Migrating a 9-TB Database to the Cloud Using Amazon EC2 High Memory Instances with Siemens | Case Study | AWS

Siemens is a technology company in the industrial, infrastructure, transportation, and medical industries. From more energy-efficient factories, more resilient supply chains, smarter buildings, and power grids to more comfortable and cleaner transportation and advanced medical systems, Siemens is committed to using technologies to provide value.

Siemens has used AWS for more than 10 years and appreciates its support, compliance, and services, so when Siemens China needed to migrate its SAP system, it turned to AWS. Because Siemens had many business lines and business units, its SAP system migration involved several peripheral business suppliers and peripheral systems, and there were hundreds of interfaces. These factors presented a challenge in the design and implementation of the cloud migration.

There are other challenges in SAP system migration as well. First, since the SAP system governs and manages all the resources of the enterprise, its security and stability is most important. The migration of the SAP system must ensure that it’s in compliance with the SAP standards and professional certifications. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, has been verified by SAP to meet the needs of the SAP application, and it meets the security standards of Siemens. Therefore, the solution was a natural choice for the migration.

The biggest challenge that Siemens faced was that to run the environment, the company needed a huge amount of memory: 9 TB. Since SAP itself is a closed system, SAP HANA cannot be distributed into smaller databases, so Siemens China needed a single instance equipped with 9 TB of memory. This size is larger than the capability of most cloud service providers.

Siemens China engaged AWS China Account team, which provides a comprehensive suite of resources. The teams worked together and met the performance and size requirements using Amazon EC2 High Memory Instances—which provide up to 24TiB of memory in a single instance—resulting in a smooth SAP HANA migration. Siemens chose the m6i.12xlarge and u-9tb1.112xlarge large memory instances for its SAP ERP and SAP HANA migrations.

“The size of our SAP HANA database is huge,” says Vineet Gupta, IT manager at Siemens. “AWS can match our computing power demands with memory instances up to 9 TB, thus meeting the migration needs. That’s really exciting.”

In the project deployment phase, AWS Enterprise Support initiated AWS Infrastructure Event Management (AWS IEM), which offers architecture and scaling guidance and operational support, for Siemens China. AWS IEM supported Siemens China through the migration.

The AWS team and Siemens China designed a main environment running on two Availability Zones in Ningxia. The backup was maintained in the Beijing Region. To accommodate for the physical distance between the Ningxia and Beijing Regions, AWS and Siemens China team verified security through AWS Direct Connect, which is used to create a dedicated network connection to AWS China Cloud. Then, the main Siemens environment and the backup was connected with the AWS network between the AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD”and the AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD”, facilitating the security and stability of the system while significantly reducing the cost. With these targeted designs and optimizations, the latency between Availability Zones is 0.6 milliseconds, which meets the performance requirements of the SAP system.

In the solution, AWS Enterprise Support also provided a new backup strategy. Now, all SAP systems and data in the AWS China (Ningxia) Region are incrementally backed up daily between Availability Zones and fully backed up every week. All backup data is synchronized to the AWS China (Beijing) Region using AWS Backup, which is a cost-effective, fully managed, policy-based service that simplifies data protection at scale. Previously, all increments would need to be recorded and backed up, and the loss of any increment would affect the recording of subsequent increments. Now, if one or both of the Availability Zones in Ningxia fails, the Beijing Availability Zone will still be able to get back the full data backup.

Furthermore, Siemens uses tools such as AWS SDK, CLI, Systems Manager and other tools to build an operation management system and environment in the cloud in order to be able to use the SAP system conveniently. In addition to monitoring SAP, these tools can also simultaneously perform log analysis, operational status health checks, etc. By developing and deploying a series of automation and scripts, the operation, monitoring, and management of the entire system can be more automated and efficient.

Atos, an AWS global consultant Partner, demonstrated its expertise and passion at every stage of Siemens SAP migration process, achieving stability during the time of rapid change.

After the cloud migration, Siemens no longer needs the infrastructure selection and deployment process. Additionally, the company now uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which is an object storage service offering cutting-edge scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

Once the entire SAP system was migrated to AWS, Siemens achieved significant optimization of IT resources. The configuration of the SAP HANA certified model u-9tb1.112xlarge provided by AWS Enterprise Support perfectly matched the large memory requirements of Siemens China’s database. The operational pressure on the local infrastructure was significantly improved, and compared with deployment in the local data center, the SAP system cloud migration ultimately achieved a 20-percent increase in the overall performance on AWS. The modernized architecture designed by AWS facilitates latency, access speed, disaster tolerance, and business continuity, helping Siemens China’s business to run more stably and smoothly.

The successful cloud migration of SAP data has inspired Siemens to follow up with more migration projects around data and machine learning, accelerating the data-centric cloud migration journey. In the future, Siemens will continue use AWS in the field of Industry 4.0, exploring more possibilities in areas such as generative AI and digital twins.

Siemens AG (Berlin and Munich) is a technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transport, and healthcare. From more resource-efficient factories, resilient supply chains, and smarter buildings and grids, to cleaner and more comfortable transportation as well as advanced healthcare, the company creates technology with purpose adding real value for customers. By combining the real and the digital worlds, Siemens empowers its customers to transform their industries and markets, helping them to transform the everyday for billions of people. For almost 150 years since its entering into China in 1872, Siemens has pioneered cooperation with the country with its solutions, technologies and products.