Gavdi Group

GAVDI Polska is a specialized consulting company offering integrated services and products in the area of human capital management based on SAP HCM and SAP SuccessFactors. A wide range of services proprietary products, and innovative solutions come from the conviction that HR strategy, IT solutions and application support are the key to the success of any company.

GAVDI Polska was founded in 2006 and belongs to the international GAVDI Group established in 1999, which thanks to its dynamic development currently operates in thirteen countries: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Poland, Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United Arab Emirates (Dubai), employing over 300 consultants and programmers.

GAVDI Polska competences and extensive implementation experience have enabled them to successfully implement projects in the field of SAP HCM and related areas such as employee and manager self-service, SAP Enterprise Learning, SAP e-Recruiting, Travel Management, SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Cloud Platform for the past ten years. Excellent knowledge of the organization’s needs in the area of human resources management allows them to create and implement proprietary tools and products complementary to the SAP HCM system and SAP SuccessFactors.

GAVDI Polska has extensive SAP environments for presenting customer solutions, creating and testing its solutions and selfimprovement. Environments do not have to be on a 24/7 basis, but when they work, they must be efficient and stable.

GAVDI Polska was looking for an environment that would meet the following conditions:

1. Stability.

   The solution had to be stable. Disruptions in the operation of the environment while presenting solutions to the customer could have had a negative impact on their reception or even the future of the project.

2. Scalability.

   The environment can have relatively low computing power on a daily basis; however, for larger projects, it must be possible to scale and increase performance quickly.

3. Cost-effectiveness.

   Maintaining your own demonstration and training systems is important, but it itself does not bring profit to the company. Therefore, it is necessary to manage expenditure in this field rationally.

4. Focusing on your own specialization.

   GAVDI Polska focuses on what they are the best at- their own specialization. Therefore, they were looking for an environment in which they could easily provide support at the infrastructure level and SAP BASIS without having to involve their own resources in the technical

After considering many options, GAVDI Polska chose Amazon Web Services (AWS. The AWS platform is a leading provider of cloud solutions on the market and enables us to meet expected results.

Amazon Web Services has a strong group of partners who are able to combine the functionality of SAP systems with modern cloud technologies. By creating its environment in the AWS cloud, GAVDI trusted one of its long-term partners, SE16N which carried out the migration process and now maintains SAP systems in the AWS infrastructure. Thanks to this, GAVDI Poland may focus on its specialization, providing services and products in the area of SAP HCM and SAP.

The systems are located on EC2 virtual machines (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud), which provide adequate computing power memory size, and performance of I / O operations for maintained systems.

If more projects are launched, virtual machines can be easily expanded, and the entire SAP application environment can be effectively duplicated and reconfigured. Connected to virtual machines EBS (Amazon Elastic Block Store) volumes provide the right performance at a given moment and can be modified immediately to optimize performance.

S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) is used for back-up, ensuring durability at 99.999999999% and storing back-up copies in three separate locations at the same time.

Additionally, AWS CloudFormation is used, which enables quick recovery of the environment in another AZ (Availability Zone) in the event of infrastructure failure. The Amazon Instance Scheduler is responsible for the periodical launch and shutdown of systems.

“A stable, efficient, and cost-effective work environment for consultants and programmers is one of the most important priorities of our daily work. Thanks to the migration of our systems to the AWS cloud, GAVDI Poland has achieved all the goals set for this process“ - says Ireneusz Hołowacz, Director of GAVDI Application Development Center.

Achieved Goals

1. Stability.

   The systems operate in a stable manner and are additionally protected in the event of failure of individual infrastructure elements. In the event of a physical server failure, the virtual machine is automatically started on another server. In the event of failure of the entire Availability Zone, the environment can be recreated in another Availability Zone using AWS CloudFormation and back-ups from S3.

2. Scalability.

   Systems can be modified in advance by adjusting performance to the current demand.

3. Cost-effectiveness.

   Systems are run for 12 hours on working days using the Amazon Instance Scheduler. For the rest of the time, EC2 Virtual machines do not generate costs. The S3 service and related ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) mechanism is used to store the back-ups, which automatically make sure that unnecessary back-ups are removed.

4. Focusing on your own specialization.

   Technical support of systems, both in the area of AWS infrastructure and SAP BASIS, GAVDI Polska entrusted to its long-term partner SE16N. Thanks to this, it has gained fast support in the field of infrastructure and systems, which allows them to focus on their business tasks.