Minimized Downtime Operations (MDO™) for SAP
Significantly reduce SAP planned downtime and Cloud infrastructure costs while optimizing your SAP on Cloud operations.
A Better SAP on Cloud Operating Experience
MDO is a patent-pending, premium services solution from Lemongrass that significantly reduces the downtime associated with operating SAP in the Cloud. Leveraging Lemongrass’s cutting-edge proprietary tool, Lemongrass Cloud Platform (LCP), MDO enables customers to initiate, monitor, and schedule important operational tasks on SAP Systems and their underlying infrastructure with minimized complexity, effort, and downtime.
IT directors at large US institutions estimate that planned downtime costs their organizations on average $1.5 million per quarter and $5.6 million per year.
Source: Forrester Research Inc., “The Real Costs of Planned and Unplanned Downtime”
Why We Developed MDO
The traditional operational procedures used by organizations to maintain their mission-critical SAP systems result in significant amounts of planned downtime, which can incur substantial costs for most organizations.
We developed MDO to address this. The solution provides the toolchains needed to perform common change operations with minimized downtime, reducing the time to plan and execute common changes to your SAP estate. MDO also gives you a single pane of glass view to see live tracking of the changes performed on your SAP systems (e.g. system creation, patching, and retirement), the health of your SAP services, and redundant hardware that can be removed to save costs—helping you redefine the experience of running SAP in the cloud.
How Does MDO Work?
Using LCP’s object model and automation artifacts, MDO builds and tests your to-be infrastructure on target patch levels, replicates data from your existing system to the new system, and then switches it over for users at cutover. MDO never takes down your primary site for planned maintenance and the cutover leaves users with minimized interruption in services during the transition. With this process, your planned downtime is essentially reduced to the cutover time and post-cutover business acceptance Testing.
MDO has the following capabilities:
- Minimal downtime resizing
- Minimal downtime OS patching
- Minimal downtime DB patching
- Minimal downtime SAP kernel patching
- SAP system refresh/cloning
- Vertical scaling of SAP infrastructure
- On-demand horizontal app server scaling
- Compliance build for ransomware prevention
Minimize Planned Downtime in SAP Cloud Migration
Breaking the Downtime Barrier
We delve into planned downtime, solutions that empower organizations to minimize planned downtime, and real-world examples of organizations that realized minimal downtime migrating and operating SAP in the Cloud.
Immutable SAP with MDO
“Immutable SAP” is based on immutable infrastructure, an approach to managing services and software deployments on IT resources wherein components are replaced rather than changed. With MDO, immutability is implemented at every level of SAP operations, including Infrastructure, Operating System (OS), Database (DB), SAP Basis, and supporting services. The benefits include:
- Improved Reliability: Immutable SAP ensures consistency and predictability, as every deployment is identical. The consistency and predictability of your deployments will translate to fewer errors, inconsistencies, and configuration drifts.
- Better Security: MDO bars human access to virtual machines, Cloud controls, Tier 1 and Tier 2 data, ensuring your environment is less susceptible to tampering and human error.
- Faster and More Efficient Updates: New instances can be deployed with updated configurations or patches without disrupting the running system.
- Easier Scalability: It is easier to scale systems as new instances can be created with the updated configuration to handle increased traffic or workload.