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SoftwareOne case study
How SoftwareOne helped Metro Brands step up to its SAP challenge
The Indian footwear retailer Metro Brands chose to migrate its critical SAP workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS). It worked with SoftwareOne (formerly Crayon) and Crescent Technologies to ensure seamless migration keeping in mind robust data protection, maintain regulatory compliance, and establish efficient backup and recovery solutions. Implementation of the chosen solution, Veeam Backup & Replication for SAP, led to a 99.9 percent backup success rate, minimizing data loss and giving peace of mind to IT leaders and C-suite management.
Challenges
- Migrate the critical SAP infrastructure from on-premises to AWS
- Ensure data protection and compliance for SAP application data.
- Implement a reliable and efficient backup and recovery solution for mission-critical workloads.
- Minimize downtime and data loss during replication and ensure that outages or unforeseen failures.
- Simplify backup management while maintaining scalability.
Project Summary
- SoftwareOne partners with Crescent Technologies to design a customized backup and migration and strategy.
- Implementation of Veeam Backup & Replication to protect critical AWS EC2 instances.
- Continuous backup monitoring is put in place to proactively identify and resolve potential issues.
- Launch of infrastructure on AWS from the backup
- Testing of validation and restoration procedures guaranteed data recoverability, strengthening Metro Brands’ disaster recovery plan.
Business Benefits
- Scalable and Durable Infrastructure. Migration to AWS provided an immensely scalable and durable infrastructure.
- Enhanced data protection. Project achieves a 99.9% backup success rate, while leveraging Amazon S3 Glacier for long-term data retention.
- Faster recovery. Downtime is minimized, reducing recovery time from hours to mere minutes.
- Scalability and cost optimization. Amazon S3 storage provides flexible scaling based on data retention needs, optimizing costs.
- Regulatory compliance. Encryption and backup immutability ensure adherence to data protection regulations, strengthening the client’s confidence in securing critical data.
Metro Brands, a leading multi-brand footwear retailer in India, embarked on a mission to modernize its IT infrastructure. Driven by the need for enhanced scalability, high availability, and cost efficiency, the company chose to migrate its critical SAP workloads to Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS EC2).
This ambitious undertaking, however, presented significant challenges, particularly in ensuring seamless migration, robust data protection, maintaining regulatory compliance, and establishing efficient backup and recovery solutions. Migrating mission-critical systems such as SAP requires careful planning and execution to avoid disruption and data loss. Metro Brands recognized the complexity of this project and the importance of working with experts.
To resolve these problems, Metro Brands partnered with Mumbai-based consultants Crescent Technologies and SoftwareOne, leveraging their combined expertise in cloud optimization and data protection. This collaboration proved invaluable in navigating the complexities of migration and ensuring a successful outcome.
The solution implemented by Crescent Technologies and SoftwareOne provided a comprehensive and robust framework for data protection and recovery.
A cornerstone of the migration was Veeam Backup & Replication for SAP, which was tailored specifically for SAP instances running on AWS EC2 to provide the granular control and efficient handling necessary.
- Client
- Metro Brands
- Industry
- Retail
- Platform
- AWS Cloud
- Services
- Cloud Services
- Country
- India
Post successful migration and seamless on cloud backup features minimized the risk of data loss by over 99% giving peace of mind to IT leaders and C‑suite.
Other Veeam capabilities were pivotal to the successful pre-migration outcomes of the project. These included Veeam Built-in Encryption, which ensured that all backups, both in transit and at rest, were protected from unauthorized access, addressing critical compliance requirements and protecting sensitive business data. Veeam ONE for Monitoring and Reporting embedded the proactive monitoring and comprehensive reporting essential for maintaining the health and integrity of the backup system. Veeam ONE provides real-time visibility into backup operations, allowing for proactive identification and resolution of potential issues.
For cloud storage, the team implemented Amazon S3 and S3 Glacier for backup storage. Leveraging the scalability and cost-effectiveness of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) and its archival tier, Glacier, allows Metro Brands to optimize storage costs while maintaining readily accessible backups. S3 provides immediate access for recent backups, while Glacier offers long-term archival storage at a significantly lower cost.
The implementation of the solution was carefully orchestrated to minimize disruption and ensure data integrity. This involved the careful implementation of a series of migration and backup processes. These are:
- Incremental block sync backups. Veeam Change Block Tracking technology helped sync data from on- premises to cloud which enabled efficient daily incremental backups, capturing only the changes made since the last backup. This significantly reduced the restoration time during cut over.
- Weekly full backups on AWS In addition to daily incremental backup, weekly full backups as a snapshot of the SAP system, ensured a robust recovery point in case of major issues.
- Monthly and yearly backups. For long-term archival and compliance purposes, monthly and yearly full backups of snapshots to S3 were also implemented, providing comprehensive recovery points for various scenarios.
One of the key elements of the project was the implementation of Instant Recovery via point in time snapshots. This feature enables rapid restoration of SAP instances, dramatically reducing downtime in the event of failure. Instant Recovery allows Metro Brands to bring critical systems back online within minutes, rather than the hours it took previously
Finally, comprehensive testing was conducted to validate the effectiveness of the post migration backup and recovery procedures. Full virtual machine (VM) restores and database-level restores were performed to ensure that recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) were met. This rigorous testing gave Metro Brands confidence in its ability to recover quickly and efficiently from any potential data loss event.
The results of the implementation were outstanding, demonstrating the value of the solution and the expertise of Crescent Technologies and SoftwareOne.
The two “headline” achievements of the project are seamless migration and 100% backup and restoration success rate with minimal RPO. Metro Brand’s exceptional backup success rate minimizes the risk of data loss, giving great peace of mind to its IT leaders and C-suite. Downtime was drastically reduced from hours to mere minutes. This rapid recovery capability all but eliminates business disruption and ensures the continued availability of critical SAP systems – a competitive necessity for any innovative 21st-century business.
Why SoftwareOne
SoftwareOne Software Experts India Private Limited’s extensive knowledge of AWS services and its unrivaled ability to customize solutions for specific business needs made them the perfect fit to tackle the operational challenges faced by Metro Brands. SoftwareOne’s collaborative approach, dedication to quality, and comprehensive support enhanced the transparency of the implementation, which came in on time and on budget. SoftwareOne’s proactive communication and focus on cost-effective, scalable, and secure solutions resulted in enhanced performance, reduced costs, and improved user satisfaction, solidifying its position as the preferred partner for this type of complex migration project.
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