At-a-Glance
Six months before the end of a multi-year project migrating to SAP S/4HANA on Azure cloud, a retailer’s infrastructure team realized something was amiss. 400+ systems had not been patched and were out of date, exposing the intricate network (supporting over 9,000 stores) to potential risk. Managing laborious manual updates to restore systems and security, the team needed a way to automate and manage updates at scale for the long term. The team opted for SUSE Manager. This multipurpose tool seamlessly shouldered responsibility for the back-end maintenance of the retailer’s modern solutions architecture and mission critical business processes — creating substantial cost savings and efficiencies.
Transforming an outdated SAP environment
Modernizing a colossal enterprise
Before 2016, IT systems at the retailer supported a variety of functions and processes, tailored to unique requirements. Managing and upgrading these disparate systems centrally was labor and time intensive. Added to this, they were quickly outgrowing their on-premises environments.
Come 2016, the retailer began working on a project to galvanize the company’s digital strategy and to spur innovation in next-generation customer experiences. To accomplish this objective, however, the IT team would first need to reduce time spent on managing complex systems so it could clear the way for building innovative customer experiences. Subsequently, the retailer would simplify and centralize its IT systems by migrating and centralizing them in Azure cloud.
As part of this migration from on-premises servers, the plan was to also modernize its myriad SAP solutions, underpinned by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications, by moving to SAP S/4HANA. The SUSE OS and SAP S/4HANA would continue to support the company’s three distinct IT environments (development, production and disaster recovery/performance) from the cloud.
For this multi-year undertaking, the retailer worked in partnership with SAP, Accenture and Microsoft to ensure the project’s successful conclusion in May 2021.
Modernizing legacy infrastructure
In spring 2019, the time to modernize and centralize the retailer’s SAP systems in Azure cloud had arrived.
Later that same year, the retailer hired a senior manager of IT cloud and service delivery, to oversee the Azure infrastructure for SAP Global. With so many critical business processes running on SAP, the company needed in-house expertise in SAP and open source infrastructure.
At the time the senior manager joined, the company had finished migrating its first SAP environment, development. What remained were the final stages of migrating its SAP production and disaster recovery/ performance environments that would support the company’s 9,000+ stores.
In January 2020, over 400 systems (mostly SLES and a few dozen Windows servers) went live in Azure cloud. Almost immediately, however, the company’s network file sharing (NFS) services that served all SAP executables experienced stability issues. This threatened continuity in every arm of the business. With help from SUSE and Microsoft, the team quickly identified the source of the issue.
Before the senior manager was hired, project teams focused on cleaning data and migrating applications to support the company’s various needs, but no one focused on the infrastructure itself.
As a result, and as the team discovered, the SLES systems supporting the new SAP infrastructure were up to 18 months behind essential security and performance patches. Additionally, the retailer was using an older version of SLES, limiting its ability to use the latest technical advancements in SAP software.
Also, in early 2020, the retailer had outsourced many of its IT functions to a managed services provider (MSP). The MSP was therefore tasked with bringing the retailer’s 100 business critical systems, and their accompanying SAP HANA databases, up to code. This was a manual process. The MSP would: shut down SAP; apply the patches; reboot the hardware; and repeat. This critical but onerous period of patching concluded in July 2020.
Having learned from the experience, the retailer needed to radically improve working processes for its MSP team. It needed visibility and transparency to ensure rigor and consistency. It needed operational agility and ease of use. It needed an automation tool for upgrading systems consistently and repeatably — minimizing the need for manual tasks.
It was then the Microsoft team suggested the retailer consider SUSE Manager.
“SUSE Manager ensures uniformity in patches and updates, and it reduces the cost of work hours. We estimate that it helps us save significantly each year in labor for patches alone.”
Why SUSE?
Having Microsoft recommend SUSE Manager speaks to the close alliance SUSE and Microsoft enjoy together.
SUSE partnered with Microsoft in 2006 to optimize interoperability between Linux and Windows systems. Years later, this partnership continues to drive innovation in enterprise systems operations. In 2018, SLES 15 was the first Linux operating system to contain a kernel tailored for Microsoft Azure.
“The reality is that bigger, vendor-led solutions don’t bring the flexibility that you need to pivot as quickly as we should because we just don’t know what’s going to happen next year,” says the senior manager. “Open source is really the only way to remain in that agile environment where you can change your mind at any point.”
SAP partners with and endorses SUSE in the development and testing of SAP products on Linux. Why? SUSE’s environment is tuned with optimal SAP performance in mind. SUSE developed SLES for SAP Applications in partnership with SAP to make hosting and running applications easier and faster. As a result, SLES for SAP Applications reduces risk from service outages, minimizes time and effort in system maintenance, and hastens deployment times — both on-premises and in the cloud.
“Running SAP on SUSE is critical to delivering on customer experience,” says the senior manager.
For these reasons, the retailer has been, for years, an avid user of SUSE solutions for running SAP environments, both centrally and at its stores.
SUSE Manager: reducing management burden
Despite having worked with SUSE solutions for years, the retailer wasn’t yet aware of SUSE Manager or the value it could bring.
SUSE Manager is a best-in-class Linux management solution designed for enterprise DevOps and IT operations teams to optimize efficiencies in the data center. The retailer quickly realized that SUSE Manager would be crucial for reducing time spent on systems management. But as the company had just contracted with an MSP to run its IT systems, why would the retailer need SUSE Manager if it already had a managed service provider?
Theoretically, the MSP could be unhappy about an automation tool displacing hourly fees, however the MSP welcomed the new methodology. The team finds, in working with SUSE Manager, projects are more rewarding, and results are seen quicker.
The Senior Manager points out: “With SUSE Manager, we can do live patching; we can do upgrades consistently and faster; we can manage an entire environment from a single tool; and most importantly, we can do it all with reduced downtime requirements.”
He continues: “The cost of downtime is greater than the cost of the solution. Just imagine how bad downtime is for customers in the store, waiting for answers, checking out and so on. We all know today time is money. Service is down? No, that’s not how to earn a customer’s trust. So, we also implemented live patching to reduce OS patching and business downtime.”
SUSE Consulting Services helped the team install SUSE Manager, make sure it worked as needed, and train the team on how to use it optimally. In the end, the retailer installed three instances of the solution, one for each of its environments: development, production and disaster recovery/ performance.
Summarizing the benefits to the business, the senior manager states, “SUSE Manager ensures uniformity in patches and updates, and it reduces the cost of work hours. We estimate that it helps us save significantly each year in labor for patches alone.”
What’s next?
Now that systems can be maintained easily and regularly, efficiency has increased, and the retailer has initiated its next step toward enhancing and protecting its customer experiences.
“We are now upgrading SUSE systems to the latest SLES version to ensure continuity of service with SAP,” says the senior manager. “We’re utilizing SUSE Manager systems to upgrade the VM’s and bare metal systems in Azure cloud to ensure we have consistent OS image implementation.”
He continues: “Our OS upgrade project is over 90% done. We prioritized the SAP HANA database systems first; now we are working on the SAP application server pool; and then we will move to the other supplemental systems last. Later, we will leverage SUSE Manager to help upgrade to the latest SLES version.
“The plan is to continue these end-to-end streams for at least a year after the program completes to further mature and extract the value out of the new solution and processes.”
With serious time savings and business benefits — in terms of resilience, performance and innovation — the retailer has cured its infrastructure ailments and is ready to reinvent its customer experience yet again.