We can change the size of our compute instances on the fly to accommodate our business needs.

TIME CRUNCH: MIGRATING SAP OPERATIONS IN ONLY 3 MONTHS

Fund Grube wanted to make its Retail IT operations infrastructure more flexible and modern by migrating it to the cloud. More specifically, they wanted to migrate their entire SAP operations to the AWS Cloud, allowing their IT infrastructure to grow as fast as their business. It was particularly important to the company that the project would not interrupt business operations. This meant setting up the Disaster Recovery (DR) productive systems with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 1 hour and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 15 minutes. Furthermore, a strict time limit of 3 months for the project was required which coincided with the expiration of their hardware maintenance licenses where all their systems resided. 

ADDRESSING TECHNICAL AND BUSINESS CHALLENGES

Zoi advised from the very beginning to realize the migration using AWS. AWS is the market-leading cloud provider and has the most advanced services at competitive costs. As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner with the SAP on AWS Competency, Zoi has successfully completed multiple migrations of SAP infrastructure to the cloud. On this occasion, the additional challenge of having to perform the migration in a maximum of 3 months was faced. 

Performing a migration of all SAP systems in such a short time meant it was vital to secure the close cooperation and involvement of the client from the very start. Furthermore, any migration that includes SAP environments should be analyzed carefully, with a global vision, and room for expansion. SAP environments are key to successful business operations and will be connected to other systems. Which means they cannot be treated as isolated applications but as part of a whole.

At Zoi, we believe that it is vital for customers to select business partners who not only understand the technical implications of these platforms, but also the underlying business challenges. With this holistic approach, not only technical problems are avoided, but also the inconvenience that a project of this nature can pose for the business is minimized.

THE RIGHT TEAM, THE RIGHT TOOLS, THE RIGHT SOLUTION

For this project, it was important to have technicians with a hybrid SAP and AWS Cloud profile. This allowed them to correctly deploy the environments following the best practices recommended by both SAP and AWS. Thanks to this, Zoi was able to meticulously carry out the design of the infrastructure in AWS with different types of instances that were adapted to the needs of the project without jeopardizing the overall platform performance.

The SAProuter service is in a self-scaling group, which guarantees the high availability of this environment. In the second phase of the project, migration to HANA (including the HANA replication configuration) was agreed upon with Fund Grube. In addition, our ScaleSAP software has been applied to the SAP application servers. This software allows the self-scaling of these servers and helps to achieve two mission-critical objectives: high availability and a DR system that allows an RTO of less than 1 hour and an RPO of less than 15 minutes.

For the migration of the entire infrastructure, the AWS SMS tool was used. This made it possible to copy each of the on-premise installed servers on different Amazon Machine Images (AMI) on AWS. The AMIs were reliable and consistent images of Fund Grube’s systems and helped with deployment. The images were created and updated daily, and without the users being affected. This way, only one final synchronization had to be done on the day of migration.

On the day of migration, the downtime of each system was on average less than two hours and caused minimal disruptions to Fund Grube’s systems.

One of these instances was our Cloud Time Table (CT2) solution. CT2 is a consistent scheduler that allows you to program the stop and start of the environments automatically. Since cloud services are charged by the hour, CT2 allows costs to be reduced. Using this solution it is common to see 65 % cost reductions in SAP development and quality systems compared to not using CT2. The figure shows the project architecture and how CT2 was used. 

ABOUT FUND GRUBE

Fund Grube was founded in 1983 and is one of the major Retail chains in the Canary Islands dedicated to the cosmetics and fashion industry. Over 40 stores are distributed in local and tourist areas of Gran Canaria, Tenerife, Lanzarote, and Fuerteventura. Fund Grube has recently made the leap to the rest of the Spanish market by opening a new store in the Balearic Islands.

The project architecture combines SAP and AWS Cloud services.