ADAPTING TO GROWTH

The increase in the complexity of Mémora's reporting processes - mainly due to acquisitions and organic growth - made it essential for Mémora to adapt their SAP Business Warehouse (BW) platform and provide it with new functionalities, including greater speed in managing and processing information. Because of this, they considered upgrading their SAP BW and migrating their Microsoft SQL Server database to SAP HANA.

The upgrade required new HANA-certified infrastructure, but Mémora was immersed in a data center renovation project that made it difficult to add new environments at the same time. On the other hand, it was important for management to have all business-critical reports available promptly to be able to continue making decisions based on quality data.

MÉMORA UPGRADES SAP BW AND MIGRATES TO HANA

Our solution for the customer was to upgrade their SAP BW systems on HANA in less than 2 months, all while ensuring the system met the high standards of security, stability, and performance required by Mémora.

ENSURING SECURITY, STABILITY, AND PERFORMANCE

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and all the base infrastructure was created for the new SAP BW system such as public and private subnets, NAT gateway, security groups, IAM accounts, etc.

ABOUT MEMORA

Mémora are the leading and largest funeral services company in the Iberian Peninsula. They specialize in funeral services, morgues, crematories, and cemetery management.

To perform the migration from the customer's datacenter, an exact copy of the original SAP BW was created in AWS followed by the upgrade to the newer SAP BW version. The database switch to HANA was carried out using the Database Migration Option (DMO) in the SAP Software Update Manager (SUM). This was beneficial because it allowed the combination of Unicode conversion, upgrade, and migration into a single step, often referred to as the one-step migration procedure.

To create the transport system between the development and production instances, Elastic File System (EFS) was used, which allowed simultaneous access to a shared file system using a traditional file permissions model, file-locking capabilities, and a hierarchical directory structure via the Network File System (NFS) protocol.

The instance for the Primary Application Server (PAS), along with the central services (ASCS), were deployed in an auto-scaling group, across two Availability Zones, with a maximum and minimum of one active instance. In this way, we ensured that the AWS platform itself would monitor that there was only one active instance in any of the Availability Zones included in the group.

To control the possible movement of instances between Availability Zones, the Route 53 (DNS) service was used, resolving by name the active instance at any given moment.

Lastly, to perform SAP backups, we used a low-cost Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volume with optimized speed for intensive use and frequent access workloads. In addition, the database periodically backups, and their logs are transferred to S3 containers to reduce storage costs.

In less than 2 months, Zoi was able to upgrade Mémora’s SAP BW system and migrate Microsoft SQL databases to HANA on AWS. This allows the company to cope with continued growth and access information faster.

This new infrastructure would be built on AWS and needed to be an extension of their corporate network to interconnect the upgraded SAP BW with their source systems (mainly SAP ERP) located in their data center and, in turn, that users from all Mémora offices could transparently access the new system.

The architecture diagram of the AWS solution for Mémora shows how the SAP systems and the AWS Cloud are connected.