When SAP acquired Sybase in 2010, the deal provided access to a raft of technologies that SAP has been gradually integrated into its applications.
The latest of these integration efforts arrived this week in the form of SAP Sybase Replication Server for SAP Business Suite software running on top of the SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise database.
According to Dan Lahl, vice president of product marketing at SAP, maintaining high levels of availability in SAP environments has historically been a challenge. Lahl says SAP Sybase Replication Server solves that problem by being able to replicate data across instances of SAP running on top of a Sybase database in about 30 seconds.
In addition to high availability, Lahl says SAP Sybase Replication Server for SAP Business Suite is being used to drive data into analytics application in real time as well as distributing workloads across cloud computing environments.
In 2014, Lahl adds that SAP will add additional support for SAP HANA that will allow organizations to replicate data between Sybase databases and SAP’s in-memory computing platform.
Since being acquired by SAP, Lahl says the number of SAP customers opting to deploy the Sybase database has significantly increased. While SAP HANA is clearly the future strategic direction of SAP, Lahl notes that not every customer is ready to move every SAP module to a real-time computing platform. Instead, many are opting to deploy SAP software in a mixed mode where some modules run on the traditional Sybase database while other modules that offer substantial business benefits by being run in real time are deployed on HANA.
Whether SAP Sybase Replication Server drives more SAP customers to abandon rival database platforms remains to be seen. But in the age of Big Data, it’s becoming clear that replication is moving from being a handy capability to becoming a key technology for enabling a whole range of mission-critical use cases.
