Multiple acquisitions necessitate a unified IT infrastructure
Each corporate acquisition at the company brought with it a new IT landscape, leading to a proliferation of different enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, databases and supporting technologies. As well as increasing IT costs and complexity, this made it difficult for the business to streamline processes and gain a timely view of global performance.
While the brewer had attempted to harmonize its systems over the years, ongoing acquisitions made this an uphill battle. Realizing that the situation was unsustainable, the company embarked on an ambitious strategic project, dubbed Aurora, to modernize and consolidate core systems.
At-a-Glance
Corporate acquisitions helped the company grow into an international brewing company but left it with a fragmented technology landscape. The brewer worked with SUSE and SAP to build a single global operating platform that will help it harmonize processes and cut IT costs.
With SUSE comes consistency
The company built project Aurora around two key objectives. The first was standardizing the entire company on a single ERP system: SAP S/4HANA. The second was migrating to a private cloud environment built on Microsoft Azure.
To achieve consistent performance, always-on availability and simplified system management, the brewer chose SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications on Azure as its operating system.
The company’s Infrastructure and “Architecture Director says: “When it came to selecting an operating system for SAP, SUSE was the obvious choice. We knew that the majority of SAP HANA instances deployed worldwide run on SLES for SAP Applications, and that the two companies have a long history of co-operation and co-development.”
Within project Aurora, the company has configured 639 virtual machines on Azure to date. These host SAP S/4HANA running on SLES for SAP Applications and support a variety of SAP environments: sandbox, development, quality assurance, preproduction, production, and disaster recovery. The brewer uses the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability (HA) Extension, a bundled component with SLES for SAP Applications that delivers robust failover and replication tools to keep systems running 24/7.
“We were impressed with how straightforward it was to set up and use SUSE Linux HA Extension,” says a Cloud Architect at the company. “As an international business, we count on SAP applications running around the clock: we can’t overstate how valuable SUSE’s ability to maximize service uptime and business continuity is to us.”
The company expects to have more than 30,000 total business users accessing SAP applications on Azure, with up to 9,000 concurrent users.
“Microsoft Azure has its own Kubernetes orchestration service, but we opted for Rancher Prime because we find it easier to use, and because it provides greater flexibility around container management.”
Accelerated automation with Rancher Prime
As part of its move to the cloud, the brewer took the opportunity to migrate non-SAP business applications to a Cloud Architect container-based architecture, managed with the Rancher Kubernetes orchestration solution. The company uses Rancher Prime to provide automated patching, scaling, and updating for containers, empowering a relatively small team to manage a large number of containers.
With other business applications running in containers on Azure alongside SAP, the brewer can more easily make connections between the two environments, helping link up processes and boost business agility.
The Cloud Architect says: “Microsoft Azure has its own Kubernetes orchestration service, but we opted for Rancher Prime because we find it easier to use and it provides greater flexibility around container management.”
The result - no complexity, harmonized systems, sleek processes
The company’s move toward a highly scalable cloud infrastructure and automated application landscape is removing complexity from IT operations while driving down costs and risk.
With SLES for SAP Applications, the brewer enjoys fast access to SAP support around the clock. Issues are resolved promptly, giving the company greater peace of mind and keeping key systems running optimally. The Cloud Architect confirms: “Thanks to the close relationship between SUSE and SAP, we can access direct support for our core business applications whenever we need it. That level of support is very valuable when running an SAP environment as large and mission-critical as ours.”
Likewise, the deployment of SUSE Manager, an infrastructure management solution designed to secure mixed Linux environments, has enabled the brewer to simplify and streamline day-to-day management of its SAP S/4HANA and Kubernetes landscapes. “We now have much more visibility and control of our IT landscape, which allows us to keep everything running with less expense, effort and risk,” says the Cloud Architect.
As more parts of the company embrace SAP S/4HANA on Azure, the underlying SUSE technologies will continue to provide a reliable platform for running, managing, and securing the solution.
In summary, SLES, SUSE Manager, and Rancher Prime in combination enabled the company to harmonize its IT systems after multiple acquisitions. It also facilitated centralized management of their IT infrastructure, and an easier transition to the cloud.