Challenge.

As a service provider developing and running SAP-based solutions for its customers, AGILITA needs an IT infrastructure that can fully meet the requirements of SAP ERP systems and the SAP S/4HANA solution, even in times of growth and increasing customer needs. The previous software and storage environment located in AGILITA’s data centre had reached its limits in terms of performance, capacity and stability, and had grown increasingly complex and difficult to operate as time had gone on with manual interventions increasingly needed to optimise the system. In short, the existing infrastructure was coming to the end of its lifecycle.


In its search for a new future-proof IT platform for SAP S/4HANA, AGILITA evaluated several offers, with Bechtle’s coming out on top not least thanks to its simplicity and economics. Furthermore, Bechtle has had a dedicated team of SAP-certified systems engineers for many years and has established itself as the partner for all SAP-oriented infrastructures.

 

Please allow cookies to see content from Youtube.

We use Youtube to embed video content on our website. This service may collect data on your activity. For more information, please go to the settings page.

Solution.

Together with AGILITA, Bechtle developed a detailed concept based on the initial proposal in a series of workshops. Working closely with AGILITA’s own SAP specialists, this was then implemented in as a redundant, on-premise compute and storage infrastructure. Computing power is provided by two Hewlett Packard Enterprise ProLiant DL560 Gen10 servers running VMware vSphere for server virtualisation as a hypervisor and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications as the operating system for virtual machines. Both servers are each equipped with four Xeon CPUs and 3 TB of RAM. This dual-server infrastructure boosts reliability and, with vSphere, enables virtual machines to be migrated between servers during ongoing operations, e.g. for maintenance or update purposes.


The storage infrastructure is now based on Fibre Channel and, for reasons of redundancy, consists of two HPE SAN switches with one all-flash (AF40) and one hybrid-flash storage system (HF40) each from HPE’s Nimble Storage range for online and nearline storage. The all-flash array has a usable capacity of 68 TB and the nearline system 196 TB. HPE Nimble Storage was chosen mainly because of the system’s excellent efficiency. Due to integrated deduplication and compression technologies, the actual data capacity is at least twice that of the native SSD/hard disk capacities. Alongside snapshots, data from the existing Veeam Backup Server are also saved to the nearline system, ensuring its optimal integration into the new environment. Two new Huawei cloud engine Ethernet switches have been installed to enable communication between the various systems and to connect legacy servers, which are still in use for certain applications. The overall result is a fully SAP HANA-certified infrastructure with HPE components at its core. 

Bechtle and AGILITA are perfect partners as both companies live and breathe SAP. We and our customers are now perfectly equipped to deal with whatever the future holds thanks to our new SAP S/4HANA infrastructure.

Sandra Völler, Managing Director, AGILITA AG

Business benefits.

With its new server and storage infrastructure, AGILITA now has a cutting edge, high-performance, error-tolerant and highly available SAP S/4HANA system environment that is both reliable, easy to operate and highly automated. The server and storage components used are also highly scalable and deliver proven reliability. AGILITA can now fully concentrate on its core business—SAP-based, reliable solutions for SME customers—and no longer has to worry about having to continuously optimise its IT infrastructure. To support strategic S/4HANA conversion services, AGILITA can thus offer a modern POC environment for customers as a service.


With Bechtle by its side, AGILITA was able to get its project off the ground quickly and without any issues — an experience that echoes the company’s previous experience with Bechtle as a partner for a great number of jobs. What’s more, Bechtle was able to impart extensive knowledge on the new technologies to the AGILITA team. 

Partner.