RealCore - Case study
RealCore Group moved its SAP systems on HANA to AWS with Runibex
RealCore Group, a retail-sector consulting group with over 300 employees in Europe, moved its SAP systems on HANA to AWS with Runibex to get a flexible platform judged on performance, reliability, high accessibility and security. RealCore reports a 30% reduction in overall TCO and says backup time fell to 20 minutes.
At a glance
About RealCore Group
RealCore Group is a group of companies providing process and technology consulting to the retail sector. One of its companies, Realcore Omnishore GmbH, is an Essen-based consulting company established in 2007. RealCore’s employees specialise in SAP and Microsoft technologies, with particular emphasis on portal, integration and mobile technologies. The group develops solutions in the SAP and Microsoft environment and publishes in the retail press. At the time of the case study, it had over 300 employees across cities and regions in Europe.
The Challenge
The approach
After evaluating on-premises and cloud options, RealCore chose to move to AWS with Runibex. The first-stage goals were better SAP performance, a fully structured and operative disaster recovery scenario, and lower storage costs.
The architecture
- Compute. The workloads ran on SAP-certified Amazon EC2 instances, selected according to the size of each workload. Runibex evaluated reserved, spot and on-demand instance options against data on volatility and need to keep costs down.
- Operating system. The working environment moved to SUSE Linux to reduce cost. Where Windows had been in use, Runibex advised on and carried out a conversion to Linux where it applied.
- Network. Amazon VPC filtered and monitored incoming and outgoing traffic at network level. Security groups, ACLs, IP groups, public and private subnets, route tables and gateways were set up for application security.
- Storage and disaster recovery. AWS EBS SSD volumes were configured for each workload’s performance needs. EBS lifecycle manager handled backup management and region-level disaster recovery by copying to a different region.
- Backups. Amazon S3 held database-level backups, and Glacier was used for long-term storage at lower cost.
- Access and security. AWS IAM controlled access to AWS services and resources. AWS GuardDuty monitored for malicious activity and unauthorised access, and AWS Inspector handled compliance checking. AWS Security Hub reported high-priority security alerts and compliance status. AWS Config assessed the configuration, and AWS CloudTrail supported governance, compliance, operational and risk auditing of the account.
- Monitoring. Amazon CloudWatch monitored the workloads. Alerts were set up, and alerts, metrics, logs and events were collected and followed up. Automated actions were defined in response to anomaly detections, alerts and logs, so the SAP applications stayed up and running.
- Right-sizing and scheduling. AWS Compute Optimiser kept compute resources right-sized, and development and test environments shut down automatically at nights and weekends.
The results
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In the customer's words
“If we decided to use this infrastructure on premise environment, we had to wait more than 6 weeks for getting hardware and it might be the reason for delaying the Project timeline. Plus, our workloads are changeable, and we could not manage this kind of challenges if we run our systems on premise landscapes. Thanks to Runibex and AWS well architected environment, we reduced overall TCO by 30%. To give a hint on how this cost reduction has happened; for instance, development and test environments are not needed to be run at nights or weekends, so they are automatically shut down,”
Cengiz Varol, Managing Director at RealCore
“Our finance team is very grateful since their time to report delivery has shortened 9-fold. Backup-restore process has been dramatically improved. Backup time has fallen to 20 minutes and this makes us comfortable that our SAP systems keep running fast and secure.
Cengiz Varol
Frequently asked questions
Why did RealCore Group move its SAP systems on HANA to AWS?
RealCore wanted a flexible platform for SAP on HANA that performed well, and it set performance, reliability, high accessibility and security as the top KPIs for the decision. After evaluating on-premises and cloud options, RealCore chose to move to AWS with Runibex. The first-stage goals were better SAP performance, a fully structured and operative disaster recovery scenario, and lower storage costs.
Which AWS services did RealCore's SAP environment use?
RealCore’s workloads ran on SAP-certified Amazon EC2 instances with SUSE Linux. The environment used Amazon VPC, AWS EBS SSD volumes with EBS lifecycle manager, Amazon S3 and Glacier. AWS IAM, AWS GuardDuty, AWS Inspector, AWS Security Hub, AWS Config and AWS CloudTrail covered access, security, compliance and auditing. Amazon CloudWatch handled monitoring, and AWS Compute Optimiser kept compute resources right-sized.
What results did RealCore report after moving to AWS?
RealCore reports that overall TCO fell by 30%, crediting Runibex and AWS jointly. One example it gives is that development and test environments shut down automatically at nights and weekends. Backup time fell to 20 minutes, and RealCore says the backup-restore process improved.
How were backups and disaster recovery set up for RealCore?
Amazon S3 held database-level backups, and Glacier was used for long-term storage at lower cost. EBS lifecycle manager handled backup management and region-level disaster recovery by copying to a different region.
What did Runibex do in the RealCore project?
RealCore moved its SAP systems on HANA to AWS with Runibex. Runibex evaluated reserved, spot and on-demand instance options against data on volatility and need to keep costs down. Where Windows had been in use, Runibex advised on and carried out a conversion to Linux where it applied.