The world’s largest marketer of kiwi fruit, Zespri International, relies on a large SAP and SQL Server infrastructure to manage its operations in more than 53 countries.
SIOS DataKeeper provided the configuration flexibility and high availability and disaster protection we needed to deploy our business-critical SAP/ Microsoft SQL Server operations in Microsoft Azure.” – Andrew Goodin, Global Manager Information Services, Zespri International
The Challenge – Moving SAP to Azure
Zespri began a strategic initiative to move their SAP operations to Microsoft Azure to leverage the flexibility and scalability of the Azure cloud. For this initiative to be successful, they needed to ensure that their business-critical SAP and SQL Server applications would continue to meet the stringent levels of service and availability their business demands.
They faced the challenge of delivering high availability and disaster protection for their critical applications in a cloud, where shared storage failover clustering is not available. “We needed a simple, cost-efficient solution that would protect critical SAP Central Services but would not add complexity to our move to Azure,” said Andrew Goodin, Global Manager Information Services, Zespri International.
The Solution
The company’s IT consultant, Datacom recommended using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software. Zespri added SIOS DataKeeper to its Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clusters to enable them to work in a Microsoft Azure cloud environment and to gain complete configuration flexibility. For Zespri, SIOS DataKeeper synchronizes local storage in cluster nodes located in different Microsoft Azure fault domains for disaster protection. The synchronized storage appears to WSFC as a traditional SAN. As a result, there is no added complexity for the IT team. Today, the Zespri infrastructure is one of the largest SAP deployments in Microsoft Azure worldwide comprising more than 32 nodes running on large Microsoft SQL Server databases.
The Results – Moving SAP/SQL to Azure
By providing the HA and DR foundation needed to support business-critical operations, SIOS DataKeeper software played a critical role in enabling Zespri to move to Microsoft Azure. “SIOS DataKeeper provided the configuration flexibility and high availability and disaster protection we needed to deploy our business-critical SAP/ Microsoft SQL Server operations in Microsoft Azure,” said Goodin. With SIOS DataKeeper, Zespri was able to take advantage of scalability and flexibility of Microsoft Azure environment for their SAP environment while delivering the stringent service levels required of their business-critical applications.
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