Overview
The Challenge
Dominic Kebenei, IT Specialist at Standard Media Group, said: “We had outgrown our previous approach to managing the various functions of the business and looked for a more integrated approach.”
Standard Media wanted to deploy an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that would provide a shared core of functionality surrounded by specialized applications for finance, sales, marketing, HR, procurement and more. The company knew that such a solution would enable better visibility and control over its business.
SUSE Solution
Deploying a system that touches so many areas of the business naturally makes it imperative to ensure the highest levels of performance, availability and security. For Standard Media, the obvious choice of platform was Linux, which provides the advantages of UNIX operating systems without the associated high costs and vendor lock-in.
“We considered Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but wanted stronger local support and training than they could offer,” said Dominic Kebenei. “Ubuntu we felt was not enterprise standard, and CentOS was not certified for SAP. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications was the outstanding choice, particularly as it is recommended by SAP.”
Standard Media deployed SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, which provides a pre-tested operating system tuned to support SAP ERP. It also includes integrated clustering technology: SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension. The SAP landscape is fully virtualized on VMware, enabling Standard Media to run a large number of production, test/development and QA instances on a small number of physical servers. The SUSE subscription model enables Standard Media to pay only for the host servers; within each host, it has the flexibility to deploy as many virtual instances as it requires.
Kipepeo, a SUSE partner in Kenya, provided end-to-end training for the Linux environment and also helped Standard Media deploy SUSE Manager to manage updates and patching across the virtual server landscape.
Dominic Kebenei said, “Kipepeo demonstrated great expertise around the deployment of SUSE in a virtualized environment. They were also very responsive, providing direct, on-site support.”
The Results
What is more, the solution is proving highly cost-effective. With high-availability components for servers, storage and networking built into the solution, Standard Media has achieved the required resilience at no additional cost or complexity. The SUSE platform also copes well with the occasional power outages that hit Nairobi.
Dominic Kebenei said: “The SUSE Linux Enterprise platform offers excellent value for money. It effectively installs and manages itself, so we didn’t need to pay substantial extra fees to get it all working. Furthermore, the cost of the SUSE solution is lower that it would be with Windows for our large virtual server landscape.”
SUSE Manager enables Standard Media’s relatively small technical team to manage its large virtual server landscape and to apply patches and updates rapidly and efficiently. The team can test new patches on a single instance and then roll them out to all servers at the touch of a button, achieving an 80 percent improvement in the time taken to apply patches.
“SUSE Manager reduces the workload of the sysadmin, making it easy to ensure resilience, security and high performance across our SAP server landscape,” said Dominic Kebenei.