As more and more customers deploy the R/3 System for their global operations to support mission-critical business functions such as sales and order-entry and continuous manufacturing, the need for maximized system availability becomes more and more crucial. Many companies now require 24 x 7 reliability for their R/3 Systems, that is, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

This documentation has been written to help you assess your current configuration and procedures and their implications on systems availability and to offer recommendations in formulating a high systems availability strategy for your R/3 System.

High availability is a technically complex area, and implementation considerations vary according to the nature of your system setup. This documentation is primarily intended to illustrate the available possibilities. Therefore, for detailed technical guidance when implementing a specific product or feature, contact the appropriate source, such as your SAP consultant, your hardware supplier, the SAP Competence Center, and so on.

An operational system (that is, a system in productive use) can be defined as "a system that can be used for its intended purpose". The term "operational" contains elements of performance as well as availability (that is, downtime), focusing on availability in the R/3 System, including the R/3 services, database management system (DBMS) services, network and operating system services, and hardware services. Availability must be discussed together with performance.

For more information, see the following:

Third-party products are used extensively in high availability solutions. Therefore, you need to make sure of compatibility with the R/3 System before implementing high availability products and features. For detailed technical guidance, contact the appropriate source, such as your SAP consultant, your DBMS supplier, the SAP Competence Center, and so on.