Recently at Pure’s user conference Accelerate 2017, I had the chance and pleasure to present together with Todd Graham, VP IT Infrastructure, ScanSource. We discussed in our presentation the various SAP deployment models and why ScanSource decided to migrate their SAP workloads from the cloud back to on-premise.
Scansource, Inc. is an international distributor of specialty technology products, particularly those for businesses such as point of sale systems, barcode scanners and video and audio conferencing solutions.1
Scansource is running their business on traditional SAP on Microsoft SQL Server with plans to migrate to SAP HANA. In order to run SAP more efficiently they looked at several cloud provider, in order to …
- Overcome lack of SAP experience
- Increase the speed of deployment
- Ability to scale quickly
- Knowledge Transfer Opportunities
- Optimize their cost model
- Reduce Opex/Capex for infrastructure
- Include SAP HANA workloads
Expectations were very high, especially to minimize complexity and cost, but Scansource quickly realized that the reality was far away from initial expectation.
The cost for running SAP workloads increased dramatically, due to performance needs, the necessity for high availability and creating several copies/clones of their production systems. In addition the complexity also increased, because SAP Cloud service provider are mainly SLA driven. Changes, alterations and maintaining the SAP environment based on the SLAs took sometimes several days, reducing the flexibility and cutting edge capabilities to a point where changes had to be made.
Scansource therefore decided to move SAP workloads back to on-premise, back into their own datacenter, but with the goal to reduce the cost for the entire SAP landscape and also reduce the complexity when making changes, creating copies/clones. The infrastructure they were looking for needed the ability to create SAP copies and clones fast and efficient with zero impact on the production system and zero data footprint, why they choose Pure Storage for all of their existing SAP workloads, as well as the new SAP HANA BW workloads.
In a nutshell Scansource migrated all their SAP workloads back to on-premise onto Pure, because …
- Increased platform stability
- Better system performance
- Pro-active support and maintenance
- High Availability
- No SLA vs Redundancy
- Reduced operational cost
- More efficiency for rapidly changing business model
- Higher customer satisfaction
If you are interested in hearing directly from Todd, from Scansource their journey to and from the cloud I encourage you to look at the Cube interview and the presentation we jointly did at Pure’s user conference Accelerate 2017 back in June.
Presentation at Accelerate 2017
