One of the biggest healthcare providers in Indonesia embarked on a digital transformation journey with T-Systems due to scalability limitations, skillset, quality, and frequent downtime issues with their on-premise data center operated by a local service provider. The project scope included full proof of secured network design, proof of concept migration, and final production migration of business-critical applications (SAP and non-SAP systems).
With its new cloud platform, the hospital chain will be able to continue its digital transformation journey for its remaining 25 hospitals. The project could be finished in a record timeline of three months (February 3 to April 25), which also shows that, during the global coronavirus pandemic, life goes on and IT has no borders. Colleagues from Indonesia, Singapore, India, Hungary, and Germany worked together beyond different time zones to make this success story happen.
The company built its first hospital back in 1989 and currently owns and operates several hospitals, located in Greater Jakarta, West Java, Surabaya, East Java, and Central Java. Typically, the hospitals are equipped with emergency rooms, outpatient clinics, inpatient wards, operating rooms, intensive care units and a pharmacy, as well as laboratory and radiology facilities. The hospitals also offer specialized services including obstetrics, pediatrics, internal medicine, angioplasty, orthopedic surgery, and neurosurgery. From its humble beginnings, the company has transformed into one of Indonesia’s biggest private hospital operators with an intake of more than two million patients and close to 3,000 operational beds. The company employs more than 6,000 medical professionals.
The project scope included full proof of secured network design, proof of concept migration, and final production migration of SAP and non-SAP systems. In addition, T-Systems has built high-availability clusters on Amazon Web Services (AWS) using SUSE Pacemaker (both application and database level) across the AWS availability zones. SUSE Linux high-availability extension is the cluster Linux solution certified by SAP and SUSE Pacemaker offers packages to build high-availability clusters for both SAP application and the SAP HANA database.
The SAP stack contains the following systems (applications and databases) based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Support Package 4 (SLES12SP4):
The backup and recovery of the SAP systems is designed to protect SAP application servers and database servers, OS disks of all systems, and management/jump servers against data loss, and retain data for recovery in the event of any issues. This can be achieved with an operating system backup on a local file system, which is transferred to the object storage. The DB backup is handled by a T-Systems backup/restore utility called the xbr toolset. The xbr toolset takes care of creating full and incremental backups and takes care of all the redo log housekeeping. All databases have redo logs to enable point-in-time recovery of the databases. SAP application server data backup will be done using an AWS backup and recovery services vault. A snapshot backup will be made for all disks that will have SAP application server binaries, other data, and log files. SAP HANA database backups will be done using native SAP HANA backup tools, SAP HANA studio will be configured to perform the backups of tenant and system databases. Backup files will be stored in the local file system storage and moved to AWS blob storage for the retention.
CloudEndure has been used for the non-SAP systems migration. This has reduced the downtime of business-critical systems because of the continuous block-level replication, which provides real-time replication and ensures sub-second recovery point objectives for all applications and databases. CloudEndure’s replication process did not affect performance or the required production systems reboot. We were able to successfully migrate the following servers:
The backup of the non-SAP systems will be performed creating AMI snapshots based on the customer’s requirements, stored on Amazon EFS storage for Attendance (Linux based system), and stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) in case of Sysmex with the help of scheduled jobs and AWS CLI on the server.
For this project, the following AWS services have been used:
The following architecture shows how the hospitals can access the SAP and non-SAP systems:
We have received good feedback about the results of the migration. The hospital reported a more stable infrastructure, which was actually the desired outcome of this migration project. The following figure shows the special account structure developed for this project by following AWS best practices. This includes segregation of SAP and non-SAP workloads and the sharing of network-specific resources like VPC, Subnets, Network Access Control Lists, NAT Gateways, etc.
The client will be able to continue its digital transformation journey for its remaining 25 hospitals. With this latest migration, it will also further strengthen T-Systems’ position as the trusted partner for all its needs in both system integration and digital transformation areas.
The next step will be to migrate quality and development systems to AWS Cloud. Beyond that a transfer onto a new AWS region is on the mid-term roadmap: Currently, the SAP and non-SAP landscape is running in the nearest AWS region, Singapore. Amazon Web Services has confirmed that it will launch a new cloud region in Indonesia by the end of 2021/early 2022 based in Greater Jakarta. The new region with its three availability zones will be the optimal location for the healthcare provider’s business critical landscape handling health data.
