Planning for Disaster Recovery

Promotion Management Tool does not have to be used to backup an SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 2025 environment. In case of power loss of the system, it is fundamental to proceed with regular backups.

Considerations:

Administrators need to backup the most important components and be able to restore them to recover from a catastrophic system loss.

Restoring Your Entire System:

When you restore the entire system, the SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 2025 services cluster is also restored.

If any of the following components fails or is lost, you must restore your entire system:

• The Server Configuration
• The FRS file store
• The Bootstrap files
• The CMS database
• The Audit database
• The Monitoring database files
• The SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 2025 file system (where SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 2025 services are installed).

Get familiar with both in-place recovery and disaster recovery.

Put together a plan that works for your business.

Practice several times a year recovering a system on a separate machine to make sure your plan actually works.

In-Place Recovery versus Disaster Recovery:

The distinction between in-place recovery and disaster recovery can be summarized as follows:

• In-place restore is the recovery of your production system on the same hardware.
• Disaster recovery is the recovery of your production system in a remote location.

To improve performance and high-availability, you can expand vertically (hardware) or horizontally (software) SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 2025.

Expanding SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 2025:

The following are considerations when scaling:

• Expand your BI deployment to meet system demand.

• SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 2025 can expand vertically and horizontally.

  • Vertical Scaling:

    Adding more hardware resources, such as processors and memory

  • Horizontal Scaling:

    Running multiple servers on multiple machines (server clustering)

When discussing disaster and recovery, it’s important to understand the following terms:

Disaster and Recovery Terms:

• Disaster

  A disaster is a sudden accident or a natural catastrophe that causes great damage.

• Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP)

  A Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) is the processes, policies, and procedures involved in restoring operations that are critical to the resumption of business.

When discussing fault tolerance requirements, it’s important to understand the following:

Definition:

• Single Point Of Failure (SPOF) must be addressed and eliminated where ever possible.

• Faults must be contained to prevent the propagation of a system-wide failure.

Definition:

When discussing network storage, it’s important to understand the following terms:

• Storage Area Network (SAN):

  • SAN is an architecture that attaches remote computer storage devices to servers.
  • SAN attaches in such a way to the operating system that the devices appear as locally attached.

• Network Attached Storage (NAS):

  • NAS is essentially a self-contained computer that is connected to a network.
  • NAS's sole purpose is to supply the file-based data storage services to other devices on the network. It uses a UNC path \\<pathname> to identify a location for files and folders.

When discussing vertical strategy, it’s important to understand the following key points:

Definition:

A vertical strategy for high availability includes the following:

• Multiple CMS servers are created on different machines.
• A second input FRS and a second output FRS are created.
• Multiple processing servers are included.
• The Tomcat and Apache servers are clustered.

When discussing horizontal strategy, it’s important to understand the following key points:

Definition:

A horizontal strategy for high availability includes the following:

• A second database is implemented as a backup database, which replicated data on a constant basis from the CMS system database and the Audit database. This database is kept inactive.
• The FRS folders are kept on a backed up NAS/SAN storage.
• Another SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 2025 is implemented but kept inactive. It connects to the backup database and the NAS/SAN storage, and it doesn't have to be a mirror of the production for SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 2025.
• If there’s a disaster, the CMS system database and the backup SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 2025 are activated.

When discussing backup strategy, it’s important to understand the following key points:

Backup Strategy:

The following are considerations when establishing a backup strategy:

• The FRS (Input and Output) folders can be located on a highly available SAN or NAS storage device.

• The CMS system database can be on a database cluster, which has a regular backup.

  • Weekly full backup

  • Daily incremental

  • Transactional

• BIAR file and machine configurations can be documented and stored on the network.

• VM host can also be backed up (weekly).

• Backup files must be stored in another geographical location.

The figure, High Availability Components, illustrates a high-level architecture for disaster recovery planning.

Backup and recovery methods and architecture must be studied with administrators when implementing a SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 2025 deployment. The main questions are:

1. Can I accept to lose some data after having being recovered from disaster recovery?
2. How long time do I accept to wait before being able to access to my data?

After having answered to each question, administrators will be able to design a related recovery infrastructure. If you answered No and 1 day, a simple backup/restore is sufficient (cheap solution). If you answered No and Immediately, a full DRP architecture with a mirroring solution with remote sites have to set up (expensive solution).

Definition:

Once the Disaster Recovery architecture has been designed, the figure, Migration, and back up of CMS Data, illustrate the workflow for how to manage the recovery process.

Note

Follow the link for documentation on Backing up and restoring your system: (Backing up and restoring your system).