of data loss that may occur during recovery from a disaster event.

For more details, refer to the definitions provided by SAP as part of RISE agreement for specific definitions, clauses, impacts, and penalties in the event of a breach.

The impact of an outage on your organisation and loss of data can cause loss of productivity, loss of income, and can damage reputation. Weighing the trade-off between cost and resiliency can help assess the risk to your organisation.

Disaster recovery options

You can implement a disaster recovery solution by replicating data into a second Amazon Region. Your SAP workloads are protected in the event of rare occurrence of local or regional failures.

RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition offers the following two options.

  • Short distance disaster recovery or Metro disaster recovery – RISE with SAP uses multiple Availability Zones in an Amazon Region. Isolated Regions and low latency between Availability Zones enables a synchronous replication between the primary and standby instances.

  • Long distance disaster recovery or Regional disaster recovery – RISE with SAP uses a secondary Amazon Region as standby for failover systems. Owing to the physical distance between two Amazon Regions, data is replicated asynchronously between two Amazon Regions.

For more details, see SAP documentation SAP Service Description: Disaster Recovery and Customer Invoked Failover.