Ice River Springs Moves SAP to AWS with a Five-Hour Cutover

Ice River Springs had three months to move its SAP workloads off a hosting provider that was closing its hosting business, during its busiest season. CONTAX migrated SAP to Amazon VPC on AWS within that window, and the cutover took five hours, with no glitches, against the 48 hours Ice River Springs had allotted.

At a Glance

The Customer

Ice River Springs started as a family-run Canadian bottled water company, sourcing water from the natural springs on the family farm. It is now one of the largest independent bottled water companies in Canada, sourcing water from natural springs across the country and producing private-label bottled water for large retailers, including grocery stores and pharmacies. It also produces its own brand, Ice River Green Bottle Co.

The business is built on post-consumer recycling. Ice River Springs buys Blue Box plastic from municipal recycling facilities across Ontario and the northeastern US and turns it into new 100% recycled bottles, diverting more than 5 million pounds of plastic from landfill every year. Every bottle it makes has no new plastic.

The Challenge

Ice River Springs ran SAP in a hosted environment. When its provider announced it was discontinuing its hosting business, Ice River Springs had three months to move its workloads, and those three months fell in its busiest season, when production runs 24 hours a day. There was no good time for downtime, so the cutover window had to be as short as possible.

After a brief look at other hosting providers, Ice River Springs chose AWS because of its team's familiarity with the toolset. It chose CONTAX without considering other partners, based on a long relationship and CONTAX's track record of delivering complex projects on time and under budget.

The Solution

CONTAX migrated Ice River Springs' SAP workloads to Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with AWS CloudEndure Migration, which replicates continuously throughout a project. During the migration, CONTAX also kept the environment in sync with the interface providers handling communication to and from SAP.

Rehearsing the Cutover

CloudEndure let the team run mock cutovers before the real one. By go-live, every person knew their role and what needed to be done, and nothing was being done for the first time. The rehearsals brought the planned cutover window down from 48 hours to nine.

The Results

• CONTAX took the project from inception to planning to go-live within the three-month deadline
• The cutover took five hours, with no glitches, against 48 hours allotted and nine hours planned after trial runs
• The migration started on a Friday afternoon and was finished in time for a late dinner, giving the business an extra 43 hours of running time over the weekend
• Ice River Springs now has full control of its SAP network environment in Amazon VPC

"We started the migration on a Friday afternoon, and we were wrapped up in time for a late dinner. What does that mean to the business to be running an extra 43 hours over the weekend? That in and of itself probably paid for the project."

What's Next

Ice River Springs is optimizing its workloads on AWS, reserving compute capacity where possible to reduce costs. CONTAX will then plan a modernization project to use new SAP functionality on AWS, such as sandbox environments for experimentation. On AWS a new server takes about an hour to set up, where in a typical hosting environment it could take several months.