Brigade - Best Cloud Services providers

Introduction

Founded in 1986, Brigade Group is residential and commercial property developer in India. Headquartered in Bangalore, the company has branch offices in several cities in South India, as well as an office in Dubai and an accredited agent in the United States. The business has a diverse multi-domain portfolio that covers property development, property-management services, hospitality and education.

Problem Statement

Brigade group wanted to upgrade the ERP application from an existing version of SAP to SAP S/4HANA to enable ingesting data from hundreds of IoT devices to the ERP system and also to generate real-time reports. Crimson Cloud Private Limited (CCPL), being the Digital Transformation partner for Brigade group, proposed Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS) to enable the S/4HANA implementation. Part of the infrastructure was the critical primary storage to store production data and a smart backup solution to facilitate backup needs.

The following requirements were stated by management of Brigade Group:

• High Availability (HA) storage infrastructure to deliver a mission-critical application environment
• Move from CAPEX to OPEX model for reducing storage infrastructure costs while delivering future storage capacity expansion to match business growth
• Cost-optimized performant primary storage for S4/HANA and other applications
• Ease of data backup and restoration with the objective of reducing any manual activity.

Solution

In order to achieve the above business requirements of Brigade, CCPL proposed combination of Amazon EBS as primary storage, Amazon S3 as backup storage and Amazon Glacier as long-term archival storage. Detailed solution overview is as follows:

• AWS Cloud to run the SAP S/4 HANA solution
• Application and database servers run on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(Amazon EC2)
• Primary Storage will be Amazon Elastic Block Store(Amazon EBS) with Standard SSD for performance as well as to provide persistent storage and Magnetic Disk for the storage of HANA and Log Backup.
• AWS AMIs & Snapshots for backup and recovery of application and database.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) services to store application binaries and CloudTrail logs.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to store HANA and log backup
• Amazon S3 Glacier for the archival of backups from S3.

The high-level schematic overview of all the above components of the infrastructure along with Storage solution is illustrated in the architecture diagram below.

Brigade Group – SAP S/4 HANA Deployment on AWS Architecture

Result

As part of implementing the storage solution for the Brigade group, CCPL has achieved the below outcomes:

• Implementation of S4/HANA
• Different types of storage for different type of application data
  • Primary storage
    • Data / OS volumes – gp2
  • Backup
    • Backups – St1
    • Snapshots – AMI backups
    • HANA DB backup – S3
    • Log backup – S3 (incremental)
  • Disaster Recovery
    • The system recovers by launching the environments from images and snapshots if any production instance fails.
    • Met the RTO and RPO of 1 Hour and 24 Hours respectively. The same has been tested and demonstrated to the customer before the site went to production. As part of managed services, CCPL team schedules the recovery testing based on customer request .
  • AWS Cloud environment provides a highly redundant, infrastructure incorporating multiple AWS regions and Availability Zones to provide high availability.