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

About the customer

Magnifi is the flagship enterprise solution offered by MultiStream Technologies Pvt. Ltd., designed to help broadcasters, sports leagues, and digital media companies deliver real-time, AI-powered video highlights. Magnifi leverages advanced computer vision and machine learning models to automatically detect key moments, extract highlights, and generate social-ready clips — accelerating content publishing and improving audience engagement across sports, news, and entertainment formats.

Customer Challenge

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Outdated Backup Strategies: The company relied on outdated backup practices, which posed a significant risk to data integrity and recovery.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.

Workmates Core2Cloud Solution Approach

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.

Managed Services Delivered by Workmates

System Patch Administration: Implemented automated monthly patching processes utilizing SSM Patch Manager for comprehensive operating system and application component updates, ensuring security compliance and system stability.
Data Protection & Business Continuity: Established automated daily backup operations to Amazon S3 storage, complemented by a comprehensive disaster recovery framework featuring defined Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) with regular recovery testing procedures.
Continuous Infrastructure Monitoring: Deployed round-the-clock monitoring capabilities through CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and GuardDuty services, with intelligent alert distribution via SNS notifications to designated engineering response teams.
Regulatory Compliance Support: Activated configuration drift monitoring through AWS Config and maintained comprehensive access logging documentation to support SOC/ISO certification requirements and audit preparedness.
Infrastructure Performance Enhancement: Conducted regular cost analysis reviews and implemented performance optimization strategies across computing resources, storage systems, and database configurations to maximize operational efficiency.
Resource Governance & Financial Management: Implemented comprehensive resource tagging strategies for accurate cost allocation and chargeback processes, leveraging AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations and Savings Plans to achieve optimal cost reduction.
Service Level Management & Issue Resolution: Integrated monitoring systems with the IT Service Management (ITSM) platform to facilitate automated alert tracking, incident escalation, and Service Level Agreement (SLA) performance monitoring for timely issue resolution.

Results and Benefits

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.

Security Considerations

AWS IAM role-based access control to restrict users to only the required resources.
Deep visibility into API calls are maintained through AWS CloudTrail, including who, what, and from where calls were made. All user related activities are tracked and logged.
For any Administrative task, Remote users have need to connect to a 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 have been set up for ALB and certificate has been issued using AWS ACM.

AWS Services used:

AWS EC2, ALB, S3, CloudFormation, CloudWatch, AWS Systems Manager, Backint Agent, Lambda, EC2 Lifecycle manager, VPC Endpoint, CloudTrail, IAM Role, AWS Config, Route 53

HANA DB Backup Implementation using AWS Backint Agent

We have implemented the AWS Backint Agent SAP-certified backup and restore solution for SAP HANA workloads running on Amazon EC2 instances. AWS Backint Agent backs up your SAP HANA database to Amazon S3 and restores it using SAP management tools.