About Twins Group
Twins Group is a large farming and animal husbandry enterprise dedicated to feed R&D and manufacturing, pig breeding, feed production, financial services and other similar services. Since its inception in 1998, Twins Group has been producing 1 million more tons of feed, each year for six consecutive years, with annual sales exceeding 9 million tons. This impressive record has helped them maintain their leading position in the industry within China. Twins Group is one of the top 500 enterprises in China, one of the top 500 manufacturing enterprises, and one of the top 100 private enterprises, but when it comes to producing pigs they are number one, in all of China.
Challenges
In recent years, trade disputes have driven up the cost of raw materials, and the African swine fever actually created strategic opportunities. The production and manufacturing involved in farming pigs has been transforming, growing more precise and more efficient. Twins Group is determined to operate at a truly world-class level. The service chain both in- and outside of China has been expanding. Traditional offline equipment rooms are not up to the task if Twins Group wants to be a top competitor on the international stage.
Twins Group needs a platform that is:
· Extremely secure. SAP ERP applications need to be stable.
· Designed to be fully compatible with SAP cloud architecture. It must support SAP applications, provide HANA database HA, and include disaster recovery, and backup services.
· Highly scalable. There has to be SAP certified servers available to help them scale up rapidly if needed.
· Supported by highly qualified personnel, project managers, architects, implementation engineers, and project members, depending on specific project requirements.
· Protected from any risks that can be identified by an expert team of troubleshooters. Mitigation measures need to be provided and expert personnel must be available to optimize the system and improve performance.
Solution
- The local environment is connected to HUAWEI CLOUD through a VPN. Local users can use private IP addresses to access the ERP environment in the cloud and interact with other local service systems.
- The SAP application and database are deployed on different production systems to ensure higher availability. Different modules can be expanded if needed to improve system flexibility.
- Users can use security groups to manage Internet and internal network access.
- HANA database backups are periodically themselves backed up to an SFS file server, which reduces costs and improves availability.
- A HANA database backup in a disaster recovery zone is kept current in real time. The disaster recovery server instance requires lower specifications, which helps reduce costs.
- HUAWEI CLOUD provides SCSI shared disks and NFS SFS services, which are required by ASCS and SBD; and by SAP HA design requirements.
- The ASCS on the application server can be automatically deployed on different hosts based on anti-affinity rules configured on HUAWEI CLOUD or they can be deployed across AZs.
- The HANA database uses synchronous replication for higher availability. The HANA database can be deployed on different host machines or across AZs.
- A cross-region or enterprise DR can be selected. Also, the enterprise keeps a copy of their data locally, so if a cloud service is terminated, the local application can be started immediately.
Benefits
This project helped Twins Group deploy an entire SAP ERP system on the cloud, supporting the group's goals for national and international expansion.
· Better Integrated Applications and Better Data Flow
HUAWEI CLOUD solution for the agriculture and animal husbandry industry helped Twins Group unify deployment, integrate management systems, and provide central access for branch offices. Twins Group deployed SAP on HUAWEI CLOUD to integrate production, supply, and marketing applications and enterprise management applications. They streamlined data flows, eliminated information silos, and are continuously improving the quality of their data. This solution represented a huge step forward for the construction of big data and business intelligence applications. It has helped them keep a handle on market dynamics in real time, improving market insight and helping them make better decisions.
· Direct Connect Connections
Twins Group headquarters connects to HUAWEI CLOUD through a Direct Connect connection, but then the branch offices connect using SSL or VPN connections, or by sharing a Direct Connect connection with headquarters. The group accesses HUAWEI CLOUD from Vietnam or other overseas points-of-presence through a VPN or Direct Connect connection, and then accesses the HUAWEI CLOUD applications in China through the HUAWEI CLOUD backbone network.
· Simplified O&M and Reduced Costs
Huawei brought 30-years of experience and best practices in enterprise digital transformation to this project, and Twins Group built an agriculture and animal husbandry enterprise that is setting benchmarks for the industry in China. SAP certified, automatic O&M management tools allowed them to improve IT O&M, which freed up resources for Twins Group to focus more on innovating new services. By purchasing stable long-term reserved instances for servers, the total cost of ownership (TCO) was greatly reduced.
· A Solid Foundation Ensures Uninterrupted Services
The powerful computing and security of HUAWEI CLOUD have helped Twins Group build a solid foundation for their platform. The Huawei SAP team provides end-to-end services. We safeguard the entire process, from the design and planning of the architecture and security solutions to final project implementation. A smooth rollout is guaranteed. The Huawei cloud infrastructure, deployment of multiple AZs, both synchronous and asynchronous replication and snapshot technologies have greatly improved the availability of their service systems.
