Dresden University Hospital migrates to Unicode & SAP HANA with the help of Claranet
The Carl Gustav Carus University Hospital in Dresden is the largest hospital in Dresden and one of the leading hospitals in Germany. It comprises 26 clinics, four institutes, and 14 interdisciplinary centers.
Management Summary
The Carl Gustav Carus University Hospital in Dresden is a customer of Claranet Addon GmbH, a company of the Claranet Group. This success story presents a successful Unicode migration of a productive non-Unicode SAP ERP system. It also demonstrates how downtime was drastically minimised through professional database migration from Oracle to SAP HANA with high availability.
Services used
- SAP Consulting
- Migration Unicode & SAP HANA
- High availability and downtime optimisation
The customer decision for Claranet
Employees of Dresden University Hospital first met Claranet Addon Trainer at an SAP seminar (AD660). The Claranet Addon employee impressed the future customer with his in-depth, cross-platform knowledge. This comprehensive expertise and competitive offer led to Claranet Addon being selected to provide project support for the planned Unicode conversion and database migration from Oracle to SAP HANA.
The task
The goal of the Dresden University Hospital in this project was downtime optimisation to minimise downtime in hospital operations. The first step was to perform a downtime-optimised Unicode migration of the productive non-Unicode SAP ERP system. At the same time, the database was to be converted from Oracle to SAP HANA as part of this migration. Another goal was to increase the high availability of the SAP HANA database through SAP HANA System Replication with automatic failover via SUSE HAE (High-Availability Extension). The target infrastructure for the system landscapes was to be built from vSphere VMs for the SAP application servers and SAP HANA. The latest version of SUSE SLES was to be implemented as the operating system for the databases and Windows Server for the application servers.
Our services
- Installation and operation of Linux systems
- Conceptual phase of all three system landscapes for Unicode migration and database change with high availability and automatic failover
- Conceptual design, planning and consulting phase for interfaces, Unicode program testing, etc.
- Support for VMware vSphere Template with SUSE SLES for SAP application servers
- Testing and preparing SAP HANA database servers (appliances) for SAP migration
- Providing consulting resources to support post-go-live errors
Operating system SUSE SLES
- Support with setting up the SUSE operating system in a vSphere environment of SAP HANA servers and Windows application servers
- Configuring the SUSE HAE extension for automatic failover of up to four setups with SAP HANA System Replication
- Installation and configuration of an SLES template for SAP HANA based on SAP Best Practices
We needed to ensure that the risk of disruption to supply and operational processes during the migration(s) was reduced as much as technically possible; Claranet Addon did an excellent job of ensuring this
SAP environment per system landscape
- Support for heterogeneous migration to a virtualised environment (application server)
- Preparing SAP systems for a system copy and Unicode migration according to SAP Best Practices
- Implementation of SAP HANA migration including Unicode migration
- Support with interface development and implementation of the new operating system
- Setup of SAP HANA System Replication for high availability of up to 3 production systems
- Checking for functional tests & system copy SAP guidelines and documentation of all project steps
The jointly developed migration strategy minimised unforeseen risks, reduced system downtime, and empowered employees to administer the SAP system independently.
