About the client

Our client is a Global Retail Chain and Consumer Package Goods Manufacturer.

Business Challenge

The client’s existing footprint in SAP HANA was massive in size due to the nature of its global retail business. As such, the Client needed to not only reduce its SAP HANA storage fees but also had to ensure a high availability and reliable platform. Additionally, the Client required redundancy for business continuity measures and the new platform had to perform equal to or better than their existing BI landscape.

Approach and Solution

The team gathered the technical system and functional requirements to produce a Technical Architecture and migration plan.

This plan included as example Azure Virtual Machines and ARM templates to build the initial landscape within Azure. Comprehensive offline and online data migration approaches and techniques were deployed to minimize business interruption and ensure a 100% successful migration.

Business Continuity was achieved by a thoughtful plan centered around the Client’s critical business applications. Leveraging Microsoft’s Cluster and SLES Pacemaker, SQL Always-on, HANA Replication, Azure Load Balancer and other tools, we created redundancies and failover systems through Availability Zones, Geo-Redundant Failover and Azure Site Recovery.

The team also ensured a robust security model was designed and deployed. These steps include as an example Azure AD integration, Single Sign-on, encryption of data and backups, Azure NSG, vulnerability scans and penetration tests.

Outcome and Benefits

Our client realized a successful migration with better performance at a lower over cost as the data storage costs were significantly reduced from SAP HANA. The system performance has shown to be superior under the new design. Some other benefits:

• Easy to build High Availability & Disaster Recovery solutions
• Implementation costs were minimally related to the size of this large environment
• Reduced infrastructure overhead
• Low-cost disaster recovery services