Challenge

A leading fertilizer manufacturer was using SAP ECC for over 15 years. Since ECC was supporting its growth satisfactorily, it didn’t have any compelling reason to upgrade to SAP HANA. However, its infrastructure provider notified that its infrastructure was reaching end of life. This meant that staying on the same infrastructure stack was not an option.

The company began evaluating the purchase of new infrastructure. Given that the its infrastructure was anyway going to be refreshed, the company explored the option of migrating its SAP to latest HANA version. However, that was not a decision that could be taken in a hurry.

The company appointed a Big 4 consulting firm to evaluate the business case of migrating to HANA. In parallel, it tasked Unique Solutions with designing a new infrastructure solution. It stipulated that the proposed stack should not only provide a state-of-the-art platform for powering the company’s existing SAP ECC applications but should also be upgradeable to support SAP HANA should the company decide to upgrade to the latest version of SAP in future.

Solution

This was a challenging ask since the migration from SAP ECC to SAP HANA has brought about several paradigm shifts in computing, storage and networking architectures. Unique Solutions rose to the occasion. It mobilized its A-team to collaborate closely with the customer’s infra team. Working in a true spirit of partnership, the two teams analyzed the existing workloads and worked out the present and future infrastructure requirements.

We then agreed a new infrastructure stack comprising HPE servers, HPE 3PAR storage, SuSE Linux operating system and other components. Since the infrastructure was mission-critical, the company opted for HPE Complete Care package.

The customer’s existing infrastructure was going out of support before the agreed delivery date of our new servers and storage. We went out of the way to accommodate the customer in a spirit of partnership by supplying standby equipment. We then migrated the company’s applications away from the old infrastructure so that there no loss of availability of any applications when the old infra was decommissioned.

Once the ordered infrastructured was delivered and installed, we migrated the workloads from the standby infrastructure to it. We then setup SuSE cluster with advanced scripting for auto-failover of production environment. Our new infra has 99.5% uptime.

Outcome

Our new stack provided state-of-the-art infrastructure to run the company’s SAP ECC in the present and could also be easily enhanced to support SAP HANA in the future. Eventually, when the customer upgraded to SAP HANA, it did not have to scrap even one building block of the infrastructure supplied by us earlier, which underscores our commitment to protect the customer’s existing investments.

Through the years, the company has scaled from 800 to 1200 SAP HANA users and from 50 to 150 Virtual Machines on the same infrastructure stack, which speaks volumes about our superior solution architecting expertise and delivery excellence.