GROWMARK Migrates Mission-Critical SAP Apps to AWS Cloud in Record Time
“Migrating our SAP applications from one Cloud host to the AWS Cloud was one of the fastest, most successful migrations I’ve ever seen.”
Keith Milburn, Chief Information Officer, GROWMARK
Seasonal Demands Require Short Timeline for Migration
As an agricultural company, GROWMARK must be aware of the seasons and how they impact its co-op members, vendors, and customers. The Cloud migration had to take place during a four-month span from early November to early March. “Our biggest concern was the timing,” says Fisher. “We had a short window to make this SAP cloud migration happen, and everything had to be live and stable before the spring of 2019. Every participant in this project committed to that timeline and made it happen.”
Three different environments—development, quality assurance, and live production—were created to safely execute this Cloud-to-Cloud migration. “Migrating our SAP applications from one Cloud host to the AWS Cloud was one of the fastest, most successful migrations I’ve ever seen,” says Keith Milburn, Chief Information Officer for GROWMARK. “Sometimes, when you go quickly, you leave a lot behind. But the way this process was managed from start to finish made me feel confident and safe that everything was being done properly.”
The GROWMARK team was certain of the technical abilities of Lemongrass and AWS, but it was their soft skills that allowed that confidence to bloom. “Lemongrass and AWS did an excellent job of communicating and coordinating resources. That included meeting with and updating us regularly so that we all stayed on the same page throughout the process,” says Fisher. “That’s essential when you have a migration that’s this mission-critical and dependent on a specific timeline.”
Cloud Migration Paves Way for Future Capabilities
Migrating from the previous Cloud host to AWS required creating Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which provide secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. GROWMARK needed R4 and R5 instance types, which are memory-optimized and therefore well suited for the memory-intensive SAP applications the company uses. The GROWMARK team also appreciated the assurance of high availability across multiple North American AWS Availability Zones, a capability not offered in colocated data centers or other cloud providers that the company considered. A highly available infrastructure paired with an automation layer provided by Lemongrass also strengthened GROWMARK’s disaster recovery plans by making their systems more fault-tolerant with failover capabilities.
The company also took advantage of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service that offers scalability, security, and performance. It anticipates that Amazon S3 and other AWS products will play a role in its long-term goals for enhanced data analytics and aggregation, particularly for planned innovations tied to the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, and expanded e-commerce. The ability for a Cloud host to enable those long-term goals was important to GROWMARK. “By migrating our SAP applications to the AWS Cloud, we have chosen to work with an organization that rolls out new services and features on a regular basis,” says Milburn. “That focus on growth and flexibility tells us we have selected a provider that understands our company’s strategic goals.”
Benefits
- More than a dozen mission-critical SAP applications migrated in a 4-month window
- Memory-optimized Cloud instances improve SAP application performance
- New Cloud-hosting environment ensures system resiliency
- Added storage capabilities enhance data analytics and aggregation capabilities
Cloud infrastructure allows flexibility to support future growth
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