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Mid-Cap Oil and Gas Company Leverages Cloud Technology to Enable SAP Upgrade

Texperts provisions VMware virtual servers in a dedicated private cloud to augment Penn Virginia infrastructure for the SAP ECC 6.0 upgrade.

Performing an SAP upgrade typically requires a production support landscape—a copy of the development, quality assurance (QA) and server infrastructure of the SAP production landscape to be upgraded. For many mid-cap companies, however, managing an upgrade of this scale is challenging: If they don’t have the extra capacity to host this environment, the cost quickly becomes prohibitive.

One independent oil and gas company based in Houston, Texas, faced this precise issue. It needed a production support (break-fix) landscape to support an SAP upgrade project, and it needed that environment within days rather than weeks or months. Penn Virginia could have purchased additional servers to internally build the production support path for the upcoming SAP upgrade, but that would have left it with excess capacity once the project was complete. Another option was to lease servers, but server leases typically run for 12 to 24 months at a minimum, which was longer than was needed. Further, either one of the options would have incurred between 6 and 8 weeks minimum of procurement and deployment delays.

So instead, the company engaged Texperts, Inc., a VMware channel partner that offers cloud-based virtualized SAP system-management services: vBreakFix. “Texperts used VMware virtualization technology to provision a temporary server cloud customized for ‘Productive Landscape’ during the SAP upgrade project,” says Thuy Tran, Manager, System Integration and Database Admin, Penn Virginia. “It was a flexible and cost-effective way to augment our data center during our SAP upgrade.”

Needed: Extra Server Capacity

Penn Virginia, which is engaged in the exploration and production of natural gas and oil resources in U.S. onshore regions in Oklahoma, Texas, the Appalachian Basin and Mississippi, first implemented SAP around five years ago.

In March 2010, the company began to plan for the SAP 4.6c to SAP ECC 6.0 upgrade. The project-planning process revealed that it did not have enough room in its datacenter to accommodate all aspects of the upgrade. “We would have had to buy or lease two more SAP servers,” Tran notes. “In either case the cost would have been up to 30% higher and we would have not been able to leverage the key benefits of cloud computing:

•rapiddeployment;

•flexibilitytoaccommodateourprojectneedsandtimeline;

•scalableresourcese.g.forincreasedmemoryrequirementon-demand;

•aflatandcalculablebudgetwithoutanycostfordecommissioningtheseservers at the tail end of the upgrade project.”

ChallengeMany mid-cap companies don’t have enough capacity in their IT infrastructure to support a major SAP upgrade project—and don’t want to add costly capacity that would then be underutilized after the upgrade is complete. At the same time they are looking for a cost-effective solution that could accommodate the ever-changing demands resulting from SAP upgrade projects.

SolutionPenn Virginia Corp. engaged VMware® channel partner Texperts, which provisions a virtual cloud environment, vBreakFix℠, that could be leveraged on a month-to-month basis to control costs.

Results•Rapiddeploymentinthreedays

•Month-to-monthsubscriptioncontractkept costs controlled and predictable

•ECC6upgradewascompletedwithoutrequiring additional staff or purchasing hardware, an immediate 30% cost savings

•Self-serviceinterface7x24

•Performanceofvirtualcloudenvironmentfacilitated the required infrastructure

•Serverscouldbemaintainedwithoutimpacting availability of internal resources

•Scalingupanddownofcomputeresourceson-demand (CPU, memory and storage) without downtime

KEy BEnEfiTS

Penn Virginia Corporation

E N E R G Y

“The key advantages [to virtualization and cloud computing] are the ability to deploy computing environments quickly, at an overall lower server cost, and with reduced technical support spend. We were very happy that Texperts and VMware were able to combine their cloud technology and services solutions as a cost-effective technology to meet our project upgrade needs. It was a key factor in the success of our project.”

– Gary Bailey, IT Director, Penn Virginia Corp.

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Even more significant, building out new development and QA environments in the SAP world is a very resource-intensive process. “The combination of VMware and Texperts facilitated our ability to do more with less,” according to Gary Bailey, Director, IT for Penn Virginia.

Virtual Copy of Development, QA Environments

Penn Virginia elected to utilize a VMware virtualized cloud environment hosted by Texperts. “As soon as we met with the Texperts consultants, we were impressed with how technical and experienced they were,” notes Tran. “We could tell they had successfully supported this kind of project before. It gave us a high degree of comfort with our decision to work with them.”

After three days, Texperts was able to provision a virtual SAP environment on Penn Virginia’s behalf. “We created a virtual copy of Penn Virginia’s development and QA environments using VMware’s native toolset as part of the SAP heterogeneous system migration procedure,” explains Gerhard Saumweber, CEO, Texperts. Once in place, the virtualized cloud served as a sourcing system for any changes or fixes during the upgrade process. This gave the company the additional testing and QA capacity required to support the upgrade. Direct access was provided to the environment’s transport directories via a cloud portal that provided for secure access as well as 7x24 self-service capability for the upgrade project team. This computing environment can easily facilitate transports to the VMware cloud and upload interface files to the virtualized environments for testing at any time.

The cloud environment offered by Texperts comprised SAP-certified x86 servers. This is a different computing environment and operating system from the traditional UNIX environment currently deployed at Penn Virginia. The difference in server platforms was transparent, however. “Our expert consultants, certified in VMware as well as SAP software, perform the SAP migration and platform conversion as part of our vUpgradeSM and vBreakFixSM cloud solutions,” Saumweber explains. Texperts also created a snapshot of the production support landscape at the beginning of the project, so that if necessary it could re-create the original. “We never needed the snapshot, but this is one of our standard procedures, so that we can reverse any changes the developers make to the environment if needed. We achieve this with a services platform built on best-of-breed technology certified by SAP which is needed for a services platform for supporting SAP upgrade processes. On the storage layer for instance, we use NetApp which is tightly coupled with VMware. This combination provides very efficient functions like snapshots which take only minutes and are seamless to the project team.”

Performance Surpassing Physical Servers

Performance of the virtualized copy of its production systems worked well for Penn Virginia. “We were pleasantly surprised,” Tran says. “The performance of the VMware environment, compared to our existing implementation on physical servers, was noticeably better. It was also very stable—we never had issues with the VMware environment going down.”

The Texperts cloud environment was available around the clock, providing the flexibility needed to meet the upgrade break-fix computing requirements. “We could access the VMware environment via a built-in security layer at the operating system level,” Tran explains. “This gave us the access we needed to easily perform file transfers at any time.”

Because the environment was hosted by Texperts, it handled all tasks associated with managing the production support environment servers. The team didn’t need to divert bandwidth away from performing the upgrade and supporting the production systems. “If we hadn’t used the Texperts cloud solution, the upgrade would have taken longer, or we would have had to contract expensive temporary resources to help,” Tran says.

Primary Application•SAPECC6.0withthemodulesFI,BC,CA,CO,PS,MM,TR,LO,SD

•SAPIS-OIL(industrysolutionforoilandgas)

Primary Database •SAPMaxDB

Primary Operating System•NovellSUSELinuxEnterpriseServer(SLES)

Primary Cloud Platform•VMwareVirtualServerInfrastructurevSphere4

Primary Hardware•ComputeResoures(CPU,memory) byDell

•StoragetechnologybyNetApp

•Networktechnology:byArrayNetworks

VMware vSphere™ 4

VMwARE AT wORK

DEPLOyMEnT EnViROnMEnT

E N E R G Y

VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.comCopyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed athttp://www.vmware.com/go/patents. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. Item No: VMW-CS-PENN-VIRGINIA-USLET-102

In the case of Penn Virginia, what little help was needed with its VMware environment was resolved quickly. “The turnaround time on their support was very fast,” notes Tran. “It is very important to be able to count on a support function with a fast turnaround in an upgrade project like this, otherwise many project members would be on a costly hold and the project progress would be held up at a time when continuous progress is important. At one point, Texperts realized one of the environments needed more memory to support the SAP industry solution for oil and gas software. Because the Texperts cloud was built using VMware virtualization technology, it was able to quickly allocate additional resources without any impact on server availability.

Month-to-Month Flexibility

Texpertsstructuresitsservicesonamonth-to-monthsubscriptionbasis;asaresult,customers always know what costs will be, allowing clients to budget accordingly. Penn Virginia made a decision to retain the cloud environment longer than it originally planned, and Texperts was able to accommodate the need quickly and cost-effectively due to the subscription basis. Once the upgrade was complete, Texperts was able to decommission the servers by simply destroying the virtual copies. “When we were done, we were done,” Tran says. “If we had leased the servers, we would have had to make a final back-up and remove our data. With Texpert’s VMware virtual cloud solution, Texperts took care of the decommissioning for us and provided evidence of such action.”

Based on the performance of the VMware environment, as well as Penn Virginia’s first-hand look at how flexible and cost-effective VMware virtualization technology can be, the company now believes it will eventually migrate its internal SAP environment onto x86 servers under VMware. “The project served as a virtualization proof of concept for us,” Tran notes.

In the meantime, it’s a given that the company will turn to Texperts if it ever needs another virtual cloud to augment its IT environment. “I’ve worked with many other hosting providers,” Tran says. “But I’ve never had an engagement that was as smooth as the one with Texperts. We were very pleased with the level of support and technical expertise, as well as the functionality of the VMware virtualization technology. It was truly a successful project in every respect.”