Specifications

Introduction 13
• Auto recovery features if the operating system hangs
IBM ServeRAID II Adapter
• RAID-0, RAID-1, Advanced RAID-1 and RAID-5 capabilities
• Hot-Spare and Automatic rebuild capabilities
• RAID array spanning over three SCSI channels
• MSCS enabled
• Optional 8 MB battery backup cache
1.8.2 High Availability on the Operating System
Windows NT implements some fault tolerance and high availability features as
well. You can establish disk mirroring or build stripe sets with parity over your
hard drives to improve your data availability. In addition, there is a function
available that can initiate a system reboot whenever a stop error occurs (blue
screen).
1.8.3 High Availability and SAP R/3
The R/3 technology comprises instruments for managing and controlling the
current operation of a system and technology for ensuring that system down time,
whether planned or unplanned, is kept as short as possible.
The administrator can monitor the status of R/3 operations that are running on
database, application, operating system and network level with the Computing
Center Management System (CCMS). Procedures and checklists help the
administrator to recognize time-critical situations and address them before a
failure occur. The CCMS has graphical performance monitors and keeps statistics
that make possible to tune the system and give you a overview of the whole R/3
System.
In addition, the SAP AG offers an option to integrate the R/3 System in existing
network and system management platforms by using the Management
Information Base (MIB) of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).
The R/3 MIBs define interfaces for application monitoring and controlling and for
alarm handling.
The SAP AG has implemented a form of automatic software distribution for new
release upgrades that allows you to distribute the new imported software over
several different servers without interrupting normal operation. This procedure
implements a software version check on that application server where a
transaction is called. It will execute an automatic update if the current version of
the software is not present. This process avoids the time-consuming procedures
that appear during common release upgrades.
The SAP AG is always developing new technology such as the repository switch,
the support provided by comfortable graphical user interfaces and fully
automated procedures or importing new releases to keep the required time for a
release upgrade to a minimum. That all helps to save large amounts of time and
to reduce costs and is important for business-critical applications such as SAP
R/3.