Zero downtime is, of course, a mythical holy grail. According to IDC senior market analyst Prabhitha Sheethal Dcruz:

Zero downtime frequently translates to 99.999% uptime, which equates to 5.26 minutes of downtime per year. While short outages may be acceptable for non-critical workloads, the same is not true for business-critical and mission-critical workloads where the downtime stakes can be very high—consider a stock exchange where a single lost transaction may incur a significant financial cost or a medical system downtime that can cost lives.

So zero downtime is a lofty but difficult to achieve goal. SUSE recently announced a certified near-zero-downtime technology for workloads running in SAP software. According to Naji Almahmoud, SUSE vice president of Global Alliances:

SUSE is an expert at bringing together emerging, fast-paced open-source innovation and turning it into reliable enterprise-grade solutions. Customers running mission-critical workloads can now have more confidence as SUSE works closely with SAP to help ensure near-zero-downtime capabilities for its users.

SUSE, as you already likely know, is an open-source operating system and infrastructure provider for workloads running in SAP software. SUSE has further strengthened its offerings for users of SAP software with new support for high-availability and disaster-recovery solutions, such as:

• SUSE support for takeover automation for scale-out clusters in SAP HANA: SUSE now provides automated takeover for users and applications, complementing the SAP HANA platform and data replication between SAP HANA nodes (scale-up) and clusters (scale-out). The SUSE offering is part of a leading platform for SAP solutions, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.

• Certification for high-availability clusters and improved maintenance for SAP NetWeaver 7.40: SAP has certified SUSE technology to manage high-availability clusters running on the SAP NetWeaver technology platform. The certification, NW-HA-CLU 7.40, is available for x86-64 now, with support for Power (both Big Endian and Little Endian) coming in the next quarter. This makes possible transparent rolling updates of the SAP NetWeaver kernel. While support for SAP NetWeaver high availability has been available previously, SUSE now also supports SAP NetWeaver 7.40 and above, included in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.

For more information about SUSE support for SAP solutions and customer workloads, visit https://www.suse.com/products/sles-for-sap and https://www.suse.com/partners/alliance/sap.