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Success Story: International Beverage Company

Success Story

Business Need

A global company in the food and beverage industry had an SAP data archiving strategy in place: data was being archived to keep the production SAP database running at peak performance. They also archived financial documents that support transactions. But even compressed, archived data takes up storage space, and when the data volume leaps into terabytes, storage becomes expensive. To make matters worse, that cost was going into storage of data that regulations required them to retain, but was very rarely accessed—if at all. The company needed to do something about the rising time and cost of managing terabytes of archived SAP data and documents.

Solution

Serrala recommended a tiered storage strategy for archived data. This strategy consisted of:

  • Nearline storage for data that could be archived but would be accessed more frequently;
  • Their current offline archive repository for data that would be accessed less frequently;
  • Cloud storage for volumes of documents and data that may never be accessed but needed to be kept to support their retention requirements.

The cloud storage tier lets you align the cost of storage with the value of the data. It frees you to invest in high-performance access for current, frequently used data, while shifting seldom used data and documents to a lower cost and practically infinitely elastic cloud storage service.

We added the Corestone Archive Service interface to allow the customer to send and retrieve data transparently to the cloud storage provider—in this case, AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service. This service allows a direct connection from the SAP archiving layer to major public cloud providers such as AT&T, Amazon S3 and Google Cloud.

Results

Now, the company has seamless access through the SAP application to data and documents, regardless of where the data is stored—online, nearline, offline or in the cloud. Thus far, the company is archiving about 4 TB of business-complete accounts payable documents and data using the cloud-based archiving solution.

Analysis shows that over five years—during which time the database will rise to about 6 TB—the new cloud-based archive strategy will save the customer about $750,000 and free their database and network for more current, mission-critical data.

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