ABOUT ROCA

Roca began its activity in 1917 manufacturing cast iron radiators for domestic heating at its factory near Barcelona. Since then, the company has expanded its portfolio to include boilers and bathroom fittings. Today, the company has established itself as a major global manufacturer with a presence in over 170 countries and 24,000 employees worldwide. 

AVOIDING OPERATIONAL DISRUPTIONS

To ensure that the legal changes in its Indian subsidiary did not affect the correct execution of other projects and developments in other subsidiaries and at the head office, the company decided to duplicate both SAP ERP development and quality management systems.

The objective of this duplicity was to have two development environments available in parallel, with different teams of consultants, and that, at some point, once the developments and tests were finished, this second branch of development would be reunited with the standard one and then disappear.

The main challenge was to have a fully operational copy of the SAP ERP development and quality management environments while ensuring that the system met the high standards of security, stability, and performance required by the company. Furthermore, the AWS network had to be an extension of their data centers to enable quick future deployment in new environments.

To make things even more challenging, the system had to be integrated into their SAP landscape within 2 weeks so that the consultants could continue with work as soon as possible.

DUPLICATE SAP ENVIRONMENTS USING THE CLOUD

In order to carry out this duplication, the company asked us to clone its quality and development SAP ECC 6 to AWS. The decision to perform this cloning on the AWS platform was taken for three main reasons: 

1. To avoid making costly hardware investments for a one-off project. 
2. The need to accelerate the availability of the copy of its two SAP ERP environments, since standard on-premise system creation is normally much longer. 
3. To explore the creation and management of infrastructures at the leading provider of cloud computing: AWS.
   

A COMBINATION OF INSTALLATION, MIGRATION & CONFIGURATION OF SAP WORKLOADS

The solution included a 3-pronged approach consisting of the installation, migration, and configuration of a landscape composed of two environments of the following SAP products:

• Two instances of SAP ECC 6 EHP 6 on Windows and Oracle (DEV and QA)

In addition to SAP environments, the following infrastructure was provided:

• A Windows Bastion instance for administration and installation tasks
• An instance for Cloud Time Table (CT2)

CT2 is a consistent scheduler application that helps to save costs in the cloud.

Through the scheduler, you can create personalized calendars for the use of your servers in a very visual and simple way, both individually or in groups. Thus, instances will truly only be used when needed.

In the specific case of the Manufacturing company, a configuration that used the instances only 40 % of the time was established, saving approximately 50 % of the costs.

BENEFITS

Thanks to this project, the group was able to make its SAP ERP development and quality systems available to its consultants in India within a week, accelerating the IT department’s processing by more than 75 %.

Expenditure vs. investment

As it was a cloud environment, expensive investments in hardware were avoided, which meant that only what was used was paid for and only for the time it was in use.

Accelerating availability

With cloud system build times much faster than on-premise, the infrastructure was delivered more than 75 % faster than setting up traditional DC environments.

Cost savings

Thanks to CT2, AWS instances were used only when required, saving approximately 50 % of the costs.