Olli Salumeria Saves 80% on Disaster Recovery for SAP ERP Infrastructure Using AWS

Olli Salumeria, a company dedicated to producing artisanal slow-cured fine meats, wanted to meet the needs of its customers worldwide, regardless of what IT outages might occur. To achieve this, it required a more robust disaster recovery solution for its SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) infrastructure. The company engaged Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner R Systems to adopt AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (CloudEndure Disaster Recovery), which minimizes downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications using affordable storage, minimal compute, and point-in-time recovery. After setting up a secondary site on AWS in only 6 weeks, Olli Salumeria has achieved its recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) while reducing disaster recovery costs.

Customers expect to find Olli Salumeria artisanal fine meats at supermarkets across the globe. In order to make this happen, the company depends on the availability of its SAP ERP infrastructure. That is why the company’s leadership determined that they needed a more robust disaster recovery solution for its SAP ERP workloads, which comprised 5 TB of data. 

Its SAP ERP infrastructure was running on Windows Server 2016 on physical machines in a single data center. Given the importance of this infrastructure, Olli Salumeria looked for a disaster recovery solution that could provide maximum availability of production applications with minimal RTO and RPO. RTO refers to the time required to recover from a disaster after notification of a business disruption, whereas RPO refers to the amount of time that data loss is tolerable. 

One of the first decisions that the Olli Salumeria team had to make was where to set up a secondary data center for its 5 TB of data. The company also needed to find a disaster recovery solution that could automatically replicate its production applications running on physical servers—something that not all disaster recovery solutions can do. Additionally, it had to determine how to set up a secondary data center so that it would continually sync with production applications. Given the urgency of this project, the leadership at Olli Salumeria wanted the solution in place within 2 months. 

In light of these challenges, Olli Salumeria turned to R Systems, an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner that is a global leader in technology, data, artificial intelligence, and analytics services.

Based on Olli Salumeria’s requirements, the experienced team at R Systems recommended using Elastic Disaster Recovery to set up a secondary site on AWS for its SAP ERP infrastructure. Elastic Disaster Recovery continuously replicates servers—including the operating system, system state configuration, databases, applications, and files—into a low-cost staging area subnet in the user’s AWS account and preferred AWS Regions. AWS Regions are physical locations around the world where AWS clusters data centers. In case of an IT disruption or disaster recovery drill, the user can use Elastic Disaster Recovery to launch servers automatically in their fully provisioned state. This initiates an automated server conversion process and a scalable orchestration engine that quickly spins up servers in the user’s AWS Region in minutes. 

To validate the solution for Olli Salumeria, R Systems conducted a proof of concept with a development workload. It set up an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), which lets users define and launch AWS resources in a logically isolated virtual network, and then installed the AWS Replication Agent on the development server, which initiated block-level continuous replication to the Amazon VPC on AWS. After the development workload was up and running smoothly on AWS, Olli Salumeria chose to move forward with using Elastic Disaster Recovery for its SAP ERP applications. 

With the automation that Elastic Disaster Recovery provides, R Systems could complete the implementation and testing of a cluster of four servers, comprising 5 TB of data, within 6 weeks. During that period, the actual replication of the data took less than 4 days. “The replication automation is one of the most significant benefits of Elastic Disaster Recovery,” says Sukhjeet Singh Chadha, senior solutions architect at R Systems. “We just needed to verify connectivity of the machines and install an agent on each one, and the replication happened on its own. This is much quicker than a manual process, which would have required us to take data backups, create workloads, move the workloads along with the data, and do the configuration-level changes.” 

Olli Salumeria uses Elastic Disaster Recovery to launch frequent, nondisruptive disaster recovery drills. The drills have confirmed for Olli Salumeria that it can meet its recovery objectives: an RTO of 15 minutes and an RPO of 5 minutes. “AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery does far better than the required RTO,” says Saurabh Agarwal, solutions architect at R Systems. “It can launch the recovered machines within 10 minutes or less.” 

Moreover, Olli Salumeria achieves these stringent recovery objectives without paying for duplicate compute resources, resulting in a savings of 80 percent. The company can achieve this by using the low-cost staging area subnet of Elastic Disaster Recovery, which uses medium Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) T3 Instances, which are a low-cost burstable general purpose instance type. Olli Salumeria pays for fully provisioned Amazon EC2 instances only in an actual disaster or drill.

R Systems identified Olli Salumeria’s business challenges, objectives, and the best solutions to achieve the desired outcome. Now that the company has a robust disaster recovery solution, with a secondary site on AWS, Olli Salumeria is ready to recover data quickly and minimize downtime in the case of IT outages. 

Gregg Gilliam, director of information technology and supply chain at Olli Salumeria, expressed his satisfaction with the results: “By using R Systems’ expertise as well as AWS capabilities, we established a secure and scalable environment that helps us solve technical challenges, address new business requirements, and keep our data secure.”

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