Years ago, I worked for a company whose profitability involved trading stocks, it was a critical part of the business. It was very important they had minimal down-time. Millions of dollars were at stake if any part of the system was unavailable. The organization had a remote site dedicated to Disaster Recovery (DR). I was responsible for training critical personnel on how to create Disaster Recovery plans; identifying what software was needed, as well as any important files, where they were located on the network, etc. This DR plan defined what needed to be in the remote site and which files and systems needed to be brought up at that site in the event there was a disaster.
Does your organization have a Disaster Recovery or Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP)? Is Business Objects included in that plan? With these plans, you have to decide what is critical for your organization to continue operations and how long you can continue operations without the systems you rely on on a daily basis. Maybe you can survive a week without your reporting system? Some customers may be severely impacted if their outage is longer than a few hours. Everyone has different needs for DR and requirements for COOP.
Another organization I worked for had a Disaster Recovery Plan that wasn’t quite as critical. They didn’t have a dedicated remote site, the plan involved failing over certain systems. This DR plan was (partially) tested once a year. The group responsible for the DR simulation asked me once for information about failing over the production Business Objects environment to another server. I provided the step by step instructions for how this could be accomplished, all described here in this blog post. I worked there for 10 years, they never once included Business Objects is the Disaster Recovery simulations…I think they decided it was too complicated, or not critical enough.
It is complicated to backup and restore Business Objects! Anyone who has done it knows this. But there is another option! With the GB And Smith tool 360Plus, one of the tools in the 360Suite, it isn’t complicated at all! You can be up and running in a matter of a couple of hours with the Backup and Restore feature in 360Plus. GB And Smith’s 360Suite has tools that help with the administration of Business Objects, 360Plus is one of those tools.
Here is a comparison of SAP’s typical Business Objects Backup vs. the 360Plus Backup:
We have customers who require a readily available DR site that can be failed over to in a couple of hours. To accomplish this, they backup their system daily with 360Plus, which does incremental backups, allowing for quick backups and provides a full backup of your entire system. Biar files are created for every object in the environment; users, groups, folders, universes, reports, instances, etc. This allows you to restore the entire environment or a single object. Once the backup with 360Plus has completed, there is a job available to restore the backup to another CMS.
With 360Plus, it is as simple as 2 scheduled jobs:
- Daily Backup job in 360Plus
- Daily Restore Backup job in 360Plus
Here is a comparison of a Restore using the traditional BOBJ Backups vs. Backups with 360Plus:
Here are the details:
- Schedule Daily Backups with 360Plus
- Install and configure an environment that has the same version of Business Objects installed as the source (production) environment.
- Run Backup Restore job to sync the PROD and DR environments by restoring all the objects from the production environment to the DR environment. Once the Restore Backup job runs, the environments will be in sync as of the previous day.
- After the initial synchronization, a daily scheduled task (Backup Restore job) will run to keep the environments in sync. With this job, any backups that were taken the previous night will be restored to the DR site. It might be 25 reports in public folders, 60 reports in personal folders, 3 universes and 50 report instances, they will all be restored to the DR site.
With 360Plus, you have a full backup of your entire Business Objects environment. You can restore everything to another environment, or only restore the content you need. The tool allows you to have a readily available DR site with minimal involvement from your Business Objects admin. It doesn’t get any easier than that!