OUTDATED INFRASTRUCTURE: A MIGRATION IN THE BEGINNING
Fujifilm worked with a 100% on premise infrastructure based on virtualized machines with VMWare, it had EqualLogic, from which all the database information was distributed, and SAP B1 for everything related to business intelligence and reporting.
The idea of migrating Fujifilm's infrastructure to the cloud occurs in the midst of two compelling facts: on the one hand, the company's on-premise infrastructure was approaching the end of its life cycle; On the other hand, SAP's announcement that it would stop supporting NetWeaver, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) with which it was working at that time.
Regarding the second point, the dilemma was to migrate the ERP to SAP HANA, either maintaining an on-premise infrastructure or doing it in the cloud. The balance tipped toward Google Cloud in early 2017 once SAP and Google partnered to make the German company's database and programming tools available as cloud-based services.
The certified SAP solutions offered by Google guaranteed Fujifilm a secure infrastructure with high availability, disaster recovery and low latency network. Jesús Gómez Garduño, IT Manager at Fujifilm, adds: “Another important issue is security. We can work in the cloud with the certainty that our information will never be exposed to hackers or even to the competition itself. It's the first thing we think about."
Certainly, migrating to SAP HANA involved a series of costs and the development of an infrastructure from scratch. Thus, after the announcement that SAP was going to extend support for the old ERP for a few more years, Fujifilm decided on GCP.
THE SOLUTION
SAP NetWeaver is the ERP from where all administrative operations are carried out. A machine that was robust was needed to provide the required level of response. For this, a machine with Google Compute Engine with four sockets was hired for a good response. In addition, the distribution of the layers of information handled by the ERP required hard drives (solid and mechanical) to install the operating system, executables, logs and swap memory. In this way, the partitions could be carried out without any problem.
Gómez Garduño adds: “The tools and virtual machines that Google offers you give you a lot of versatility. Besides, the cost does not increase because it really depends on use and the RAM that we used at first was 26 GB, more than enough for us. The versatility of this infrastructure is that you can adjust it according to your needs and your consumption.”
Currently, Fujifilm has six machines, three for production environments and three for development environments, “which is what SAP recommends for working on GCP machines under best practices,” notes Gómez Garduño.
BENEFITS FOR FUJIFILM
“Today that we have a contingency, we have not stopped operations. Productivity has not decreased, we have not had a single problem with our infrastructure and billing has not stopped. In short, we have not stopped doing business, which is what worried us most,” emphasizes Gómez Garduño.
Regarding the role of Xertica, Gómez Garduño highlights: “The deadlines were met perfectly to conclude the migration project. At the moment we set the deadline, pretend that on Friday we started operations with our on-premise infrastructure and on Monday we were already working in the cloud as if nothing had happened. In what was the stabilization of the system, Xertica was always present in the follow-up and monitoring. The truth is that we have not felt alone in this process. When we have needed support because there was a high priority ticket, Xertica has responded immediately. “We haven’t had a single setback.”
