Maximizing System Uptime with OpenEdge Replication

With enterprise applications becoming increasingly critical to the day-to-day operations of businesses across the globe, the way these applications are built and managed must also evolve.

The world of brick-and-mortar companies with systems and applications available only on premises has faded into the background. In its place, a completely digital business landscape has emerged. Users have come to expect anytime, anywhere access to critical data and applications, delivered by the cloud and available on any number of devices, from smartphones to tablets.

In this always-on, always-available era, downtime (regardless of whether it’s planned or unplanned) can cause operations to come to a screeching halt. In fact, with businesses deploying and managing a growing number of mission-critical applications, downtime is becoming even more costly. In a survey we conducted with over 600 OpenEdge customers and partners last year, we discovered that nearly half of the respondents require continuous operation of their OpenEdge applications.

Always-On with OpenEdge
Given the increased pressure to maintain uptime, we’re constantly exploring new ways to ensure continuous operations. Acceptable downtime windows for maintenance are smaller than ever, and recovery from unplanned downtime needs to be instantaneous.

OpenEdge Replication is a solution that customers and partners rely upon to address their business continuity strategy needs. Mission-critical applications can’t afford to depend on the availability of a single system or source of data—if it goes out, then the application goes with it.

OpenEdge Replication gives businesses a way to protect their business-critical information from unplanned downtime, and provides some peace of mind by protecting against the potential loss of data. It does this by automating the near real-time transfer of data between the primary and target databases, without affecting the performance of any applications running on the platform.

With OpenEdge 11.7, we further enhanced the functionality of OpenEdge Replication with target synchronization. This enables businesses to maintain multiple standby sites (on- or off-site, up to you) that are constantly in synch with your primary system. If your hardware becomes unavailable, a hot standby site can help you recover—regardless of the cause of the outage. In fact, with multi-site synchronization, you’re even protected if multiple sites go down.

Replication transition failover is another capability we added in OpenEdge 11.7 to ensure the uptime of your systems and applications. This enables you to manually switch the roles of different systems at any time. For example, say you wanted to perform some maintenance on the primary system—you could have it become the tertiary system, while the original secondary and tertiary systems move up to fill the gap. This enables you to do routine maintenance without impacting uptime or the user experience.

Barbara Ware is Sr. Product Marketing Manager, responsible for positioning and messaging OpenEdge and OpenEdge Professional Services.