VOX and the first SAP-to-Google-Cloud migration on the Polish market
Deployment date: 2021
Sector: manufacture
Google Cloud
OChK partnered with VOX to carry out the project of moving its main SAP system and web applications to Google Cloud. This was the first such migration on the Polish market.
VOX is a brand whose purpose is to provide comprehensive interior solutions tailored to the lifestyles of homeowners. VOX’s new strategy allows it to successfully expand its business in foreign markets. Today, the brand’s products are available in more than 60 countries all over the world.
Challenges
Truly dynamic growth and globalization of the VOX brand necessitates creation of a work environment such that it supports providing technical solutions for sales, warehousing, logistics, and production processes. High availability of IT systems and their flexibility in development are the hallmarks of cloud solutions, which VOX now uses.
OChK became the brand’s partner to carry out the project of moving its main SAP system and web applications to Google Cloud. Thanks to OChK experts and the companies participating in the project, it was possible to automate the production migration process as much as possible and (during an earlier trial migration) assess the resources needed, estimate the costs, optimize the environment, and take advantage of new services that facilitate and accelerate the operation and development of VOX applications.
Solutions
Taking advantage of the services available on Google Cloud allowed to carry out the migration from a local data center to the cloud. During the migration, new services were launched that had not been previously used by VOX.
The launch of Cloud CDN and Load Balancer allowed to achieve faster access to web applications from various corners of the world and improved the performance of VOX web applications themselves
Hybrid Connectivity services ensure great access to resources on Google Cloud from all VOX locations around the world
The Compute Engine service helped to migrate and put into operation the current SAP production environment as well as historical SAP systems
In addition, other servers based on Microsoft and Linux systems were migrated too
Results
As a result of carrying out the migration of VOX resources to Google Cloud, the following results were achieved:
increased speeds of launching new virtual machines as well as invoking new resources and services thanks to easy access to resources such as: RAM, CPU, storage
accelerated operation of web applications through the use of the Cloud CDN service
quicker access to web applications from various parts of the world through the use of the Load Balancer service (e.g. from a VOX location in Mexico to VOX resources in the cloud – compared to the previous data center, the response time was reduced from 128 ms to 32 ms)
launch of a multi-region backup, so that copies of systems and data are located at different Data Centers within the European Union
ability to quickly temporarily increase performance of the systems
60
is the number of countries where VOX products are available
96 ms
is by how much the response time of servers was decreased
Technologies used
To complete the project, the public Google Cloud was used, within which the following services were activated:
Cloud CDN
Load Balancer
Cloud Armor
Compute Engine
Hybrid Connectivity / HA VPN , Interconnect
Backup Multi Region
Tools that were used to configure and manage the cloud:
Gitlab
Terraform / Terragrunt
Together with the specialists of OChK, Google and 7 Technology, we managed to complete the first migration of the SAP system to Google Cloud in Poland. This enabled us to achieve high availability of our main system from various locations around the world, great flexibility in the scalability of the necessary resources, and also opened the door to faster creation of new IT solutions in the digitalization of processes in our company, considering the size of this project.
Lucyna Michniewicz-Ślaska
CIO in the VOX Capital Group