SAP TO AWS CLOUD MIGRATION

DYNAMIC ADAPTATION OF BUSINESS NEEDS

Daufood reached out to Zoi with three main objectives:

• Implement new cloud infrastructure that allows adapting the demand for computing dynamically to the business needs, making it possible to easily increase or decrease capacity.
• Ensure that Daufood systems are managed following industry best practices including the availability of real-time data analysis.
• Have adequate licensing costs and that these licensed products cover all of the company’s processes optimally.

Zoi is a certified partner in both SAP (Gold Partner) and AWS (Premier Tier Services Partner). Additionally, Zoi has the SAP Competency, which is reserved for partners who have expertise in realizing SAP on-premise migration projects to the AWS Cloud and correct administration thereof.

The most critical part of this project was to migrate the entire SAP infrastructure of Daufood to the AWS Cloud for later management. Zoi does not simply perform a migration but instead performs it transparently for users to minimize the impact on business.

CREATING A SCALABLE AND RELIABLE SYSTEM

From the start, Zoi advised migrating to AWS, since they are the market leader in cloud infrastructure and have five times the processing capacity of all other competitors put together. Furthermore, they have the most advanced services for the customer’s purpose and a competitive pricing model.

Zoi has a history of successfully migrating SAP infrastructure to the cloud. However, migration to the cloud is only half the battle for projects like this. After the migration, Zoi would be responsible for the complete administration of the SAP systems. Administration in this case meant starting from the lowest layer (infrastructure) and working up to the highest (functional).

Similar to other projects, there are normally two types of requirements: functional and technical. The requirements for this project are detailed below.

FUNCTIONAL

• Implement a certified AWS architecture ensuring SAP support is available at all times
• Architecture must be adjusted based on current needs to optimize costs
• Implement a scalable architecture that can meet the future needs of Daufood
• Take advantage of cloud capabilities to reduce recurring costs as much as possible

TECHNICAL

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 8 hours and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 hour for environments with Disaster Recovery (DR) and RTO of 1 hour and RPO of 15 minutes for environments that require high availability (HA)
• 24 x 7 availability for production environments
• Availability in working hours or on-demand for development and quality environments
• Interoperability with the rest of Daufood applications
  

KEEP IT SIMPLE & AUTOMATE WHERE NECESSARY

In a project with such characteristics, it is important to have technicians with a hybrid SAP and Cloud profile. This allows them to have the advanced concepts of SAP assimilated and the know-how to correctly deploy the environments following the best practices recommended by AWS. Thanks to this, Zoi was able to meticulously carry out the design of the infrastructure in AWS with different types of instances that were adapted to the needs of the project.



One of these instances is our Cloud Time Table (CT2) solution. CT2 is a consistent scheduler that allows you to program the stop and start of the environments automatically. Since cloud services are charged by the hour, CT2 allows costs to be reduced. Using this solution it is common to see 65% cost reductions in SAP development and quality systems compared to not using CT2. The figure below shows the project architecture and how CT2 was used. 

The project architecture combines SAP and AWS Cloud services.

In the figure, there are several self-scaling groups, which guarantee the high availability of these environments.

Two tools were used to migrate the entire infrastructure:

• Export/Import of servers in VMware using an AWS proprietary tool for SAP BO servers
• Homogeneous copy of the other SAP servers through backup/restore

Zoi has a deep knowledge of the different existing migration procedures and performs an analysis of how to act most efficiently in each scenario taking into account several key aspects:

• Ensure consistency of the data
• Minimize downtime on critical servers
• Procedures should be simple and automated where possible to minimize errors and working hours

Another important point of the project for Daufood was the backup storage application. This application stores backup copies of SAP databases in S3 containers. These containers provide great reliability at a cost ten times lower than on-premise alternatives.

For IT Service Management, Zoi uses Atlassian’s Jira software which is perfect for implementing an agile methodology. This tool allows Daufood to open requests and incidents, and track them in a simple and efficient manner.

The SAP services managed by Zoi are composed of three types of recurring tasks of different periodicities:

• Preventive: This includes monitoring, checking, and reporting to prevent future problems in the systems. 
• Corrective: All actions aimed at correcting an error. These errors can come from detection in a preventive task or from an open ticket in Jira.
• Evolutionary: All systems need to evolve and have the latest patches applied to keep them updated and safe. Periodic patches are performed at the operating system, database, and SAP levels.

These tasks help to maintain the successful state of SAP systems, minimize problems in the medium term, and achieve a stable infrastructure.

ABOUT DAUFOOD

Daufood is headquartered in Barcelona and is the owner of Domino’s Pizza master franchise in different countries around Europe. With a total of fourteen franchises, it has become the world’s first franchisee of the brand, in terms of countries in which it operates. They currently have more than 950 employees and more than 130 stores.

This migration process needed to be led by a technology partner such as Zoi with extensive knowledge and experience both in AWS migration projects and in the subsequent support and maintenance of our SAP systems. And the result of the project, in time and form, could not have been more satisfactory.