JTSi implements Cloud Technology in the Army eNOVA platform
Congratulations to the Johnson Technology Systems, Inc. (JTSi) eNOVA team on the successful transformation of the SAP ENOVA landscape from a traditional proprietary “big” server environment to a robust and secure open private cloud. Twelve (12) Expensive antiquated SUN servers were replaced by three (3) modern and inexpensive X86 servers. The servers in this new private cloud were clustered together with CITRIX XENSERVER. Each VM (Virtual Machine) runs a fully STIGed open REDHAT LINUX OS, an SAP application and a fully upgraded Oracle 11G RDBMS.
The project took approximately 2 1/2 months to complete. More than 60 SAP systems were migrated into this private cloud. All of the project work was completed by the JTSi ENOVA Basis team as well as the ARMY SAP COE LAB basis team. The JTSi ENOVA team consisted of four (4) basis members and the COE LAB consisted of three (3) members. No additional contracting resources were utilized.
As a result of this project, the ARMY will save a significant amount of money on server refresh and maintenance costs. The new X86 servers are much less power consuming; ARMY go-green initiative met. Also, in the future, since the ARMY is not tied down to a proprietary vendor, it will have several choices of servers to add to the cloud, thus providing potential cost savings on server purchases.
Utilizing private cloud technology, ENOVA SAP systems are now in a HA (High Availability) environment and the application can live-migrate to any server in the cloud, without any disruption to the end-user. Also, since CITRIX XENSERVER virtualization is being utilized, each VM can be assigned specific system resources, such as CPU and memory. And, multi-tenancy is being utilized, with each server containing many VMs/SAP applications.
Initial statistical analysis, indicates that the SAP background jobs are executing 50% faster and the actual SAP backups, which contain Terra-Bytes of data, are executing 50% faster as compared to the old environment. The end-user is experiencing faster response time.