Our CRM system is a back-end for our online customer facing system. The maximum outage for the online customer facing system is 1 hr. Our recent upgrade of our CRM system in production resulted in a 12 hour downtime phase.
For future upgrades of CRM we need to investigate whether a downtime of < 1 hour is achievable ( this includes the SAP UPGRADE downtime + post transports).
The alternative is to put some middleware in between the online system and CRM which can handle situations when CRM is down and which can be patched itself in < 1 hour.
The CRM system is virtualised and is connected to an "always on" database.
In the future we can make improvements such as these during the upgrade phase
- Add temporary addtional resource to the CRM CI
- Add temporary addtional resource to the CRM DBS
- archive as much data as possible
- tune the downtime parameters (IE number of R3trans processes)
- look at a move to HANA
- perform more downtime test on equivalent production hardware
But I don't want to spend resources doing all this , if in general a downtime of < 1hr is really not achievable for a CRM SAP upgrade.
I am interested to know if people out there have been able to achieve downtimes in that range themselves or have any other ideas.
I am looking forward to your input.
FYI - the DB size is 1.5 TB and it runs on WIN/SQL
regards
Tony Lewis