HANSA-FLEX AG

In 2019, hydraulics expert HANSA-FLEX AG took on two major projects to adapt its IT structure to meet its organizational and customer needs. Working with NetApp & Microsoft partner Arvato Systems, the company updated its SAP systems and database to SAP HANA, achieving the fastest cloud migration to-date. It was the first time the company used Azure NetApp Files to run performance-intensive and latency-sensitive workloads in the cloud.

Launched by Microsoft in October 2019, Azure NetApp Files is widely used as the underlying shared file storage service in various scenarios, such as migrating a high-performance computing infrastructure or enterprise web applications. HANSA-FLEX was the first company in Germany to implement Azure NetApp Files as part of a purely SAP project. Once migrated, the database took up just one-third of the space it had before.

At the end of September 2019, the project team began the planning phase, setting a goal to have all key SAP systems running in the cloud within three months. These included the 10 terabyte IBM Db2 database that stored 80,000 material master datasets for HANSA-FLEX’s more than 450 locations. That left a six-week window to complete the migration itself by year’s end.