Popular Shoe Mart Scaled to Success with SAP B1 HANA and AWS

Popular Shoe Mart is a partnership firm established in the year 1962. It was the vision of Sri Chukkapalli Pitchaiah, who foresaw the potential of quality-footwear-trading in abutted market. Branding of items of mass consumption was being resorted to at a faster pace during those times. Proliferating urbanization has created awareness about the quality of branded products. Recognizing the characteristic property of the footwear as a product of mass consumption and sensing the opportunity, Sri Pitchaiah, an entrepreneur by instinct, commenced a partnership firm under the trade name “Popular Shoe Mart”. The firm commenced the initial business, opening a shop at Guntur. Sri Pitchaiah carefully nurtured the trendy consumer taste and acquired valuable insight into the intricacies of marketing branded footwear. Armed with the market pulse Sri Pitchaiah proceeded to expand the business by opening branches. Sri Pitchaiah was the pioneer in creating and developing a retail business model for footwear in Andhra Pradesh, soon Popular Shoe Mart network became a competitor to national network such as BATA & LIBERTY.

Popular Shoe Mart encountered several challenges with its existing infrastructure hosted in a third-party data center. These challenges prompted the decision to migrate to the AWS Cloud:

• Downtime Issues: The existing infrastructure resulted in frequent downtime, impacting business operations and customer service. The need for a more reliable and available solution was evident.
• Scalability Constraints: The infrastructure lacked the ability to scale seamlessly to accommodate increasing demands, particularly during peak business periods. This constraint affected the customer experience and the company’s potential for growth.
• Outdated Backup Strategies: The company relied on outdated backup practices, which posed a significant risk to data integrity and recovery. An advanced backup and disaster recovery solution was essential to ensure data protection.
• Infrastructure Upgrade: Popular Shoe Mart aimed to upgrade its SAP system to a more modern and efficient SAP B1 with HANA Database. This transition required a robust and scalable cloud infrastructure.

Configuring the SAP on AWS infrastructure involved several key steps. Here is a high-level solution approach we took for Popular Shoe Mart for configuring the SAP on AWS.

• Planning and Architecture Design
• Network & Connectivity
• Infrastructure Provisioning
• SAP Installation & Configuration
• Data Migration & Integration
• Security & Compliance

During the implementation phase, we addressed several key technical

aspects:

• A new VPC was provisioned exclusively for the customer in the Mumbai Region of the AWS Cloud.
• Two separate networks, public (Internet-facing) and private (non-Internet-facing), were provisioned on the AWS Cloud.
• An SSL VPN Server was set up in the public network, allowing SSH/RDP users to access the servers in the private network.
• One Windows Server EC2 instance and a SUSE Linux EC2 instance were provisioned in the private network to host the SAP B1 Application Server and the HANA Database Server, respectively.
• Well-known port numbers for essential services were customized to enhance security, and Security Groups (SGs) and Network Access Control Lists (NACLs) were configured to allow traffic only to the necessary services from the Internet or through the SSL VPN.
• A NAT Gateway was established in the public network to enable Internet access for private servers.
• AWS enterprise tool CloudWatch was utilized to monitor server resources and trigger alarms in case of any service outages or internal server issues.
• AWS S3 with object-based storage was provisioned as a native backup site to accumulate daily data backups.
• AMI Backups of the server instances and EBS Snapshots of the server hard disks were regularly taken to restore server instances in the rare event of any service outages.
• A Backint agent was configured to facilitate AWS Backint agent installation, enabling SAP HANA backups to be stored directly in an AWS S3 bucket for efficient and secure data management.

• Improved Uptime and Reliability: The company experienced a substantial reduction in downtime. AWS’s high availability and redundancy features ensured that the SAP B1 application and HANA Database were consistently accessible, enhancing overall system reliability.
• Scalability for Business Growth: AWS’s cloud infrastructure provided the flexibility to scale resources up or down as needed, allowing Popular Shoe Mart to accommodate increasing demands during peak business periods and future growth.
• Enhanced Data Protection: The company improved its backup and disaster recovery practices by leveraging AWS’s object-based storage and backup solutions. This enhancement ensured that data was secure and easily recoverable in case of any service outage or data loss.
• Modernized Infrastructure: Popular Shoe Mart successfully upgraded its SAP system to SAP B1 with HANA Database, utilizing the latest technology for improved performance and efficiency.
• Efficient Resource Management: The AWS Cloud allowed for optimized resource management, enabling cost-efficiency and eliminating the need for excessive capital expenditure on infrastructure.
• Managed Services: By partnering with an AWS Managed Service Provider, the company could rely on expert management and maintenance of its AWS infrastructure. This offloaded the responsibility of day-to-day management tasks, allowing the internal team to focus on core business activities.
• Business Continuity: The AWS environment, including AMI backups and EBS snapshots, ensured business continuity and minimized disruptions during system issues or failures.

• Data Security: Popular Shoe Mart benefited from AWS’s robust security features, safeguarding sensitive customer and business data from potential threats.

• AWS IAM role-based access control to restrict users to only the required resources.
• Deep visibility into API calls are maintained through AWS Cloud Trail, including who, what, and from where calls were made. All user related activities are tracked and logged.
• For any Administrative task Remote user have need to connect to VPN client for accessing the servers. All the RDP/SSH port are bound with OpenVPN server, also default ports will be changed to the custom port.
• The DB ports are accessible only from the Application containers and are restricted using Security Group.
• All the SAP workloads are under the private subnets, the dispatcher application are exposed using the Application Load Balancer. SSL listeners has been setup for ALB and certificate has been issued using AWS ACM.