Project delivers lowered overhead costs and a faster, more secure, and stable data management platform with LCP Migrate
With offerings including uniforms, mats, mops, towels, restroom supplies, workplace water services, first aid and safety products, eye-wash stations, safety training, fire extinguishers, sprinkler systems and alarm service, Cintas helps customers get “Ready for the Workday®”. The service company is headquartered in Cincinnati and has over 40,000 employees and one million customers in the U.S. and Canada.
The Challenge
Cintas Corp was running their business on SAP’s Enterprise Central Component (ECC) software with a local hosting provider which required them to overspend on mainframe hardware to accommodate their growth needs. This resulted in much of that excess capacity going unused for months or longer. In addition, Cintas’s reliance on this on-premises infrastructure also limited the company’s flexibility to connect external data sources to its SAP HANA-based analytics data lake.
With their SAP environment running on legacy systems and older hardware that was not optimized for SAP and their contract with their current provider close to renewal, the time was right for Cintas to make the move to a more modern, secure, and cost-effective infrastructure.
“We selected Lemongrass because they’re very innovative. They’re the only ones we’ve seen that have been able to move a system this size. We were on Oracle on Friday and DB2 on Monday and we’re seeing huge performance gains.”
The Solution
Cintas had a strong relationship with Google, so it chose to stay with the hyperscaler to take advantage of its microservices, cloud-native automation and Cortex integration framework. In addition, Google was found to be the most cost-effective solution and the companies’ cultures were well aligned.
The migration included moving all of Cintas’s SAP workloads and more than 130 terabytes of uncompressed data running on Oracle’s database management system to the Google Cloud Platform. To facilitate the move, Google recommended they speak to Lemongrass. Lemongrass was selected for the project due to its proven expertise in complex SAP to cloud migrations and its experience with large databases.
The plan initially called for a lift-and-shift migration, but Lemongrass recommended a more heterogeneous approach that would transition Cintas from an IBM Corp. Power Platform to Google Cloud and IBM’s Db2 relational database management system. This method could cut the size of the database by half and significantly reduce overall costs by leveraging Lemongrass Cloud Platform (LCP), a governance, management, and automation orchestration layer tuned to SAP operations.
Lemongrass started the project with a series of workshops to explore requirements, which led to a formal SAP on Cloud Landscape Assessment.
The Assessment provided insight into the landscape and integration scenarios, the upfront activities that could be carried out before the migration, and the early benefits. Moving the database from Oracle to Google’s DB2 database was perceived as high risk due to the size of the database, arguably one of the largest databases in the world.
The Results
Over nine months, Cintas and Lemongrass migrated 212 SAP applications on production, test and staging servers to Google Cloud over a series of weekends and shifted multiple databases from Oracle to DB2 with zero downtime.
Over one weekend, Cintas and Lemongrass migrated the massive database and compressed its size by 60% which has lowered overhead costs and delivered Cintas a more stable, safer, and faster data management platform.
Lemongrass is currently providing Cintas with services to manage and optimize SAP operations. The objective is to transfer knowledge and skills to the Cintas teams and eliminate any issues that may arise after the migration.
