The partnership between T-Systems and BR Matozinhos started a long time ago through a SAP hosting and services agreement. After years of successful achievements, and frequently accomplishment of all service levels, the continuity of this partnership was essential for the new BR Matozinhos’ business phase.
T-Systems was able to offer one migration plan considering the safest strategy for BR Matozinhos business. It was only possible thanks to the cognition of the existing environment characteristics and the knowledge of its teams regarding AWS services. In additional to the technical expertise, some commercial adjustments have been made to extend this partnership for additional 60 months.
With AWS, T-Systems is able to continue providing operation excellence to its customers, which includes tools and processes like Incident Management, Change Management and Capacity Planning.
In 2017, SIFCO group faced a Carve-out process and the SAP landscape had to be segregated across its companies. The same technological characteristics were maintained, but BR Matozinhos needed a hardware capacity, licensing and services review. For that reason, BR Matozinhos approached T-Systems, its IT partner, looking for a new high-performance infrastructure that could adapt to business changes while possibly reducing IT costs.
The customer search for availability, performance, flexibility and price, led T-Systems, advanced Consulting Partner of AWS, to consider a fully cloud-based solution. This case considered the IT infrastructure redesign, but keeping the existing managed services - Monitoring, Cost management, Operational Systems, SAP Basis, backup routines and network administration - within the existing high-quality levels.
Already a long-time partner, T-System has been providing us with an excellent service. Based on such principles and on the technical quality of their support team, which already has a deep knowledge of our environment, BR-Matozinhos knew that these values would be critical to make sure that this environment migration to the “cloud computing” could be carried out without any impact on our business and users. Moreover, we understand that choosing AWS has taken us to the next technological level, getting us ready to the countless industry changes to come.
During the Project execution, T-Systems proved it was possible to move the SAP environment to the AWS with the same requirements existing on premise platform. To make that possible, some procedures and automated scripts were implemented, allowing the existing contracts provisions and SLAs to be accomplished also in the Cloud. The Project scope considered the migration of the entire SAP DEV, QA and PRD environments. The solution is based on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for production volumes and Virtual Private Cloud. It also uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store backups
After the creation of servers and storage using the region of Virginia (USA), the most critical challenge was to migrate the data considering the lowest possible downtime. SAP is always available for BR-Matozinhos with 24/7 uptime. One of the customer requirements was to avoid impact on both development teams and production. To meet this requirement, a high-capacity connection was established between the company and AWS, which allowed the data to be migrated quickly and transparently. The project considered also 2 VPNs at BR-Matozinhos’ site, with 2 different suppliers and automatic high-availability mechanisms. T-Systems developed a proof of concept to test the solution and make sure the downtime would achieve all the customer´s requirements.
After the creation of servers and storage using the region of Virginia (USA), the most critical challenge was to migrate the data considering the lowest possible downtime. SAP is always available for BR-Matozinhos with 24/7 uptime. One of the customer requirements was to avoid impact on both development teams and production. To meet this requirement, a high-capacity connection was established between the company and AWS, which allowed the data to be migrated quickly and transparently. The project considered also 2 VPNs at BR-Matozinhos’ site, with 2 different suppliers and automatic high-availability mechanisms. T-Systems developed a proof of concept to test the solution and make sure the downtime would achieve all the customer´s requirements.
BR Matozinhos SAP is running on AWS since June 2019 and it has been achieving the 100 percent availability SLA. After this BR Matozinhos’ experience with cloud-based solutions, I understand that new opportunities for non-SAP solutions can be pursued.
BR Matozinhos is a casting company with extensive experience in the supply of a wide range of grey cast and nodular iron parts, also providing finished goods to a diverse array of industries like renewable energy, construction leaders, mining companies and agribusiness.