SAP Migration Automation
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 before the migration.
This automation used the HANA replication (HSR) approach, 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.
Reference Architecture
Several services from AWS and IT-Conductor were used to deploy the infrastructure and software.
Figure 2: AWS Migration Architecture for BGP
Orchestration Workflow using IT-Conductor
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 the BGP Tenant to start with our automated migration process.
Figure 4: BGP Tenant Grid
Several process definitions are added to the BGP tenant to provision the Virtual Machine for S/4HANA 2021 in AWS and install the SAP APP Server and HANA Database.
Figure 5: Tenant Process Definitions
Figure 6: Provisioning and Installation Process Definition
HANA Replication prerequisites are checked before the deployment of the replication to ensure software components are matched.
Figure 7: HANA Replication Process Definition
After successfully replicating the database via HANA System Replication (HSR) automation, the migrated S/4 system and database are added to IT-Conductor to be monitored as part of the performance and configuration validation before 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
Application Performance Management
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
Supported Migration Databases
Figure 11: Supported Databases for Migration Available in IT-Conductor
Benefits Delivered
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A traditional SAP S/4 HANA system migration typically takes 3 weeks from assessment to deployment and migration. With IT-Conductor, BGP could reduce the time to less than 24 hours.
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Migration demonstrated consolidation and rehosting from two on-premise VMs to a single VM in the AWS cloud, which can quickly meet a balanced performance and cost objective.
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IT-Conductor automation scripts reduced 80% of the manual tracking and effort, as well as providing auditing of the deployment and migration process at every stage, which is useful for operations and compliance purposes.
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Automated migration reduced business downtime by 90% since most stages, except for the final cutover, can be achieved without application outage.
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With a single step during the automated migration, we also obtained:
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HW refresh
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OS release Update
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DB release Update
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Very small manual effort needed
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Figure 12: Benefits of IT-Conductor Automated Migration
About BGP
For 35 years, BGP has been offering consulting, services, and software platforms in the areas managed by CFOs and CIOs relating to the design, construction, and management of corporate information systems, taking as a starting point the specific needs of the functional and industry sectors, to provide complete ERP, Analytics, Performance Management and Managed Services solutions, enabling Management to make conscious decisions in line with the state of the art opportunities offered by technological evolution, in Cloud and On-Premise, developing Cloud Native applications that extend standard solutions using Blockchain, AI, ML, RPA and IoT technologies to automate activities and increase control and granularity of data.