Vision

Managing complex migrations, maintenance and DR engagements

PDS Limited’s current on-premises, legacy SAP environment is critical to finance functions, plant maintenance and materials management.

These legacy systems and infrastructure were unable to scale in step with the company’s growth and were causing performance and latency issues, leading to routine operational challenges. In addition stability issues caused by capacity bottlenecks also compromised business operations.

The existing environment also lacked any form of resiliency. To rectify this, PDS Limited wanted to implement a highly responsive DR environment for their SAP environment, which would enable quick and effective data recovery in the event of unforeseen outages.

This led to their decision to collaborate with NTT, meeting their need for a single technology partner with established credibility in driving end-to-end cloud transformations.

Transformation

Creating a seamless cloud environment

To achieve their business objectives, PDS Limited elected to move their SAP environment to Google Cloud Platform. they selected NTT as their Managed Services Partner for GCP and SAP, because of our expertise in migrating and managing SAP applications to the cloud.

We conducted initial assessments in conjunction with their SAP application development team, conducting a proof of concept and leveraging performance testing to fine-tune infrastructure sizing requirements.

Key elements of the transformation were compliance with their controls and cybersecurity protocols, as well as providing overarching program governance.

Highlights of the transformed technology landscape include:

• SAP on Google Cloud: The company’s SAP applications today run on Google Cloud’s SAP-certified instances designed for memory-intensive systems. Not only can GCP handle their future growth requirements effortlessly, but it can also support a robust on-cloud DC DR setup.
• Database re-platforming: PDS Limited’s on-premises Oracle SAP database was re-platformed to Sybase for GCP to meet the growing need for cost optimization. Sybase uses GCP-persistent SSD disks, whose single millisecond latency is suited for high-performance database workloads.
• Resilience, storage and security: PDS Limited uses Google Cloud Storage for SAP backups, Google Cloud VPC, Compute Engine Snapshots, and Google IAM and security services. A highly effective DC-DR architecture was deployed (DC at Singapore and DR at Mumbai), replicated using DRM tools.
• Analytics: PDS Limited also uses our SimpliInsight services for cost and performance optimization, and overall cloud governance. This provides them with actionable insights allowing them to monitor, analyze and optimize their cloud infrastructure. They’re also exploring BigQuery for their analytics requirements.

Results

An agile and cost-effective infrastructure solution

Google Cloud Platform proved a more agile and cost-effective alternative when compared to the legacy on-premises set-up.

• Seamless transition: Working with NTT, PDS Limited was able to accelerate swift solution development and migration of over 6TB of data, along with faster delivery speed and improved agility for their SAP application. The entire transition was completed in 180 days with zero downtime.
• Significant cost benefits: GCP provided lower infrastructure TCO, while expediting delivery time of their new business framework by 2x and delivering over 20% in savings.
• Holistic insights: The applications and services offered as part of GCP, like BigQuery, are promoting real-time data analytics and competitive insights.

The partnership was also immensely beneficial for driving new business outcomes and opportunities to PDS Limited.