Animex – Google Cloud hybrid cloud and DRC as a guarantee of business continuity
Deployment date: 2023
Sector: manufacture
Google Cloud
The OChK team prepared the organization's configuration (landing zone) in Google Cloud, a secure and reliable cloud environment.
Animex Foods is the largest meat company in Poland. It specializes in the production of pork and poultry meat and meat products and is the largest employer in the industry and a leader in exports. The company has 11 plants across the country and employs approximately 11,000 people.
In 1999, Smithfield Foods Inc. became a strategic investor in Animex. Thanks to the presence of an industrial investor, Animex has access to a wide pool of knowledge, experience and technological innovations, which allows it to further develop its brands both in Poland and on international markets. Since 2013, Smithfield Foods and Animex Foods have been part of WH Group – the world's largest pork producer.
Challenges
Animex uses IT systems not only in support areas, but also in the management of critical processes, such as production control in meat plants and livestock farms. Among other things, the applications ensure proper animal nutrition, which requires a highly reliable IT environment.
To ensure business continuity Animex developed a Disaster Recovery Plan that involved keeping several data centers in Poland (DRCs) on standby at considerable cost. The inability to automatically switch to a backup environment in the event of a disaster proved to be a problem as well. As a result, the whole process was time consuming.
In addition, Animex recognized the risk of locating all of its data centers in Poland. The war in Ukraine made it clear to the company that from a security and business continuity point of view, a geographical distribution of data processing across Europe was the best solution. To meet these challenges, the company decided to supplement its own IT environment with a public cloud.
Solutions
To ensure business continuity, the OChK team prepared the organization's configuration (landing zone) in Google Cloud, a secure and reliable cloud environment. The team migrated more than 30 SAP virtual machines from the data centers. More than 80TB of data was transferred in a lift and shift model. The entire environment now operates as a hybrid cloud, with network connections between applications,hosted in the Google Cloud with applications running on-premises
30 SAP virtual machines have been migrated to a new environment in Google Cloud.
To ensure business continuity, a Disaster Recovery Center was implemented and configured in several Google Cloud regions.
Tools that allow infrastructure to be code configured (Infrastructure as Code, Terraform, etc.) automate the switch to a backup center in the event of a failure.
In addition, there was the possibility to test the DRC without interrupting the production environment.
Due to the size and complexity of the Animex environment (dozens of locations, hundreds of connections to external systems), the process was carried out in stages. Each individual application was tested and scaled, and only after it was found to be stable,were the target production environments migrated. The performance of individual SAP modules was also tested after migration to Google Cloud. The results were excellent, exceeding the previous efficiency of the on-premises environment
Another challenge was the need to fit into very tight service windows of a few hours. Despite these high expectations, the migration was completed on schedule thanks to the close cooperation between the 7technology and OChK teams. Throughout the migration process, there was no interruption in the continuity of the Animex systems.
Project partner
The partner in the implementation of this project was the company 7technology, which specializes in SAP system deployments. In this project, they were responsible for migrating the SAP BASIS layer (including the OS system, SAP application layer, and database layer) to the infrastructure prepared by OChK.
Technologies used
To carry out the project, the public Google Cloud was used, within which the following services were activated:
Compute Engine
Cloud Storage
Cloud VPN
Cloud DNS
Cloud VPC
Development Tools (Automation)
Terraform / Terragrunt
Cloud Monitoring
Results
By moving some of its SAP systems to the Google Cloud environment, Animex has significantly increased its resilience in the face of the risk of data center outages or security breaches. The Disaster Recovery Plan that has been implemented and regularly tested confirms that the backup environment will ensure business continuity in the event of any issues.
Work efficiency has also increased significantly. The time needed to perform the most time-consuming operations has been cut in half.
With the implementation of cost control and automation tools (e.g., blanking test and development environments during off-hours), the environment is at the optimal point between cost and efficiency.
30
the number of SAP system virtual machines migrated
80 TB
the amount of data migrated as part of the project
Running an IT project within a large organization like Animex is very demanding, due to the scale of the organization and the need to maintain business continuity, including outside office hours or short service windows. The OChK team carefully analyzed our requirements and, thanks to their great expertise, selected Google Cloud solutions and services that meet these requirements. The migration project was professionally prepared and carried out, with cost discipline and efficiency. By combining the advantages of the SAP system with the efficiency of Google Cloud, our resilience in the face of unexpected events is much greater, and we are also extremely well prepared for future business development.
Artur Kaczmarek
CIO Animex