Atlantique Automatismes Incendie (AAI) Logo
Industry: Manufacturing & Engineering
Location: France
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Atlantique Automatismes Incendie builds a scalable environment for global expansion

Highlights

  • Increases scalability, giving AAI a stable platform for growth
  • Enables fast analytical insight with accelerated performance
  • Powers stellar customer service during peak times through high availability

Products

Founded in 1982, Atlantique Automatismes Incendie (AAI) offers a wide range of fire protection systems and maintenance services throughout France. To ensure customer safety and satisfaction, AAI uses advanced robotics technology to craft its fire prevention systems with precision.

At-a-Glance

As AAI grew its business, the company found that its business applications and IT infrastructure no longer provided the scalability and flexibility required for seamless expansion. By migrating to SAP HANA on SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications with the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) High Availability Extension, AAI created the perfect conditions for growth, enabling it to bring stellar service to even more customers.

The Challenge

Committed to helping people prevent fires, AAI set out to expand its operations across France. However, as the company grew, it discovered that its legacy business applications did not provide the flexibility and scalability it desired.

Michael Girard, IT manager at AAI, explains: “Our ERP, business information and analytics capabilities simply couldn’t keep up with the pace of growth. They started causing delays in our internal system, which created a significant amount of inconvenience for our business.

“As well as inhibiting scalability, our legacy solutions just didn’t offer the functionality we required, such as rapid, reliable analytics. With our legacy systems being pushed closer to their limits every day, we aimed to find a solution fast.”

Xavier Chauvin, system administrator at AAI, adds: “After exploring a wide range of options, we decided to replace our existing mission-critical business applications with SAP ERP. We needed to deploy a new IT infrastructure that would maximize the performance, stability and availability of our new SAP solutions.”

“Thanks to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, we have impressed our users with the enhanced stability, reliability and performance of the SAP applications we run on our servers — helping staff to work more productively.”

SUSE Solution

AAI chose SUSE to provide the operating system for the crucial database element of its new SAP ERP landscape — implementing SLES for SAP Applications with the SLE High Availability Extension.

“When we were looking for the new business applications, we ran a comprehensive RFP,” says Chauvin. “But when it came to choosing a vendor for the OS, we decided to take a different approach — preferring to select the technology that would work best with SAP solutions. SLES for SAP Applications was the solution recommended by SAP, and at such an attractive price point, we saw no reason not to implement the SUSE solution.”

AAI worked with Delaware to deploy SLES for SAP Applications on two servers in two different data centers, linked via a dedicated optical fiber connection. These servers run the SAP HANA databases, while the three SAP ECC servers (for test, quality assurance [QA] and production) run on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 on AAI’s VMware virtualization platform.

Girard comments: “We had no significant previous experience of running Linux, so we chose the more familiar Windows landscape for the SAP applications. On the database side, thanks to the excellent support from Delaware and the easy availability of SUSE documentation, we quickly got up to speed with Linux administration for our SAP HANA environment.”

The two SAP HANA database servers used by AAI are clustered using the SLE High Availability Extension. During normal operations, one physical server handles the entire production workload, while the other is used for development, testing and QA. In the event of planned or unplanned downtime on the first server, the second automatically takes over the production workload.

“Maintaining high availability, especially between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. — our busiest hours — is essential if we are to provide excellent service,” says Girard. “Even the slightest disruption in our service would cause frustration, and a 30-minute delay would essentially be unacceptable. As our business grows, the exceptional stability provided by the SUSE OS and high-availability component is a great benefit to AAI.”

The Results

With SLES for SAP Applications and the SLE High Availability Extension, AAI has built the scalable environment it needs to push ahead with its global expansion — helping more individuals stay safe from fire.

Chauvin explains: “Our SUSE solutions enable us to provide a fast and reliable database layer for our new SAP applications. This is helping us to make the most of the new analytics capabilities, which are much faster than on our legacy systems, driving rapid insight and aiding decision-making.

“Furthermore, by improving system availability, our SUSE solutions are helping us provide consistently reliable customer service. This will prove invaluable as we take on more customers and expand our operations.”

Girard concludes: “As we continue to grow, we value the stability of the SUSE OS and also the integrated support via SAP Solution Manager, which keeps everything simple. Backed by SAP HANA on the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform, we feel we are much better placed to develop AAI into a truly global company.”