Adapting for Hybrid Cloud – Part 3 of 3: The Results

Part 1 of this series – Adapting for Hybrid Cloud: The Market – provides a view of the market challenges in achieving a cloud-optimized enterprise and adapting to hybrid cloud.

Part 2 of this series – Adapting for Hybrid Cloud: The SUSE Solution – provides information around the SUSE offerings that can help adapt to a cloud-optimized enterprise and be smart about migrating workloads to the cloud environment.

Most enterprises today are pursuing a hybrid strategy, mixing and matching public and on-prem venues depending on each workload’s requirements. One of the issues facing enterprises with hybrid today is the difference in pricing and procurement models. For public cloud, on-demand operating expense pricing is pretty mainstream, and this on-demand access to huge capacity is one of the key drivers behind public cloud adoption, driving more rapid instantiation of resources, allowing the scaling of applications to suit changing demands, making innovation easier and simplifying entry into new markets.

Many enterprises have already been successful in seamlessly scaling their platform to quickly take applications from prototype to production deployment across multiple environments – from on-premise to multi-cloud to cloud-optimized enterprises.  Here are several examples:

• ApiOmat provides enterprise companies with the agility to deliver new digital services faster, by simplifying the development of frontend apps for any device—be it mobile, web, voice assistants, chatbots or even AR/VR headsets. Key to ApiOmat’s offering is the flexibility to support different IT environments and the capability to integrate easily with existing business applications, legacy systems and Cloud APIs.  To speed up time to value, the company containerized its software and selected SUSE CaaS Platform to enable the quick and easy deployment in any environment—from bare metal on-premises to public cloud.  To offer simple solutions that are easy to set up in different environments, ApiOmat was then able to offer a more efficient way of rolling out its solution to client data centers.

• Altran wanted to deploy an authentication gateway for their web application without the cost and complexity of setting up internal infrastructure. They chose a solution based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server virtual servers running on Microsoft Azure.  As a result, they gained a flexible, highly available and secure platform.  They enabled low-touch management and systems administration and achieved scalability at a low total cost of ownership.

• Carlsberg, a very large having grown through acquisitions to become the world’s 4^th largest beer manufacturer, had some growing pains of many disparate systems. They wanted to shift to a cloud-first approach for more unified collaboration. From planning through execution, the project team completed the datacenter and SAP migration in less than six months with no significant downtime. They used standard SAP HANA database replication from existing nodes to SAP HANA Large Instances in Azure running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Their results included the ability to optimize cloud consumption by shutting down some unused resources at night.  Plus, their scalability has greatly improved, allowing for the ability to build out resources in the Cloud which was impossible with their data center.  And they saw faster and improved innovation and experimentation, with much less risk and cost.

• Alegri is a leading IT consulting company focused primarily on integrating Microsoft and SAP technologies. Because their existing IT infrastructure was not extensive enough to run a comprehensive ERP solution, Alegri considered migrating to the cloud. Alegri moved to Linux servers based on Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines and chose SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP applications as the operating platform, as well as SAP S/4 HANA with three database instances. As a result, their operational business reports now enable better and faster decisions because they are based on current transactional data.  Faster response to changing ERP system loads allows Alegri to maintain performance without the need to purchase additional IT infrastructure.  And through self-service automation, Alegri can decommission systems that aren’t actively used which contributes to even more cost savings.

• Achmea is a Dutch holding company for a group of strong, successful insurance brands. With its on-premises SAP HANA appliance approaching the end of its service life, Achmea wanted to adopt a more adaptable and scalable solution for the future. Achmea rejected a new on-premises option because it would have been too costly and inflexible.  Instead, they chose to migrate their SAP HANA landscape to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications running on the Microsoft Azure Cloud. Following a smooth migration, the company is working with SUSE to deploy a full HANA System Replication high-availability solution. As a result, Achmea delivered a scale-out cluster proof of concept that increased uptime significantly to almost 99.9999%.  They also expanded their SAP Fraud Management solution from 1TB to 2TB without disruption, and their 4TB on-premise environment to a full 10TB on Azure – with no difference in performance.

• Coke One North America (CONA) wanted to enable their 12 largest bottling partners to work together as one company. To do this, they needed to migrate their SAP HANA based platform to the Cloud which was powered across two outsourced data centers. Their SAP HANA instance at that time was the biggest instance to ever be migrated to Azure. CONA chose SUSE and Azure based on cost, speed, and strategy. The solution included a net disaster recovery with multi-tier replication, SAP Business Warehouse – with a database size of more than 12 terabytes, and 40 Azure machines running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Their extensive migration was completed in 7 months and resulted in substantial cost savings.  They realized increased performance – processing about 160,000 orders per day, representing $21 billion net sales.  And in the end, they had a unified platform to build a foundation for better analytics and machine learning.

• With software and telemetry data playing a bigger role in connected cars, Daimler began offering fleet management services. Stunted by onboarding and provisioning that was taking weeks, Daimler knew they needed an application development solution that was faster, more dynamic, and collaborative. As primarily a Java-shop, Daimler implemented Azure DevTest which was open-source friendly. That led to an implementation of SUSE Linux.  This resulted in faster developer onboarding and provisioning – dropping from weeks to hours.  Quicker innovation and time to market – when a developer has an idea, they can now be coding within minutes.  And better attraction and retention of over 700 developers with modern state-of-the-art development services.

• Fitch Ratings is a global provider of credit ratings, commentary and research. They decided to move from a capital intensive, traditional on-premises based data center environment to using a cloud first strategy. This strategy will enable Fitch to improve agility for spinning up instances while reducing hardware costs and capital expense. The strong partnership between SUSE and SAP was one of the main reasons Protera advised Fitch Ratings to switch to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.  With engineering innovation such as being the first to market with an automated SAP HANA Failover Detection for High Availability on AWS, support for Enhanced Networking Adapter and other performance benefits on AWS – it was the best choice.  Before AWS, SAP HANA and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Fitch’s process chains, which move data from SAP to its consolidation system, took hours to complete. As a result, Fitch was only able to run four loads a day. Fitch’s new solution has dramatically increased throughput: “Moving to SUSE on HANA and AWS, those process chains now run in minutes,” explained Ranjit. “In theory the business can request ad-hoc loads at any time, and it won’t interfere with the business.

Let SUSE help you design, build and manage your future cloud infrastructure. From on-premises to public cloud, to hybrid and multi-cloud, SUSE open source cloud solutions enable you to innovate faster, reduce expenditure and simplify IT management. This gives your IT team time to keep up with the latest industry innovations and provides your business a little welcome distance from the competition. Our partnerships with the world’s leading public clouds, managed service providers and systems integrators give you ultimate flexibility in defining and executing on your cloud strategy. Whether you are looking to migrate existing software subscriptions to the partner of your choice, to build a new cloud-based infrastructure or to implement a hybrid or multi-cloud environment, SUSE enables you to execute on your Cloud Strategy, your way.

No matter where you are in the journey, SUSE can implement the right cloud strategy and accelerate your digital transformation by uniquely addressing your toughest challenges from technology, to people and processes, to economics. Hybrid cloud promises to bring together the best of both worlds, enabling businesses to combine the scalability and cost-effectiveness of the cloud with the performance and control that you can get from your on-premise infrastructure.

Thanks for reading!

Learn more about SUSE for hybrid cloud:

• https://www.suse.com/solutions/cloud/
• https://www.suse.com/products/cloud-application-platform/
• https://www.suse.com/programs/cloud/public/

Jeff Reser, @JeffReserNC