Stability starts at the bottom

About the client

The GAVDI Group

The GAVDI Group is an employee-owned company with Scandinavian heritage and an outstanding reputation for delivering award-winning SAP and SuccessFactors Solutions. Established in Copenhagen in 1999, the group is known for continuous innovations and expert delivery of SAP solutions. The company operates in 13 EMEA markets.

GAVDI Polska

GAVDI Polska, a member of the GAVDI Group, is a specialized consulting company employing over 300 consultants and programmers to offer integrated services and products in human capital management based on SAP HCM and SAP SuccessFactors. Its wide range of services, proprietary products, and innovative solutions contribute to HR strategies, IT solutions, and application support that are the key to client success. GAVDI Polska’s competences and extensive implementation experience have enabled the company to successfully implement projects in SAP HCM and related areas such as employee and manager self-service, SAP Enterprise Learning, SAP e Recruiting, Travel Management, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP Cloud Platform over the last decade. Excellent knowledge of its customer’s HR management needs enables GAVDI Polska to develop and implement customized tools and products complementary to the SAP HCM system and SAP SuccessFactors.

The challenge

GAVDI Polska requires extensive SAP environments to create, test, and present its customer solutions. These environments must be efficient and stable. GAVDI Polska was looking for an environment that would meet the following conditions:

• Stability: When presenting solutions to customers, system stability is critical to avoid disruptions which could have a negative project impact.
• Scalability: The core environment can have relatively low computing power; however, it must be scalable for larger projects and increase performance quickly.
• Cost-effectiveness: Maintaining internal demonstration and training systems is essential but don’t directly generate profits. Therefore, it is necessary to manage expenditures carefully.
• Specialization: GAVDI Polska is focused on its specialization in an environment that easily provides support at the infrastructure level and SAP BASIS without involving its resources in the technical implementation.

The solution

Why Amazon Web Services?

After considering many options, GAVDI Polska chose Amazon Web Services (AWS). The AWS platform is a leading provider of cloud solutions that assure results. Amazon Web Services also has a strong group of partners who help combine the functionality of SAP systems with modern cloud technologies.

By creating its environment in the AWS cloud, GAVDI trusted one of its long-term partners, SoftwareOne, to carry out the migration process and maintain SAP systems in the AWS infrastructure. As a result, GAVDI Polska can focus on its specialization, providing services and products for SAP HCM and SAP.

Solution highlights

The GAVDI Polska systems are located on EC2 virtual machines (Amazon elastic Compute Cloud), which provide adequate computing power, memory size, and I / O operations performance for maintained systems. As additional projects are launched, virtual machines can be easily expanded, and the entire SAP application environment can be effectively duplicated and reconfigured. EBS (Amazon Elastic Block Store) volumes are connected to virtual machines to provide the best performance at a given moment and can be modified immediately to optimize performance as requirements vary.

S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) is used for back-up, ensuring durability at 99.999999999 per cent and storing backup copies in three separate locations at the same time. Additionally, AWS CloudFormation is used, which enables quick recovery of the environment in another AZ (Availability Zone) in the event of infrastructure failure. The Amazon Instance Scheduler is responsible for the periodic launch and shutdown of systems.