Performance optimization - Data center change, operating system, hardware, and database change
The company NAY a.s. (hereinafter referred to as NAY) is the largest specialized retailer of consumer electronics in the Slovak Republic, with a market share of approximately 25%.
Business need
Business growth places new demands on IT systems. To ensure their smooth functioning, it was necessary to eliminate problems with user responses on the production system. At the same time, we prepared the environment for the transition to S/4HANA and the use of modern technologies.
Key benefits of the solution
- Rapid improvement of system responses in the new hosting center.
- Elimination of problems with user responses and system running speed by moving to a new hosting center in a private cloud.
- The transfer of all environments between hosting centers, as part of the migration of systems to HANA/Sybase ASE database and the Linux operating system, was completed within 12 hours on each environment, i.e., customer operations were not affected.
- SAP systems run on DB HANA/Sybase ASE as a prerequisite for a faster and optimal transition to S/4HANA.
Solution
The prerequisite for the implemented solutions was the trust and cooperation of NAY in all, even partial, steps, which ultimately led to the optimization of the system operation and the resolution of identified difficulties in user response times on NAY systems.
As IT Director of NAY a.s. Mr. Martin Deák says: "The SAP DB to HANA DB migration project from MS SQL was evaluated by NAY as successful and with minimal negative impact on the business. What I appreciate the most is that after testing, the downtime of the production system was significantly reduced compared to the originally planned one."
In the 1st step, we proposed to NAY to perform benchmarking within the Proof of Concept (PoC) to "test" the running of a productive SAP system on the same architecture but in the private cloud of our cooperating company Dragon Internet a.s. (hereinafter referred to as Dragon). Dragon provides hosting services for our customers to house servers in a private cloud in the Czech Republic, which is a data center tuned specifically for the operation of SAP systems.
In 10/2020, we switched the productive ERP system 1:1 to the same architecture (server) with the same hardware resources. The system responses turned out to be significantly faster, which was such a significant difference for NAY that they decided to keep the productive ERP in the Dragon data center.
The entire SAP architecture was gradually migrated to Dragon - the 2nd step of the solution. The migration of the SAP architecture itself took place during 1Q/2021 at the same time as the migration to new databases, HW, and the operating system.
We prepared the HW, set up IP, DNS, etc., gradually migrated Process Integration and Adobe Document Services (ADS) to Sybase ASE, as well as migrated the development, testing and production ERP environment to HANA DB.
We performed checks and modifications of the ABAP code for HANA optimization. The entire process was accompanied by checks and subsequent corrections/modifications and thorough testing again. Each sub-step included testing by the MIBCON Group team and the NAY team.
NAY had previously operated BW as their 1st SAP product on the HANA database. The HW of the development and production BW environment was physically transferred to the Dragon hosting center.
More information about NAY a.s.:
Company website: https://www.nay.sk
Headquarters: Bratislava
Products and services: Electronics, Electrical appliances, Photo + Audio + Video, Computers and laptops, Mobile phones, Home and garden equipment
You can view the reference in OnePager format MIBFORMA_OnePager_NAY_EN.pdf
