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How UCLA Health Implemented an SAP BusinessObjects Disaster Recovery Plan

medical-icon 

Medical

Product Used:

360Plus

CHALLENGE ISSUED

If you’ve ever tried to design and implement a disaster recovery (DR) plan for your SAP BusinessObjects (BOBJ) environment, you know it’s not simple. The typical approach involves several steps:

  1. Backup the CMS and FRS
  2. Restore the CMS and FRS to a DR site
  3. Update the CMS
  4. Remove links and references to the source system

Unfortunately, these steps aren’t easy to execute with SAP BusinessObjects. For example, SAP makes it difficult to restore BusinessObjects to a DR site on another server because of ties to the source CMS, which is named according to the server on which BOBJ is installed. SAP warns customers that the steps aren’t supported. We warn customers that the steps are neither straightforward nor easily automated.

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

Fortunately, 360Suite came to the rescue with 360Plus, a disaster recovery solution designed specifically for SAP BusinessObjects. It’s not new, but it is newly improved in the latest version of the 360Suite web platform. 360Suite software engineers worked hard to ensure that the performance and usability of backup and restore features are now even better than before. Here’s an example of what 360Plus can do:

  • Schedule Daily Backups: The first time it runs, 360Plus performs a full backup. Every day thereafter, 360Plus runs a scheduled, incremental delta and dynamic backup, which has little impact on the platform and makes it possible to roll back to any version of any object (personal documents, security settings, users, Universe connections, etc.) at any time.
  • Schedule Nightly Restore Jobs: The first time it runs, 360Plus syncs environments (e.g., source CMS/PROD and destination CMS/DR). Every night thereafter, 360Plus runs a scheduled, incremental job that restores content added to or modified in the source environment since the last restore job.

USE CASE: UCLA HEALTH

A particular 360Suite customer — University of California, Los Angeles Health — had 1,900 SAP BusinessObjects users and a very large environment (300GB FRS), containing 20K reports and 100K instances. Backing up and restoring such a large environment was extremely time consuming, so the organization looked for ways to speed up the process. They explored available virtualization options, but abandoned that idea after discovering it wasn’t supported by SAP. They also looked for software that took an operating system (OS) approach to DR with the goal of re-enabling their system as quickly as possible in the event of a disaster. Ultimately, the medical center settled on 360Suite because it restores at the application, and not the OS, level. This made it possible for the organization to switch to their DR site simply by adjusting their load balancer, an approach that is both quick for IT and seamless for end users.

With 360Plus, UCLA Health was able to dramatically shorten the time required for backup and restore jobs.

  • Initial full backup with 360Plus: 13 hours
  • Initial full restore with 360Plus: 53 hours
  • Subsequent daily backups with 360Plus: 1 hour
  • Subsequent daily restore with 360Plus: 1 hour

UCLA Health is now able to switch quickly to their DR site with no downtime. Users won’t even notice they are pointing to another environment. Accomplishing this with a traditional SAP BusinessObjects DR process would have taken at least a day, possibly longer, depending on the experience of BI managers.

Can you afford to have your BI environment down for more than a day? If not, contact us for information about how to make 360Plus a significant part of your organization’s SAP BusinessObjects DR plan.

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