Bunge is a global leader in agribusiness and food, connecting farmers to consumers across more than 50 countries. The company processes and trades essential crops such as soy and corn, producing protein meal for animal feed, edible oils for food production and ingredients for biofuels.
As one of Bunge’s largest regional operations, Bunge South America (Bunge SA) plays a vital role in feeding and fueling the world. Operating more than 180 business units (including silos, processing plants, ports and offices), the division runs high-efficiency operations that depend on continuous availability and data-driven decisions.
At-a-Glance
For over a decade, Bunge South America ran its mission-critical SAP environment on legacy AIX and PowerPC systems. When the hardware reached end-of-support, the company migrated 420 TB of SAP workloads to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The transition delivered at least 50% faster SAP performance, reduced infrastructure costs by 33.5% and energy costs by 7.5%, and provided real-time visibility across the entire environment.
How Bunge Tripled SAP Trade Speed with SUSE Linux Enterprise
“Since the migration to SUSE, we’ve saved 33.5% on hardware and software procurement and reduced data center power and cooling costs by 7.5%.”
Modernizing SAP from Unix to Linux
Bunge relies on SAP applications to manage its core business processes across HR, finance, sales and more. For Bunge SA, this mission-critical SAP environment had been running on a legacy, proprietary IBM AIX and PowerPC architecture that was approaching end-of-support.
Once a gold standard for SAP workloads, the aging stack limited agility and challenged the IT team compared with modern best practices. The infrastructure required up to eight hours of downtime for security updates, forcing a rigid quarterly maintenance schedule to minimize business disruption.
Furthermore, the complexity of the legacy system generated reliability and security risks. The system lacked centralized observability, making it difficult for the team to diagnose potential security issues across the environment. The AIX high-availability clustering solution was also complex, increasing the risk of prolonged downtime in the event of failure.
The seasonal nature of agribusiness added further pressure. During peak demand, the legacy SAP system suffered performance bottlenecks, particularly during backups and large data transfers, impacting operational efficiency.
Meanwhile, the AIX environment grew increasingly expensive to maintain, requiring costly, proprietary hardware, software and highly specialized skills that were difficult to source.
With these challenges in mind, Bunge SA decided to view the upcoming end-of-support as an opportunity to fundamentally evolve its IT strategy.
“We saw the opportunity not just to upgrade, but to entirely transform our operations, replacing a complex proprietary architecture with modern, cloud-ready technologies,” says Eduardo Solis, Manager of Datacenter Services at Bunge SA. “Our objective was to gain flexibility and scalability for future innovation.”
Why SUSE solutions?
Bunge SA first learned about SUSE through SAP user groups and community discussions, where it discovered that SUSE Linux is the leading validated operating system for SAP environments.
Given the company’s need to eliminate the eight hours of planned quarterly downtime, SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching became a crucial factor during the evaluation process. This add-on would enable the IT team to apply Linux kernel security patches without system downtime.
To address the challenge of ensuring business continuity for its critical workloads, Bunge SA also earmarked SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, an optional extension for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
Recognizing these advantages, and learning that the largest SAP workloads in the world run on SUSE Linux, Bunge SA selected SUSE as the foundation of its transformation project, confident it would deliver the reliability and performance required for its mission-critical systems.
Wanting to break free from vendor lock-in, Bunge SA also chose SUSE Multi-Linux Manager. Previously, the company relied on disparate tools across different Linux distributions, making patching complex and limiting insight into its security and compliance posture.
With SUSE Multi-Linux Manager, Bunge SA would be able to centrally manage its Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Linux and SUSE Linux operating systems from a single interface, strengthening governance and compliance in keeping with open source principles.
The impact of SUSE solutions
Transforms mission-critical SAP infrastructure with zero disruption
Bunge SA completed its migration of more than 420 TB of data from AIX to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server over the course of a year, with zero disruption to business operations. The company transformed its core infrastructure, replacing more than 70 LPARs on PowerPC systems with Dell PowerFlex virtual servers to support all critical SAP environments.
The new SAP environment supports operations across two data centers and 120 remote sites, serving 3,000 SAP users per day. 79 VMs run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for critical systems, including all of the region’s SAP environments running on Oracle databases, as well as key network applications.
“After we migrated to this technology,” says Solis, “Dell invited us to present at the Dell Brazil Forum because it was considered a very innovative project.”
Boosts SAP performance by 50%
Bunge SA now drives mission-critical SAP applications with significant performance gains. Overall, SAP application performance improved by at least 50%. This new efficiency allowed Bunge SA to accelerate month-end closing jobs by 73.9%, cutting the time required to finish critical jobs from 23 hours down to six hours.
The team also saw substantial network throughput improvements on the new Linux x86 platform, which contributed directly to faster SAP processing and better user responsiveness.
Furthermore, the company slashed BI report processing time by 50% and accelerated critical transactions related to Trade Operations by three times.
The positive impact on the end-user was immediate. Luciano Angioletti, Senior Infrastructure Analyst at Bunge SA, states: “With SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, the average response time for our SAP users has dropped from 1,400 ms to 800 ms, a 45% reduction. This provides great productivity gains for Bunge SA employees, helping us feed the world more effectively.”
Reduces infrastructure costs by 33.5% and energy costs by 7.5%
By replacing the costly, legacy AIX and PowerPC infrastructure with x86 servers powered by SUSE’s open source solutions, Bunge SA has achieved substantial financial savings.
“SUSE’s efficient, lightweight footprint has reduced our system overhead, allowing us to get more performance out of existing resources,” says Angioletti. “Since the migration to SUSE, we’ve saved 33.5% on hardware and software procurement and reduced data center power and cooling costs by 7.5%.”
These savings enable reinvestment in service improvements, including sustainability initiatives such as the Soya Recicla project, which collects millions of liters of used cooking oil for recycling across Brazil.
Provisions new servers significantly faster
The new hyper-converged x86 platform powered by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server freed Bunge SA from vendor lock-in, boosting agility. Provisioning of new servers is now much faster, taking a few hours compared to the previous many days. SUSE’s open, interoperable architecture now allows the company to scale workloads seamlessly across environments, all managed centrally through SUSE Multi-Linux Manager.
“SUSE makes it easier to scale resources both vertically and horizontally, and scaling comes at a lower cost,” says Jefferson Zanetti, Data Center and Cloud Architect at Bunge SA. “This transformation paves the way for much more efficient growth in Bunge’s future.”
Eliminates planned downtime and strengthens security
SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching has effectively eliminated Bunge SA’s quarterly eight hours of planned maintenance downtime, with systems now only rebooted once a year as a best practice. Now, the IT team patches the kernel while keeping the systems fully online. This allows the team to conduct patch maintenance on a monthly basis, proactively reducing security risks.
Enables 100% real-time visibility into security and compliance
The IT team maintains an average 99% compliance rate, a direct result of gaining 100% real-time visibility into security and patch compliance across its entire Linux estate via SUSE Multi-Linux Manager. The company can now respond to critical vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) much faster and track patch deployment progress in real time across the entire environment.
“With SUSE Multi-Linux Manager, we can see patch compliance across our entire Linux environment in real time,” says Zanetti. “That visibility has improved how we manage security.”
Simplifies transformation with enterprise support
SUSE Support served as a strategic partner, providing deployment assistance and ensuring the transformation was completed seamlessly. In particular, Bunge SA relied on SUSE experts for best-practice configuration of SUSE Multi-Linux Manager and SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension.
“SUSE Support remains an important safety net for us,” comments Solis. “Our team values the assurance of always having SUSE’s experts ready to help resolve any issues in our mission-critical environment quickly and effectively.”
A new benchmark in visibility and governance
The success of Bunge SA’s landmark transformation project established the region as a pioneer, particularly in OS patch visibility and governance.