Helping enterprises achieve SAP transformation

cbs Corporate Business Solutions is a global SAP consultancy that specializes in digital transformation, end-to-end business process design, and complex data migrations. Headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, cbs provides holistic technology and strategy consulting for enterprises across a wide range of industries, with more than 30 years of experience driving large-scale client projects around the globe.

Across manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, life sciences, chemical, and automotive, many businesses are aiming to harness data from SAP to drive faster, better-informed decisions. cbs empowers innovators to realize their digital transformation goals by moving from legacy versions of SAP to modern solutions such as SAP S/4HANA.

“We are strongly focused on business growth,” explains Arne Rietzel, IT Systems Administrator at cbs. “Over the next five years, the goal is to expand our consulting capabilities, run more SAP transformation programs in parallel, and support clients with data-driven and cloud-enabled business processes.”

To date, cbs has delivered more than 5,000 successful projects. The company’s consultants rely on a range of digital platforms to support their work, including SAP landscapes for development and testing, collaboration tools, document management systems, and internal business applications.

“We have around 100 different SAP instances running at our primary data center in Germany, which allow us to replicate and test most of the SAP configurations we might encounter at a client site,” continues Rietzel. “Around the world, our consultants use these instances to help us develop and test custom data migration and transformation tools for each client scenario. As a result, availability and performance are both key requirements.”

As cbs scaled out its SAP test environments, its existing NetApp storage platform was beginning to feel the strain. As the number of SAP environments, VMware virtual machines (VMs), and project-related workloads grew, the company decided to look for a new platform that could deliver greater performance, enhanced scalability, and improved ease of management.

“While our previous storage environment was stable, maintaining, upgrading, and expanding the system inevitably required downtime,” says Rietzel. “As our project volumes grew, it was becoming increasingly difficult to schedule those downtime windows across our international business.” 

While cbs already relied on Rubrik to protect its critical data, the legacy storage environment introduced performance bottlenecks that hindered the team's ability to maximize backup and restore workflows. This prompted the team to seek a modern, high-performance storage foundation that could fully unleash existing cbs data protection capabilities.

Rietzel continues: “It was taking us longer to back up and restore our VMs than we wanted, and we saw the storage refresh as an opportunity to improve our recovery time objective [RTO].”

To prepare its business for ongoing growth, cbs decided to replace its legacy NetApp storage systems with modern, all-flash Everpure FlashArray//X solutions. By choosing an Evergreen//Forever™ subscription, cbs can continuously scale out and upgrade its solution without the need for disruptive and costly forklift migrations.

“We evaluated a number of market-leading storage vendors, but it was the Everpure Platform that impressed us the most,” recalls Rietzel. “As well as assigning us a dedicated and extremely responsive project team, Everpure gives us upgrades with zero disruption or downtime. I’d never have imagined that I’d be excited about storage, but after our proof of concept, I couldn’t wait to see Everpure FlashArray in production.”

Integration with VMware was a significant consideration for cbs, as its SAP certification requires it to virtualize all workloads.

“Seamless integration between the Everpure Platform and VMware simplifies provisioning, improves visibility between the virtualization and storage layers, and supports efficient operation of our infrastructure,” says Rietzel. “FlashArray is also fully SAP certified for SAP S/4HANA and delivers the low-latency performance we need to run demanding SAP S/4HANA databases in parallel.”

Working together, Everpure and technology partner NetPlans ran in-depth workshops and technical discussions to map out the company’s existing systems, estimate the expected growth of the infrastructure landscape, and size and configure the optimal solution.

“NetPlans played an important role as our implementation and integration partner,” comments Rietzel. “The NetPlans team supported the evaluation process from an architectural perspective and helped map the proposed solution to our existing infrastructure. This included validating compatibility with our virtualization platform, Rubrik backup environment, and operational processes.”

By adopting a phased approach to migration, Everpure and NetPlans helped cbs to quickly move its data to the new FlashArray//X platform and validate performance and stability.

“We deployed the new solution just before the holidays, and we had planned to complete the data migration during January,” says Rietzel. “By the time I got back from the Christmas break, I was thrilled to discover that my team had already completed the migration—it was so fast and smooth.”

Today, cbs hosts more than 60 TB of data across 190 VMs on the Everpure platform. By combining immutable SafeMode Snapshots on FlashArray with its existing Rubrik backup and recovery platform including protection of M365 and Identity (Active Directory and EntraID), the company is enhancing its cyber resilience.

“The combination of Everpure and Rubrik is very powerful—it provides us with a modern and integrated approach to data protection,” says Rietzel. “SafeMode Snapshots give us an additional layer of protection against the risk of accidental deletion, operational errors, and ransomware. While Everpure helps protect our data through immutable snapshots and encryption, Rubrik adds threat monitoring and analytics capabilities that improve our ability to detect and respond to potential incidents.”

Since switching to the Everpure Platform, cbs has eliminated the complexity of planning out downtime windows for storage maintenance. With FlashArray//X at the heart of its mission-critical SAP test environments, the company delivers always-on performance for its consultants.

“Everpure enables us to run our storage with zero downtime,” confirms Rietzel. “The ability to perform nondisruptive software updates is highly valuable because it allows us to maintain and improve the platform without impacting our SAP systems. With Evergreen//Forever, we can also perform upgrades in a way that is totally transparent to the business—something that was unimaginable before.”

With Everpure and Rubrik, cbs ensures that it can complete backup jobs smoothly and recover its VMs in seconds.

“Without a doubt, Everpure and Rubrik have simplified our day-to-day data protection operations,” says Rietzel. “Backup management is now more centralized and policy-driven, which reduces manual effort and improves visibility for our infrastructure team. Operationally, this means less time spent managing backup jobs and troubleshooting issues and more time focusing on supporting internal platforms and project environments.”

Rietzel adds: “Compared to our previous solution, the integrated approach with Rubrik and Everpure improves reliability, reduces operational complexity, and strengthens our ability to respond quickly in case of incidents or recovery scenarios. In fact, we’ve cut our RTO by 50%.”

cbs is also measuring the benefits of the Everpure Platform in other operational areas. For example, the Everpure Intelligent Control Plane enables cbs to reduce time spent on storage management and maintenance by 33%.

“The Purity operating system, Pure1® management solution, and Everpure Plug-in for the vSphere Client are making it much simpler and faster to perform routine maintenance and storage administration tasks,” explains Rietzel. “That’s very valuable to us, as it allows our people to focus on supporting other internal platforms and project environments. We’re seeing big efficiency improvements in the data center, where the Everpure Platform has helped consolidate our rack footprint by 85% and cut energy consumption in half.”

Looking ahead, cbs plans to build on its success with Everpure. The company is preparing to deploy a second FlashArray configured for high availability using ActiveCluster™ synchronous replication technology, which will ensure critical workloads remain available even in the event of a site-level disruption at its production data center.

“Everpure combines passionate, knowledgeable people with highly performant and reliable technology; it’s a pleasure to work with them,” concludes Rietzel. “We see our partnership evolving as we continue to expand and modernize our infrastructure. Working with Everpure will help us to strengthen our resilience, support growing workloads, and serve our clients all over the world.”