ITGLOBAL.COM provided functioning of SAP-applications of Ural Steel on the basis of private cloud
The complex situation in the world and high competition push businesses to make quick decisions: some companies leave the market, large corporations absorb competitors or buy other companies to strengthen their brand. Each restructuring process is different, so it requires complex solutions, including IT infrastructure. In this article we told how with the help of ITGLOBAL.COM Ural Steel managed to move its infrastructure into private cloud and create a backup site in case of failures.About the customer
. Combinat “Uralskaya Steel” is a full-cycle enterprise, which includes: coke and blast furnace production, electric steelmaking shop (ESPC), sheet rolling shop with 2800 mill and heat treatment, specialized enterprise of full-cycle processing of scrap metal.
The history of the plant began in 1955. Now it is a leader in bridge steel production in Russia, one of the leading producers of flat rolled steel, cast billets, large-size castings and pig iron.
More than 100 bridges have been produced from Ural Steel products, including the Red Dragon bridge over the Irtysh River, the bridge to Russky Island in Vladivostok, the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky bridge over the Pur River in Yamal, the high-mountain bridge on the Yenisei River and others.
The mill’s rolled steel was used in the construction of facilities for the Sochi Olympics, stadiums for the FIFA World Cup, the Moscow City multifunctional complex, structures of the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow and other facilities.
Task
. In 2022, Ural Steel and Zagorsky Pipe Plant formed a single vertically integrated steel holding. Prior to that, the mill was part of another holding and used its facilities and IT infrastructure. After the transaction, the company started to create its own infrastructure and incorporate it into the common IT system of the new holding. The plant needed to move critical services to the cloud and create a backup site in case of emergencies.
Solution
. ITGLOBAL.COM specialists suggested moving the IT infrastructure to private cloud to host SAP applications based on SAP HANA. The computing resources allocated at the physical level allowed the customer to access an isolated environment that is not affected by other users.
It was decided to rent computing resources in two Moscow data centers ITGLOBAL.COM. The project was realized in two stages.
First stage: migration to a private cloud
. At the first stage, ITGLOBAL.COM specialists deployed the IT infrastructure for Ural Steel’s SAP systems in the data center, after which Ural Steel’s external contractor integrated it into the Combine’s IT landscape, ensured migration of SAP systems to ITGLOBAL.COM’s private cloud and seamless migration of users to the migrated systems. The private cloud was deployed in the DataSpace data center at the base:
- eight dedicated Cisco physical servers, with N+1 redundancy with specifications: 4x Intel Xeon 18 core @ 3.0 GHz, 3 TB RAM;
- four dedicated physical servers, with N+1 redundancy with specifications: 4x Intel Xeon 18 core @ 3.0 GHz, 1 TB RAM;
- NetApp storage.
Schem of IT infrastructure placement in the Data Space data center
Second phase: hosting in a redundant data center
In the second stage, the plan was to place the enterprise IT infrastructure in a backup geographically dispersed IXcellerate MOS5 data center. In case of a disaster, this solution helps to quickly restore the company’s critical data.
The private cloud was planned to be deployed on the base:
- four dedicated physical servers, with N+1 redundancy with characteristics: 4x Intel Xeon 18 core @ 3.0 GHz, 3 TB RAM;
- six dedicated physical servers, with N+1 redundancy with specifications: 2x Intel Xeon 24 core @ 3.0 GHz, 768 GB RAM;
Data layout of IXcellerate MOS5 backup data center
Results and future plans
With the help of migration to a private cloud, Ural Steel has been able to build its own IT infrastructure, fully exploit it and implement modern solutions on its basis.
As of February 2023, the enterprise has not yet completed the migration of all data from the infrastructure of the former holding company, so it is not using the second data center yet. In the near future, the company plans to switch to an optimal scheme of work with two data centers, which was proposed by specialists of ITGLOBAL.COM.