SA Power Networks reduces datacenter footprint by around 30 percent with SAP on Azure

Powering the future

It’s an exciting time for utilities. The push for sustainability and distributed generation—small producers putting renewable energy back into the grid—is subverting the traditional power paradigm. SA Power Networks Executive General Manager, Innovation & Technology, Chris Ford wants his company to lead this transition. “We see ourselves as building the next-generation digital utility,” he says. “We need digital technologies to help transform our organization so that we can adopt and manage this new world of distributed energy, a world the grid was never designed for. Getting there requires scale, flexibility, data integration, and insights.” 

SA Power Networks has long been an SAP customer. It first went live with SAP in 1997, moved its Business Warehouse and ERP Central Component (ECC) environments to SAP HANA in 2015, and then migrated its workloads to SAP S/4HANA in 2022. The company relies on SAP to support virtually all vital back-end processes, like asset management, maintenance scheduling, logistics, procurement, and billing. Migrating its SAP estate to Azure, therefore, was the next logical step in optimizing its essential workloads. Travis Smith, SAP Domain Architect at SA Power Networks, states, “Our SAP platform runs business-critical functions, so its reliability, scalability, and security are extremely important. With SAP on Azure, we can ensure those.” 

The company’s journey to Azure began with an implementation of a new cloud-native SAP billing platform in 2021. Based on that project’s success, SA Power Networks migrated the remainder of its sizable SAP on-premises landscape (11 on-premises products, totaling 150 servers) to Azure the following year. “We wanted to avoid a simple lift and shift and take the opportunity to address pain points and modernize our architecture. Our SAP on Azure environment is resilient, scalable, and future proof,” Smith continues.

A transformational architecture

SA Power Networks has all of its on-premises SAP landscape in Azure today, and it uses Azure API Management to tie in its SAP environment with its other applications and datasets. While its SAP S/4HANA workloads are supported by SUSE Linux, it uses Windows Server to run the remainder of its SAP services and applications. 

SA Power Networks uses Azure Virtual Machines, running M-series virtual machines (VMs) to support its SAP S/4HANA database workloads and a combination of D-series and E-series VMs for general compute. For storage, SA Power Networks is using a combination of Premium SSD and Standard SSD Azure Disk Storage, depending on environment tier, to optimize costs. 

In addition to running its SAP workloads on Azure, SA Power Networks is taking advantage of other Azure platform services. The company uses Azure Logic Apps to augment a few key SAP processes and Azure SQL database services to support some additional workloads. 

By running its SAP workloads on Azure, SA Power Networks has gained access to scale and more robust resilience measures. “Running SAP on Azure gives us greater resilience,” Smith says. “The self-healing capability of Azure Virtual Machines keeps us more resilient than before. Plus, we get scalability and flexibility, so we can resize an environment far more easily and provision or tear down environments effortlessly, which we couldn’t have done on-premises.” Rocco Lupoi, DevOps Capability Manager at SA Power Networks, adds, “We’re seeing a level of scalability with Azure that’s crucial for the success of our systems, and we simply could not have attained it previously.”

Data integration to drive innovation

By moving its SAP data onto Azure, along with other datasets, the company has positioned itself to realize better, faster innovation. With all that data now readily available, SA Power Networks plans to use its Azure footprint as a cloud-enabled central repository to help yield data insights and inspire new advancements. The company uses Power BI for analysis, visualization, and reporting across its Azure data footprint, including its enterprise data platform in Azure along with SAP and non-SAP reporting datasets, and it has plans to augment its capabilities with Azure Databricks and Azure Data Lake Storage. Phil Manning, Infrastructure Design Manager at SA Power Networks, says, “We’re building the capabilities necessary to gather data across our assets—from how our distribution network is performing to where the next set of maintenance activities should occur—then analyze and make that intelligence visible throughout the organization. This is the future we are aiming for, and we can get there with Azure.” 

The company’s integration of SAP and other enterprise datasets with external solutions is bringing this vision to life and expediting innovation. Lupoi says, “Now that we’re on Azure, we can easily interoperate with other platforms to enrich our datasets. This has made our application development processes run so much more smoothly and enriched our capabilities.” 

SA Power Networks’s innovation efforts also get a boost from incorporating Azure Automation. With increased automation, SA Power Networks can get solutions to market sooner. “We’re using Azure Automation to take ideas to solutions far faster with less developer hours,” says Manning. “Today with Azure, we save time with deployments; we have been able to deploy environments in a matter of hours, rather than many days in the past!” 

The power of sustainability

Migrating its SAP workloads to Azure and adopting other Azure platform services helps SA Power Networks use less equipment as well. “We’ve reduced two racks’ worth of equipment in each datacenter, and we’ll lower that further in the coming years. By migrating our SAP landscape to Azure, we’ve reduced our datacenter footprint by around 30 percent,” Manning says. 

SA Power Networks is rapidly innovating and introducing increasingly sustainable initiatives to the energy distribution industry, and positioning itself to realize continuously lower emissions moving forward. 

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