Large US Municipal Government Modernizes Mission-critical SAP Infrastructure on a Software-defined Hybrid Platform, Driving Resilience and Scalability

The client runs mission-critical SAP applications supporting finance, procurement, HR, and payroll. Under a managed services engagement, the team migrated about 60 SAP HANA workloads and 190 application servers from a legacy Vblock platform to SAP-certified VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure and now provides 24x7 monitoring, patching, backup, DR, and compliance support. 

Powering essential city services with complex, always-on SAP infrastructure

The client is the administrative body of a large US city, responsible for delivering public safety, utilities, libraries, parks and recreation, and general administration services. With thousands of employees operating across a central office and multiple satellite locations, the city relies on a complex SAP landscape to manage critical functions such as finance, procurement, human resources, and payroll. Ensuring the security, resilience, and continuous availability of these systems is essential to maintaining efficient, uninterrupted municipal operations.

Modernizing SAP at scale without disrupting city operations

• Certified infrastructure: Only SAP-certified hardware and designs could be used, following SAP, VMware, and HPE best practices across compute, storage, network, and OS layers. 

• Large-scale migration: SAP application and HANA environments need heavy memory and storage, and had to move with existing IP addresses and minimal downtime. 

• Latency and availability: SAP is sensitive to latency and timeouts, and several SAP applications must stay available 24x7 for essential city operations. 

• Controlled change: Patching, upgrades, and hardware refresh had to be planned without affecting critical SAP workloads. 

• Security and supporting services: The platform had to meet security, compliance, and audit requirements, while Control-M, backup, monitoring, Active Directory, email, and DR services stayed resilient. 

Building a resilient, SAP-certified, hybrid infrastructure with end-to-end managed services

The SAP environment moved from the legacy Vblock to software-defined infrastructure on VMware Cloud Foundation, vSAN, and NSX-T, running on HPE Synergy Gen10, HPE ProLiant Gen11, and HPE Alletra storage, with additional workloads on VMware Cloud on AWS and disaster recovery in native AWS, tested annually.  

The stack includes SAP HANA on Linux, SAP application servers on Windows, Control-M for scheduling, Rubrik for backup, SolarWinds for monitoring, and BMC BladeLogic for patching. An HPE GreenLake consumption model provides on-demand capacity and cost optimization. The team delivers 24x7 monitoring, incident and problem management, patching, capacity planning, backup and DR, and security compliance.

The migration was executed with minimal downtime and negligible business impact, through detailed planning, extensive testing, and coordination across infrastructure, application, database, and network teams. The team kept supporting services available throughout, including Control-M, which manages roughly 650 jobs across the SAP landscape. The modernized platform improves performance, resiliency, scalability, and operational efficiency, while 24x7 support, proactive monitoring, patching, backup management, and security compliance keep the environment stable, secure, and ready for future growth.