Orchestrating World's First Oracle 11g to HANA Migration on Azure Cloud

About the Client:

The client is the world’s leading industrial thread manufacturer, headquartered in the UK, with 17,000 employees in over 50 countries, across six continents. 

Customer Challenge

The customer faced several challenges due to the complex on-prem distribution of their SAP landscape. Their infrastructure spanned across four geographical locations, consisted of over 40 terabytes of databases, and utilized more than 300 servers running on AIX and Windows. This situation generated several issues, such as:

• Security Risks: With SAP applications hosted on-premises, the customer faced increased security risks. The distributed infrastructure hindered the client’s ability to maintain consistent security measures across all locations, leaving room for vulnerabilities and potential threats.
• Higher Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): The traditional infrastructure setup resulted in higher costs associated with managing and maintaining the on-premises SAP landscape.
• Traditional Infrastructure with Minimal Cloud Adoption: This lack of cloud utilization restricted their ability to leverage advanced technologies, scalability, and cost optimization that the cloud provides.
• Scalability: The existing infrastructure posed limitations on scalability. With growing data volumes and increasing demands, the customer struggled to scale their SAP landscape efficiently. The on-premises setup made it challenging to dynamically adjust resources to meet fluctuating demands, resulting in operational bottlenecks.

Brillio’s Solution

To address the challenges faced by the customer, Brillio developed and executed a comprehensive solution as follows:

• Customer Onboarding and Infrastructure Assessment: Leveraging BrillioOne.ai, we have facilitated the customer’s onboarding process, ensuring seamless integration with the SAP suite, and conducted an in-depth infrastructure assessment to evaluate the existing setup and identify areas for improvement.
• Phase 1: Migration to Azure and Greenfield Implementation. In the initial phase, Brillio prioritized the migration of on-premises SAP landscapes to Azure based on application profiling. We have conducted a Greenfield implementation on Azure for SAP GRC/Fiori landscapes, ensuring a smooth and efficient transition.
• Backup and VM Provisioning Automation: Brillio implemented Microsoft DPM (Data Protection Manager) for backup purposes across all environments and automated end-to-end virtual machine (VM) provisioning, streamlining the deployment process and reducing manual effort.
• Phase 2: Oracle 11g to HANA Migration on Azure. Brillio accomplished a groundbreaking achievement by successfully executing the world’s first Oracle 11g to HANA migration on the Azure cloud platform.
• Implementation of SAP BO & BODS Landscape: Brillio implemented SAP BusinessObjects (BO) and BusinessObjects Data Services (BODS) landscapes, utilizing SAP SQL Anywhere and Windows 2012.
• Consolidation of Production Systems: Brillio consolidated the customer’s production systems across multiple regions, including the EU, North America, East Asia, and South Asia, into a single PROD system. This consolidation streamlined operations, improved efficiency, and reduced complexity.
• Managed SAP and Azure Services: Brillio provided comprehensive managed services for the customer’s SAP landscape, ensuring the support and availability of critical applications worldwide.

Business Impact

Brillio successfully addressed the customer’s challenges, enabling the successful migration of its SAP landscapes to Azure. The managed services provided by Brillio ensured the smooth operation and availability of critical applications across the globe, ultimately leading to streamlining costs, improved efficiency, and increased customer satisfaction.

Following our implementation, the client managed to:

• Reduce dependency on in-house solutions by migrating SAP ecosystems to Azure, and leveraging cloud-managed services.
• Gain the flexibility to scale and support increasing volumes of SAP and non-SAP workloads.

1. 1. 1. Retired or enabled 20-30% of the workloads for elastic consumption, streamlining resource allocation and reducing unnecessary overheads.
      2. Achieve faster time to market by implementing same-day factory planning, as opposed to the previous 1-2 days required before migration.

• Improved operational efficiency by tremendously accelerating the report generation time by 98%, from 6 hours pre-migration to 10 minutes.

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