Case study: Hillarys' Julian Bond on the company's shift from HP-UX to SUSE Linux as part of SAP Business Suite upgrade

Hillarys' SAP upgrade complicated by platform shift and database migration

Julian Bond, head of ICT at Hillarys, the £200m shutter, blind and curtain manufacturer, has been talking to Computing following the completion of its SAP upgrade, a project that entailed a database migration from Oracle and SAP HANA, as well as a shift from HP-UX Unix running on Intel Itanium-based servers to SUSE Linux running on dedicated appliances, at the same time.

The project was initially required to support an upgrade from SAP ECC5 - installed in 2006, with support set to end soon - to the latest SAP Business Suite.

The company had run SAP on HP servers and HP-UX since 1999, but with both HP-UX and Itanium also stamped with a firm ‘end of life' date, the company decided to do a combined upgrade, which would also entail the virtualisation of the company's IT infrastructure with VMware, too.

The project was started in the autumn of 2015. Early on, the company had selected six Huawei server appliances to both host its new SAP application, as well as to run the virtualised environment, providing back-up and failover at the same time.

These now run both the ERP suite and SAP HANA database, on a combination of Huawei RH5885H V3 and RH8100 models. All the appliances feature solid state disks rather than conventional hard-disk drives to help boost performance.

The migration was necessitated by the impending cessation of support for SAP ECC5, presenting Hillarys with the option of either migrating to another ERP package entirely, or upgrading within the SAP software family, which would also mean a migration from an Oracle backend database.

At the same time, though, the company was also hitting against technology limits on its ageing SAP system. The increasingly evident limitations of SAP ECC5 were impeding the company's mobile-based customer relationship management (CRM) systems, used by its sales consultants in the field.

The SAP CRM system supports mobile apps rolled out to staff, and running on Samsung Galaxy smartphones and tablets. This not only enables them to demonstrate products in the home, but also to take orders and update customer records.

"Our customer relationship management system was far too slow so staff were finding workarounds," says Julian Bond, head of ICT, Hillarys.

He continued: "So instead of the CRM system aiding us in providing a great customer experience, it was more of a hindrance. We were also struggling to fit the data warehouse nightly upload into the available time window, which was slowing down the business. [And] we needed to move from batch to real-time processing to keep the business competitive."

To provide that boost to customer service and to give staff a more 'streamlined' digital experience, Hillarys decided to upgrade from SAP ECC5 to SAP Business Suite, powered by SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA), a set of fully integrated applications running on SAP's in-memory database technology.

"Moving to SAP S/4HANA meant that we needed to upgrade the rest of our IT infrastructure and move to an operating system certified for the SAP HANA in-memory platform. We wanted a more modern platform that would also give us more flexibility around hardware platform choice - without sacrificing the bullet-proof reliability that we'd been used to," adds Bond.

With the era of proprietary Unix operating systems rapidly drawing to a close, the migration was also a good opportunity to shift from HP-UX to Linux, with SUSE Linux for SAP Applications selected on account of Micro Focus-owned SUSE's close relationship with SAP.

"SUSE Linux for SAP Applications has got a lot built-in to it that is much more aware of the SAP environment, and tuned for HANA adding not only in terms of performance, but also systems management tools," said Bond.

Also considered, and rejected, was a shift into the SAP cloud. "We have extensive SAP NetWeaver Process Integration integrations in place on-premise, and attempting to migrate these to SAP HANA Cloud Integration [HCI] at the same time would have added significant risk to the project.

"Plus, the bulk of our employees are based in Nottingham on a local area network, so moving to the public cloud doesn't offer us the same benefits it might to a more global, distributed organisation. [And] we didn't want to have the additional latency associated with running on the public cloud," said Bond.

At the same time, the business has already seen the benefit of the manifold upgrades Bond's IT team has implemented.

"ERP is quicker in places, and SAP Business Warehouse is quicker all round. But it was the CRM suite where we saw a radical change in terms of performance," said Bond.

Internally, the migration also required a re-skilling of Hillarys' in-house IT department, with much Oracle knowledge needing to be re-tooled for SAP HANA, and training required in terms of VMware. However, the shift from HP-UX to SUSE Linux was easier, notwithstanding the need for training to make the most of some of the extra management tools built-in to SUSE Linux for SAP Applications.

"We spent some time in advance of the shift to SUSE Linux for SAP, running it on some base servers. We got some training in and certification to get people comfortable because from the day after you've gone live in your production environment, those are the guys you are relying on," Bond told Computing.

"The alternative to SUSE," adds Bond, was Red Hat. "We certainly did a reasonable amount of work on the two to try comparing their differences, working to understand what the support would be like and trying to understand where SAP is going, as well.

"Although Red Hat Linux is more widely deployed purely in terms of Linux instances, when you get into the SAP space the vast majority are on SUSE rather than Red Hat."

The project was completed just as Hillary's was about to undergo yet another acquisition, this time by Dutch window coverings firm Hunter Douglas. While the £300m deal was announced in May it is subject to an investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

Hillarys manufactures much of its range of shutters, blinds and curtain in the UK at two factories in Nottingham and one in Washington, Tyne & Wear, in the North East. It employs more than 1,350 staff, as well as another 1,000 in the role of self-employed sales advisors.