Over 330 employees, more than 300 technological and application certifications in the fields of Administration, Finance, Control, Logistics and Production, development of Treasury and Insurance solutions, and extensive experience in Utilities and Fashion.
Since 1997, we have been part of the SAP partnership program as a Service Partner and have several Recognized Expertise designations. Since 2015, we are also VAR Partners with PCOE Certification.
IT-Conductor has dealt with traditional migration processes and their complexities through the years. Some of the challenges faced in traditional migration processes were the following:
Cloud migrations are complex and not having a clear strategy can lead to failures that would impact business objectives, resulting in higher operational costs.
Migration processes are time-consuming due to their manual nature and are more prone to errors.
High downtime periods
Figure 1: Traditional Migration Risks
BGP and IT-Conductor innovation initiatives are tapping SAP on AWS to enhance agility, flexibility, and scalability for migration processes. IT-Conductor platform offers automated migration services to help its customers to deliver simpler and faster deployments with a clear strategy and reduce time efforts.
IT-Conductor’s goal is to deliver end-to-end automated migration cycles to be completed in a reduced time-lapse compared to traditional migration.
Our automation approach for BGP’s migration scenario was executed in 5 stages:
Discovery of source systems leveraged automation through our LMBD tool
Distilling the source environment to the on-premises baseline
Design of the target environment and migration approach
Developing the customization of best-practices automation templates for provisioning via Terraform and Ansible playbooks
Deploying the automation to create target systems and migrating data from on-premises to AWS.
IT-Conductor and BGP worked together in a real use-case scenario to deliver end-to-end S/4HANA 2021 from on-premises to AWS. We addressed business challenges by leveraging and customizing existing process definition templates for automated migration.
BGP collaborated with IT-Conductor to develop robust strategies and solutions that meet the needs of our customers as they embark on their digital transformation journey.
IT-Conductor’s tool for Automated SAP Landscape Discovery, reduced the time and effort to design the target system requirements for a proper assessment prior to the migration.
For this automation, the HANA replication (HSR) approach was used and the process was automated to migrate the data from the source to the target system on AWS for S/4HANA 2021. The deployment was leveraged with Terraform and Ansible scripts integrated with IT-Conductor.
For the deployment of the infrastructure and software, several services from AWS and IT-Conductor were used.
Figure 2: AWS Migration Architecture for BGP
With the IT-Conductor Gateway deployed in BGP’s on-premises infrastructure, the IT-Conductor tool for LMDB enables the discovery of all BGP SAP landscape components to export landscape inventory data and for migration assessments (compute, storage, and networking profiles).
Figure 3: LMDB Discovery on BGP Landscape
Once the target systems are added to the BGP Tenant to be managed and monitored from LMDB, process definitions are added to BGP Tenant to start with our automated migration process.
Figure 4: BGP Tenant Grid
Several process definitions are added to the BGP tenant for the provisioning of the Virtual Machine for S/4HANA 2021 in AWS and the installation of the SAP APP Server and HANA Database.
Figure 5: Tenant Process Definitions
Figure 6: Provisioning and Installation Process Definition
HANA Replication prerequisites are checked prior to the deployment of the replication to ensure software components are matched.
Figure 7: HANA Replication Process Definition
After successfully replicating the database via automation of HANA System Replication (HSR), the migrated S/4 system and database are added to IT-Conductor to be monitored as part of the performance and configuration validation prior to customer operation. The system performance can be easily compared side-by-side to baselines taken from IT-Conductor on the source system during the Distill stage of the project. 24x7 SAP operations are fully monitored and managed by IT-Conductor.
Figure 8: BGP Dashboard
Figure 9: Automated Migration from Source to Target
As part of BGP’s digital transformation journey, IT-Conductor provides Application Performance Management to guarantee that their applications are in good health and high performance when running applications on the cloud.
Systems can be managed through IT-Conductor and requested through the service catalog. Some of the IT-Conductor services include SID Start/Stop, Kernel Update, SAP Host Agent Update, Backup administration, and more.
Keeping track of performance trends is essential for organizations, and alerting in case of any failure is important for daily operations and finding root cause analysis to avoid system outages.
As part of the IT-Conductor and BGP collaboration, system migrations were added to IT-Conductor for monitoring and orchestrating.
Figure 10: HANA DB System in IT-Conductor
Figure 11: Supported Databases for Migration Available in IT-Conductor
A traditional SAP S/4 HANA system migration normally takes up to 3 weeks from assessment to deployment and migration. With IT-Conductor, we were able to reduce the time to less than 24 hours.
Migration was able to demonstrate consolidation and rehosting from two on-premise VMs to a single VM in the AWS cloud which can easily meet a balanced performance and cost objective.
IT-Conductor automation scripts reduced 80% of the manual tracking and effort, as well as provided auditing of the deployment and migration process at every stage which is useful for operations and compliance purposes.
Automated migration reduced business downtime by 90% since most of the stages except for the final cutover can be achieved with no application outage.
With a single step during the automated migration, we also obtained:
HW refresh
OS release Update
DB release Update
Very small manual effort needed
Figure 12: Benefits of IT-Conductor Automated Migration
