A future-proof infrastructure at Nizi

Nizi International is a metals trading company, based in Luxembourg. Its main products are ferro alloys, foundry products, base metals and concentrates. Nizi has been one of the early users of the SAP commodity and has been loyal to SAP for more than 20 years.

Moving to the cloud

Up until 2018, Nizi had its SAP environment running on an on-premise infrastructure. For numerous reasons, Nizi decided to go for a first cloud strategy. This decision was supported by three important drivers:

To optimize the total cost of ownership of the infrastructure landscape for SAP
To simplify and reduce the datacenter maintenance
To prepare for the future implementation of SAP S/4HANA

Nizi started a search for a partner to make their transition to the cloud. It was mainly the broad and proven expertise in SAP S/4HANA and cloud technology, that made them go for Flexso to migrate their SAP solution. As Microsoft Office 365 was already chosen to be the future communication and collaboration platform, it was a matter of course that Azure would be preferred solution for hosting the future IaaS workloads.

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Parallel migration

The eventual goal of the SAP migration is to have SAP HANA as the underlying database platform. A direct migration was not possible, and that is why the decision was made to migrate the SAP environment to Azure first, in an as-is state.

The technical migration was completed in 4 major steps:

Building a cloud infrastructure design and migration roadmap including the integration with other critical IT services, like Microsoft RDS, Azure Express Route, …
A staged homogeneous migration from on-premise to the cloud (Development, Quality, Production)
The upgrade of SAP ECC to Enhancement Pack 7
The deployment of SAP Web dispatchers to increase security

For the Disaster recovery and Backup strategy, the RTO/ RPO requirements for Nizi were optimized to their business requirements by making use of different Azure storage components like Azure Blob Storage, Azure VM backup, …

One step closer to the future

We can certainly say that Nizi is one step closer to the future, with their heads in the clouds. But it does not stop here. Since the completion of the project, Flexso supports the SAP environment to unburden Nizi from SAP landscape management both functional as technical.

Together with the customer, we were able to bring this project to a successful end, fully in line with the customer’s expectations and our quality requirements. An excellent collaboration between Flexso and Nizi, driven by teamwork.