Corex migrates SAP workloads to Microsoft Azure for improved scalability and performance

Building the case for a cloud-based future

VPK acquired Corenso, another cardboard manufacturer, in 2019 and that acquisition merged with Corex. The joint organisation follows VPK’s lead on IT strategy while retaining autonomy over its choice of technical partners. Like many manufacturers, Corex wanted to retain its hardware for as long as possible and had bought time for its decision with extended hardware support.

Corex has always been a Microsoft house, and with so many Microsoft services already in use, migrating to Azure was its first choice. VPK had also chosen Azure for its own migration, so having the same platform strategy as the group made sense.

SoftwareOne worked with Corex on the business case for the migration and on the migration plan. A major goal for the project was a smooth, seamless migration. Corex has over 400 SAP users, so disruptions had to be avoided. The company also wanted to gain better control over its costs – something that moving from a capex to an opex model would provide.

In addition to an infrastructure that could scale easily and offer high levels of flexibility, the company also needed to improve the redundancy and resiliency of its systems. The IT team wanted a more robust business continuity capability and regular backups in place in case of failover.

SoftwareOne developed three costed infrastructure options for Corex, from a basic level to an enterprise level. The two companies assessed the design options for 4–6 months, looking at different models and services.

Detailed migration planning and refactoring key services

The plan needed to minimise business interruptions and allow Corex to quickly unlock the critical cloud capabilities it wanted around flexibility and scalability. Corex and SoftwareOne tested the migration plan on the company’s three different environments, learning lessons during each stage and applying them to the next migration. By the time they were ready to go live, the team had built a high level of confidence in their plan.

Although it was primarily a lift-and-shift migration, the team discovered through testing that some elements of the infrastructure needed to be refactored for better operation on Azure. There was some concern over the scarcity of the reserved instances servers commonly used for SAP. SoftwareOne’s solution was to move from one SAP application server to two, in different availability zones. The result was a more resilient service with better availability.

With testing and refactoring complete, the migration to production began on a Friday evening. The team was delighted with how smoothly it ran – a success attributed to the detailed planning phase. Because SoftwareOne had been working with Corex since 2017, both companies’ teams knew each other well and some functional support for the SAP configuration team was already subcontracted to SoftwareOne. The familiarity with the system and its quirks and how Corex employees interfaced with it helped make the process smooth and painless.