Migration to Unicode and SAP HANA

The Städtische Werke Magdeburg is a customer of Claranet Addon GmbH, a Claranet Group company. This case study presents a successful Unicode migration of a productive non-Unicode SAP ERP system. It also shows how downtime and data volumes were drastically minimised by using SAP tools during the database migration from Oracle to SAP HANA.

Customer	SWM - Städtische Werke Magdeburg GmbH & Co. KG
Branche	Energy supply
Short portrait	The Städtische Werke Magdeburg GmbH & Co. KG are the regional market leaders in the field of energy supply. The company's services include electricity, gas, water, waste disposal and heat.

The customer decision

At an SAP HANA seminar (HA200) in Walldorf, employees of Städtische Werke Magdeburg met a trainer from the then AddOn AG for the first time. The AddOn employee impressed the future customer with his in-depth, cross-platform knowledge. The comprehensive technical expertise and the competitive offer were the basis for AddOn being commissioned to provide project support for the planned Unicode conversion and database migration from Oracle to SAP HANA.

The task

The aim of SWM in this project was to carry out an efficient Unicode migration of the productive non-Unicode SAP ERP system - with EHP7 already in place. At the same time, the database was also to be converted from Oracle to SAP HANA as part of this migration.

Coming from a pure AIX & Oracle environment, the aim was to continue running the SAP Application Server on AIX and the SAP HANA database on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in future, both virtualised on IBM Power systems. Until then, SWM had been using AIX systems with an Oracle database. The data volume on the Oracle database was around 4 TB at the time of the migration.

The solution

Since EHP7 had already been installed in the ERP systems, the Claranet consultant was able to use the R3load process. Compared to other methods, R3load offers various import and export optimisation options. However, it should be noted that SAP requires the project team member carrying out the project to have SAP migration certification when using the R3load process. Claranet consultants generally have the necessary certifications for SAP or SAP HANA migrations.

The project organisation and implementation exceeded our expectations. The reduction in migration time helped us to minimise the impact on the customer business. The professionalism gave us the necessary security for the transformation of sensitive data into the new environment."

Dr. Frank Schmidt
CIO, Städtische Werke Magdeburg

The results

Reduction of the export/import runtime from 52 hours estimated by the customer to 5:15 hours by using the R3load process.
Reduction of the database from 4TB to 800GB during the SAP HANA migration.
By using an external migration host for up to 120 R3load processes, the export/import phase was extremely parallelised and the downtime was minimised.

The consultant used was technically convincing and managed the project confidently and professionally. In addition to the competent implementation of the migration with impressively short downtime, we were particularly impressed by the knowledge transfer that took place. For us, this project is a prime example of successful collaboration and has brought us added value throughout the migration."

Torsten Urban
Administration Coordinator, Städtische Werke Magdeburg