Challenge

The customer is the world’s largest laminated plastic tubes manufacturer and has 25 state-of-the-art production facilities in 12 countries. The company was running its end-to-end business on SAP ECC ERP and an array of satellite applications like SAP BW, SAP APO and SAP BO. Over time, its application and infrastructure landscape struggled to keep pace with the growth in its volumes and increasing digitalization of its business.

After a detailed evaluation, the company decided to migrate to SAP HANA to support its digital transformation goals. Recently acquired by one of the world’s largest private equity companies, our customer expressed a preference for an OPEX-based infrastructure deployment model that delivered the most optimum Total Cost of Ownership.

Solution

We collaborated with the company as a trusted partner and techno-commercial advisor for its migration journey.

For the SAP HANA production server, we used standard SAP HANA scripts for sizing the memory. For the quality and sandbox landscape, we leveraged advanced features supported by SAP HANA to size the memory at less than half of that stipulated by the prevailing SOP, thus optimizing the TCO. When it came to SuSE Linux, we reviewed both SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP variants. With its support for Extended Service Pack Overlap Support (ESPOS) and SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, the SAP variant proved to be a better fit for the mission critical nature of the customer’s business than the plain vanilla variant.

Outcome

With the bill of material of the new landscape ready, we turned to the commercials of the new infrastructure. The alternatives considered for developing the business case were On-premise, Public Cloud and HPE Greenlake Cloud Platform.

HPE Greenlake was the only option that provided a consumption-driven model with full cost transparency. It also eliminated cost of over-provisioning. Public cloud providers charge steep egress charges to take their data out, which can add up quickly in a company with large database size and presence in over 10+ countries. HPE Greenlake enables rapid ramp up to address rare spikes in demand. In addition, it also delivers highly predictable performance for regular workloads, which is a huge area of uncertainty in public cloud. The customer also liked the unique ability provided by HPE Greenlake to pick and choose the latest and state-of-the-art infrastructure components, something that is outside the buyer’s control in public cloud. Another major advantage of HPE Greenlake is that it enables future infrastructure additions to be made incrementally to the Greenlake master services agreement. Gone are the days where a company had to jump through many redtape hoops to raise a purchase order for new infrastructure.

The company’s HPE Greenlake Cloud Platform is located in Mumbai Metropolitan Area, which is also the home of the company’s global HQ. With access provided to over 1000 users spread across 10+ countries, this is one of the largest HPE Greenlake Cloud Platforms set up by an HPE Partner in Western India.