Storengy Accelerates Business Transformation by Deploying SAP S/4HANA on AWS

Storengy is one of the world’s leading providers of underground natural gas storage, with 21 natural gas storage sites across the globe. The company is a subsidiary of the ENGIE Group, a French multinational utility company.

Over the past few years, ENGIE has embarked on a cloud-based digital transformation to support its energy transition, moving business-critical applications such as a growing SAP environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Storengy sought to follow its parent company’s lead and move away from its on-premises SAP environment and implement a new SAP S/4HANA solution to drive innovation and business mobility. “We are exploring new business areas such as green energy, and we needed a solution like S/4HANA to enable the scalability to support that,” says Guillaume Yvon, enterprise architect for Storengy. However, Storengy’s IT team knew it needed more agility and automation to quickly deploy S/4HANA. “Because of our small IT department, it can take up to 6 months to build and deploy a new SAP solution,” Yvon says. “To accelerate innovation, we had to be able to create new SAP environments faster.”

Storengy knew it wanted to move its SAP environment to AWS because its parent company had already successfully been running SAP on AWS for several years. “We chose AWS because we knew it would help us automate everything from building and deployment to monitoring our SAP applications so we could meet our aggressive business goals,” says Yvon. “We also saw how ENGIE had used SAP S/4HANA on AWS to drive new business and speed time to market.”

Storengy engaged Capgemini, an AWS and SAP Partner, to lead the setup of Storengy’s SAP applications on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. During the process, Storengy used AWS Launch Wizard. AWS Launch Wizard is a service that simplifies SAP implementations on AWS by orchestrating the provisioning of AWS resources. “With AWS Launch Wizard, everything is automated,” Yvon says. “That means I no longer need to install and configure everything on my own when it comes to a new SAP environment. If you are an SAP Basis professional, AWS Launch Wizard is incredibly easy to use.”

Storengy is also using AWS Backint Agent, a backup and restore solution for SAP HANA workloads running on Amazon EC2. The solution is integrated with AWS Launch Wizard and automatically backs up SAP HANA databases to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). “Amazon S3 is great for storage, and Amazon S3 versioning makes document storage and data archiving much simpler,” says Yvon.

Using AWS Launch Wizard, Storengy has reduced the time required to deploy new SAP environments. “It would typically take us up to six months to purchase hardware, manually set up the network and security, and then install and configure everything,” Yvon says. “Using AWS Launch Wizard, it only takes us a few hours. It’s very simple, and there’s no troubleshooting required because of the AWS Launch Wizard best practices.” Storengy can also quickly and easily scale its SAP environments on AWS. “Before, we would have to acquire new servers and add memory to increase performance,” says Yvon. “We can now scale everything with a few clicks through AWS Launch Wizard.”

With faster SAP deployment capabilities, Storengy was able to implement a new SAP S/4HANA platform to help lead the organization’s digital transformation. “A typical SAP S/4HANA project would take 6 months to complete from an infrastructure standpoint,” says Yvon. “AWS Launch Wizard was a major accelerator for our SAP S/4HANA implementation and our overall transformation. Now, when the business wants to test a new functionality or feature, we can provide it immediately because of the on-demand infrastructure and deployment automation AWS offers.” As a result, Storengy is poised to support ENGIE’s move into green energy offerings in the future.

Storengy also expects to reduce its operational costs by 40 percent by running on AWS, and the company has strengthened its security posture by using the AWS Well-Architected Framework to design its solution architecture.

AWS Launch Wizard also simplifies the creation of a high availability architecture for SAP S/4HANA, which is helping Storengy meet strict service level agreements (SLAs). “It used to be complicated to build high availability into SAP,” says Yvon. “We needed to set up three separate configurations. AWS Launch Wizard integrates everything, so creating a high availability application is fast and easy. This is important because we cannot have more than one hour of downtime for SAP—we need it available almost 24/7.”

Additionally, Storengy is using AWS Backint Agent for SAP HANA to lower database backup times for a 256 GB database from 1 hour to 5 minutes. “Because AWS Launch Wizard helps in automating the deployment of AWS Backint Agent, the entire database backup process is highly cost-efficient and high-performing,” says Yvon. “Previously, we had an allocated capacity for this recurring activity, which is no longer required. AWS has removed our operational burden in this area, and AWS Backint Agent has simplified scheduling, maintenance, and storage of SAP HANA backups,” says Yvon.

Storengy is now working on developing new initiatives on AWS, such as an Internet of Things solution for predictive maintenance and a solution to provide a better digital view of gas exploration sites. “We are investing in innovation at Storengy and ENGIE,” says Yvon. “We can do this because of the capabilities we have on AWS.”