Success Story Garcimar

Garcimar: Migration to AWS

Garcimar is a family business with a long tradition in the food sector, specialising in offering services and a wide range of products with its own guarantee, and a leader in food distribution in the Horeca channel.

With more than eighty years of experience, Garcimar has established itself as a National supplier with local response for all of Spain and with a powerful logistics platform that allows it to guarantee supplies within 24 hours.

What challenge did the company face?

Improve availability

Enhance elasticity

Cost reduction

The client platform requirements were as follows:

Availability: It was critical to have a Disaster Recovery system that could guarantee the availability of the platform in the event of a failure of any or all of its services.

The continued growth that Garcimar has been experiencing in recent years required a platform that could adapt to these new demands in an agile manner.

In recent years, Garcimar had suffered significant cost growth, especially linked to the increase in the price of electricity at its CPD, so it was considering migrating to some of the large suppliers that could optimize its current platform costs.

Solution implemented

Garcimar had a very diverse technological infrastructure deployed, which we can see in the following points:

Connectivity: Through a telecommunications operator, the organization had a VPN-IP service and Internet access via an MPLS network that linked the different offices to a Datacenter located in Barcelona. In addition, it had other satellite locations of group companies linked to the same data center, through IPSEC and OpenVPN site-to-site connections.

Hardware platform: The company had contracted a virtualized platform service from VMWare with dedicated server equipment in a data center located in Barcelona. It also had 2 physical server equipment and its own disk cabinet that allowed it to manage and administer more than 30 virtual business servers from the different companies in the group.

Software: The client had different applications from various providers for the multiple areas, departments and offices of the organization installed on its platform. Each of them installed on operating systems of all kinds (Unix, Linux, Windows, etc.) supported by database engines and web hosting from different manufacturers.

Apser designed a project of secure, very flexible and reliable platform that would allow:

Increase your platform requirements quickly and efficiently, with virtually no impact on system outages

A Disaster Recovery system that will guarantee business continuity in the event of an incident or disaster

A pay-per-use platform that does not increase costs due to variables such as electricity

That the migration of the entire platform be carried out in a weekend, especially the ERP part (Libra, from Edisa), so that it would not affect Garcimar's daily work.

Maintain the network infrastructure and replace the Datacenter with an additional headquarters in AWS connected by IPsec

Once the platform was deployed and the connectivity part was configured along with all the appropriate security measures for both internal and external access, stress tests were performed and the new instances and the most critical and important applications within the organization were optimized to try to reduce costs in the operation of the services on the new AWS platform.

Results

The results are very satisfactory, since all the objectives mentioned for this project have been met:

A DR tailored to the client is available thanks to the extensive capabilities of AWS services

The platform cost has been optimized while most of the servers have been adapted to current technologies and operating systems, which allow for better application performance.

There is complete flexibility to take on changing customer capabilities at any time and in an extraordinarily fast manner.

The same network connectivity infrastructure has been preserved and adapted to the new centrality of AWS

Next steps

The following challenges are planned:

Once the entire new infrastructure has been consolidated in the AWS cloud, both the hosting of your ERP and the backup and Disaster Recovery solutions, a migration analysis process begins from your current telephony solution to the AWS solution. AmazonConnect.

Lessons learned

In order to estimate costs in time and to be able to plan the migration and implementation, it is interesting calculate data loading timespreviously.

On the other hand, it is necessary fully control which subnets are going to be cloned in the VPC on AWS to define in advance the network segments and ranges that we need to accommodate. Otherwise, we could find that we cannot use some of them, because they are part of those restricted by the platform.

Finally, all the casuistry in relation to the Configuring networks, SGs, and ACL rules for the VPC due to the fact that the servers become part of the AWS environment, in order to correctly restrict access in each of the existing segments.

Why Apser

apser is the AWS Advanced Consulting Partner specialized in private companies, public sector, ISVs and non-profit organizations.

The apser team provides a customized, agile and understandable approach that contributes to the widespread adoption of the cloud paradigm.

In 2018 we began our experience with AWS and, since then, we have not stopped incorporating knowledge and experience, a fact that drives us to improve the efficiency of our clients' platforms.

Our team operates through two business units: Cloud Solutions (as a managed services provider) and Cloud Professional Services (as consultants).