Business Objects Enterprise 6.5 Disaster Recovery, Architecture and System Tuning

The Client

A Regional Utility Company

For more than 180 years, the client has been meeting the energy needs of more than one million business and residential electric customers and more than 600,000 gas customers in an economically diverse, 2,300-square-mile area.

The Challenge

The client needed hardware, software and procedures that, together provide the capability of seamless Catastrophic Disaster Recovery from current Production Instance of Business Objects over to a completely self contained, geographically separated identical Recovery Instance, while maintaining current near-real time Critical Reporting to Clients, Agencies and Media without interruption.

The client's primary goals were to develop:

• A complete independent Disaster/Recovery Reporting Environment capable of carrying out Production InfoView Site Hosting and batch report scheduling in the event of a site disaster.
• Procedures to keep the D/R instance in sync.
• Procedures to Activate and De-Activate the D/R Environment.

Some of the client's secondary goals for the effort were to develop:

• A complete independent Tandem Production Reporting Environment capable of carrying out InfoView Site Hosting and batch report scheduling in Tandem with Production to provide multiple points of failure in normal production mode and continued processing should any undesired occurrence make either environment unavailable.
• Procedures to keep the Tandem/Recovery instance in sync.

The Solution

The Client’s current architecture was designed, validated, tuned and tested to meet the requirements, leveraging the core implementation and incorporating new Disaster Recovery requirements. This was undertaken prior to the implementations of a Big-IP F5 deployment and was designed with the architecture to integrate with the F5 BIG-IPâ 3-DNS Global Traffic/Application Management System without modifying the enhanced BusinessObjects deployment.

Altek Solutions successfully configured and tested the tandem clusters with Business Objects Enterprise 6.5.1 and implemented Oracle 9i Repository back-up strategies to allow replication of BCA Near Real-time and regularly scheduled batch jobs to continue seamlessly in the event of catastrophic failure of the Primary Production Cluster. Altek Solutions consultants also configured each Cluster with a secondary Web Server as additional fault tolerance within each cluster.

As a result of the design, the Client had 3 layers of redundancy, if required, within each cluster, while being able to maintain presentation of mission critical reports to clients without activating the Disaster Recovery cluster. This was achieved with 3 web servers, the first, a stand-alone primary web server, used for access by external clients and the next two, within the cluster that could be accessed, internally or externally if events warranted.

The independent clusters were not connected through any BusinessObjects intra-process or inter-process communications as per the requirements. The 2 clusters were independent as to subnets, geographical locations, key files with synchronized yet independent Repositories.

Altek Solutions enhanced the ability to monitor and administer the Clusters by implementing BusinessObjects Auditor and Supervisor over the Web, for additional management and disaster recovery capabilities.

The Benefits

The architecture design and Disaster Recovery Architecture that was designed by Altek Solutions has resulted in the following improvements:

• Increased Global Availability
• Fault Tolerance
• Disaster Recovery
• Global Availability Monitoring and Administration
• Transparent Distribution of Web Services
• Interoperability
• Providing 99.999% availability for mission critical Web Services

Tools & Technologies

• Business Objects Architecture
• Business Objects Broadcast Agent
• BIG-IP F5
• Business Objects Clustering
• Oracle 9i Backup Strategies
• Enterprise Architecture
• Business Objects Auditor
• Diaster Recovery