SAP to Azure Migration for Darnytsia Pharmaceutical Company

Business Challenge 

Darnytsia wanted to migrate its SAP infrastructure to the cloud environment since the platform had to be managed with a cost-effective approach. At the same time, the performance of SAP platform and intensive operations became critical and required better management of infrastructure, dynamic allocation of computing and data storage resources. Darnytsia required external help to overcome the following challenges: 

• Local SAP infrastructure utilization level reached the critical threshold in terms of performance and capacity and required costly upgrade.  
• Supporting traditional server/storage/network hardware with backup/HA solutions was too costly in comparison to the cloud.  
• Technical and implementation expertise had to be delegated to a reliable service provider.  
• Proper migration planning also required relevant expertise.  
• Business Continuity became dependent on the availability of the ERP platform requiring High Availability and Data Recovery processes.  
• IT infrastructure support created an increased need for the availability of highly skilled technicians, both for hardware maintenance and for local SAP support.  
• Agile infrastructure adoption required significant investment in local infrastructure with oversizing, leading to extra expenses.  
• Dev/Test/QA environments required extra resources and support.  
• The customer needed to extend professional SAP Basis support and have an on-demand functional SAP Partner with a local presence.  
• Up to 300 end-users (executives and decision makers) would benefit from this transition.  

A Microsoft certified partner, Tietoevry Create Ukraine (formerly Infopulse) previously helped Darnytsia implement another important cloud migration project. Azure is fully certified and approved by SAP as a reliable platform for SAP products and solutions. SAP on Azure is now used by 90% of Fortune 500 companies – its scalability is huge and handles more than 5Trln storage transactions on a monthly basis. Besides, SAP migration to Azure allows spinning up VM’s in minutes and SLA’s that provide for 99.9% VM availability for all these SAP products.  

We offered Darnytsia its help to boost its SAP systems through migration to Azure with enhanced agility, lower TCO and storage expenses, higher availability and innovation.  

Solution 

During the initiation of the project (PoC), we conducted an assessment of existing SAP environments, developed the pilot architecture of SAP in Microsoft Azure, prepared SAP QAS and PROD environments using different Oracle and SAP HANA DB management systems, tested two different scenarios with SLES and RedHat Linux platform in Azure Linux Virtual Machines, tested Azure workloads and presented the results to the customer.  

Upon getting the approval of PoC results from the customer, we received approval from Darnytsia to proceed with the full-scale implementation: 

• Designed SAP ERP (based on SLES OS and Azure Linux Virtual Machines) architecture within Azure infrastructure  
• Assured conditions for migration from Oracle DB to SAP HANA  
• Integrated backup and Disaster Recovery solutions  
• Monitoring solution for the Linux and SAP parts in the Azure environment.  

Since all components of the solution were created and configured from the very ground up, data migration could only be conducted manually. At the same time, we could automate some of the tasks with heterogeneous copying of SAP systems. 

With the help of Microsoft Ukraine, we conducted a full-scale heterogeneous migration of SAP platform to Azure, replacing Oracle DB with SAP HANA, the first transition of such scale on the Ukrainian market: 

• All Microsoft and SAP managed services from a single provider: we became a one-stop shop of full-cycle Microsoft and SAP managed services for Darnytsia Pharmaceutical Company  
• All SAP data kept within high-speed cloud data centers  
• Built-in HA/DR functionalities: DR environment can be instantly set up without affecting the Production environment  
• Established Microsoft Premier and professional SAP Basis support  
• Hypercare – high-level availability of support resources during the after-migration period  
• 24/7/365 support and maintenance of Azure Cloud infrastructure, with the contract signed for at least 1 year of support.  

SAP to Azure Migration for Darnytsia Pharmaceutical Company project timeframe: October 2018 – June 2019. 

Technologies & tools 

• Azure Linux Virtual Machines 
• Azure Monitor 
• Azure Security Center 
• Azure Storage 
• Azure Migrate 
• Azure Compute 
• Azure Virtual Machines 
• Azure Site Recovery & Backup 
• Azure Networking 
• Microsoft Windows Server 
• SAP Basis 
• SAP HANA 
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 

Keeping in line with our long-standing traditions of providing efficient medicinal solutions to improve quality of life, Darnytsia continues investing in digital transformation and innovations. The migration of our SAP systems to Microsoft Azure that we conducted with the help of our partners at Tietoevry Create Ukraine (formerly Infopulse) is a substantial investment in Darnytsia’s business scalability, critical for our business and ability to provide the best-in-class medicinal services to our customers. With SAP systems on the Microsoft cloud platform, Darnytsia will be able to double its effort, as we focus on our mission to extend the longevity of the nation. 

- Andrii Romanenko, CIO at Darnytsia Pharmaceutical Company 

Business Value 

Being one of the few companies on the Ukrainian market with the relevant expertise to implement the transition of SAP to Azure, we became the first one in Ukraine to actually implement such a transformation for a large enterprise. Microsoft Ukraine was instrumental in helping us win Darnytsia as a customer and greatly assisted in conducting this and other cloud migration project for the pharma giant. 100% of SAP infrastructure transition was finalized as of May 2019, with immediate proven results: 

• Up to 30% performance boost  
• 60% fewer storage costs  
• 50% TCO cost savings with Microsoft Azure Reserved Instances and Azure Hybrid Benefit  
• Hardware cost savings on hyper-scale cloud infrastructure  
• 300 end-users (executives & decision makers) affected  
• Faster provisioning – minutes instead of days and improved time-to-market for new requirements  
• High levels of SAP automation allow to focus on strategic tasks  
• SAP systems can scale up/out/ down depending on workload  
• Cloud consumption can be tuned and switched off for inefficient resources; Dev/Test/QA can be ‘parked’ to minimize computing costs  
• Enhanced security and enterprise GDPR compliance with state-of-the-art cloud architecture.  

Together with Darnytsia, we continue working together and already plan the migration of a number of other systems, while further developing SAP infrastructure within the Azure cloud. 

Besides, in June 2019, efforts of Infopulse (now known as Tietoevry Create Ukraine) in delivering excellent cloud solutions and success in provisioning SAP on Azure service were recognized with a prestigious ‘Microsoft Country Partner of the Year’ award. 

As a leading innovator, Darnytsia invested more than EUR 200 million in R&D, technology and equipment during 2008-2018. We believe that Digital Innovations should influence all the aspects of the business – strategy, operations, and at the end of the day – the entire enterprise. Thus, Darnytsia continues investing in digital transformation and new technologies. Our partners were instrumental in helping us with our latest cloud migration project. Fast, reliable, and cost-effective, migration of our SAP systems to Microsoft Azure has already demonstrated immediate results, improving and speeding up our internal processes on numerous levels. On behalf of “Darnytsia”, I would like to express our gratitude to our partners and congratulate them on getting the prestigious Microsoft award. 

- Dmytro Shymkiv, Chairman, Executive Board of the Managing company “Darnytsia”