Tomago Aluminium has been operating 24/7 since 1983, producing 25% of Australia’s primary aluminium (more than 590,000 tons), contributes more than AUD1.5 billion annually to the country’s economy and exports 90 per cent of its products to global markets. 

To continue to do so it needed a reliable and highly available IT system. Together with Red Hat - which curates, secures, and supports a Linux distribution - it made the decision to migrate its SAP HANA workloads from a managed public cloud environment to a private, on-premise solution.   

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions, Tomago Aluminium says it has improved development efficiency, consolidated its server footprint, and enhanced system and data security. The company also adopted Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate provisioning and operational processes, such as virtual machine (VM) creation for testing. Now, with improved control and insight, Tomago says it has improved development efficiency, consolidated its server footprint, and enhanced system and data security.  

To maintain 24x7 operations, Tomago Aluminium’s IT systems must be reliable and highly available. Its IT team works to refine processes and improve data access to help the company respond faster to issues affecting production. Tomago Aluminium uses SAP HANA to support its enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business warehouse systems, including a variety of processes from project management and peer-to-peer (P2P) networking to health and safety and human resources.  

Previously, the company ran its SAP HANA workloads in a managed public cloud environment, but this solution lacked visibility into performance or effective notification when systems approached capacity. Additionally, the vendor’s service contract limited development to business hours, hindering innovation and rapid response to changing business needs. When the service contract was due for renewal, Tomago Aluminium decided to find a new partner for its hybrid cloud infrastructure to improve agility and complexity while maintaining availability. 

“Our partner was very risk-averse, which limited progress and made it hard to innovate,” said Dennis Moncrieff, IT Superintendent, Tomago Aluminium. “Without visibility of how things were running, we couldn’t even identify opportunities for improvement. We finally realized how restricted we were. For instance, we have a large warehouse of spare parts that are critical for our plant. If something breaks or wears out, we need to find parts and get the system running again quickly.” 

Standardizing SAP operations with a hybrid cloud solution from Red Hat and IBM 

Based at a single site with no expansion plans, Tomago Aluminium decided to migrate its SAP HANA architecture from public cloud to a private, on-premise solution based on Red Hat software running on IBM server and storage hardware.   

The company consolidated multiple operating systems onto Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions, a single, consistent foundation for SAP workloads that includes: 

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability Add-On for increased uptime. 
• Red Hat Smart Management for life-cycle management. 
• Red Hat Insights for proactive issue identification and remediation. 
• Update Services for SAP Solutions. 
• In-place upgrades and live patching for critical and important security issues. 

Additionally, Tomago Aluminium adopted Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate provisioning and operational processes, such as virtual machine (VM) creation for testing. 

“We had a mix of Red Hat and SUSE Linux environments, but we lacked in-house SUSE expertise and Red Hat offers stronger support,” said Moncrieff. “Building on Red Hat’s technology would help us grow our existing in-house skills to fix issues and better support innovation.” 

Red Hat partners Advent One and SAPWORKS supported the deployment. Advent One inspected for certification issues, then implemented the new hardware and software solutions in just six days. SAPWORKS completed a parallel migration of Tomago’s SAP environment and related testing. 

“The partnership is seamless, and the solutions fit together perfectly. We’re confident that we have a resilient, stable system and would recommend it to anyone,” said Moncrieff. “Our collaboration with Advent One helped us get our IT environment how we want it.” 

Optimizing processes and security with integrated, efficient infrastructure 

Maintained critical production availability at greater scale 

By standardizing its SAP HANA environment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions, running on IBM Power servers, Tomago Aluminium can keep its critical business and production processes running 24x7—even at larger scale.  

Red Hat Insights provides greater transparency into performance and efficiency through a single, user-friendly dashboard, helping the company improve operational efficiency while maintaining availability, states the company. 

“Previously, we could only view monthly reports, but with Red Hat Insights we have real-time visibility that helps us make smarter decisions about processes,” said Moncrieff. “For example, for five years we ran a certain transaction only once a week, because it was so slow. Now, we have the information we need to look for ways to make that process faster.” 

Improved development efficiency with automation 

By integrating Ansible Automation Platform with IBM PowerVM server virtualization, Tomago can use standardized playbooks to speed provisioning and other manual, repeatable processes, says Moncrieff. “Automating processes such as SAP HANA deployments using Ansible Automation Platform helps us automate VM provisioning for testing environments and accelerates development of new, innovative features.”  

Reduced infrastructure costs  

Compared to its previous managed cloud solution, running Red Hat software on IBM POWER hardware has helped Tomago Aluminium improve server density. As a result, the company has consolidated its server footprint from 32 CPUs to just 8, reducing related operational and power costs. Moncrieff said the goal was to improve effectiveness and efficiency while keeping infrastructure costs down. With Red Hat, he reckons, Tomago gets a better return on our investment. 

Enhanced security with faster issue resolution and greater control 

By adopting an integrated solution from Red Hat, IBM, and SAP, Tomago Aluminium has improved control and security capabilities across its application environment. 

Red Hat Insights help to proactively identify potential security and compliance issues, analysed against a large volume of internally defined, Red Hat-defined, and industry-defined advisories. Additionally, Red Hat provides ongoing patches, updates, and bug fixes to protect against vulnerabilities and threats. 

Adopting IBM hardware, managed through Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has also helped the company improve security for its data and systems. IBM PowerVM isolates applications for improved performance and scalability on Tomago Aluminium’s servers while maintaining security for critical services and processes.  

Expanding digital transformation to new processes 

After its initial success with its new SAP environment, Tomago Aluminium plans to migrate additional SAP ERP and production processes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions. 

“So far, everything we’ve migrated to Red Hat runs better. Now that we’ve got the high-priority work done, we can focus on enhancing and expanding our environment to make sure we can keep supporting our critical operational processes,” concluded Moncrieff.   

Benefits 

• Maintained 24x7 availability and optimized processes at scale 
• Improved development efficiency with automation 
• Reduced infrastructure costs with consolidated server footprint 
• Enhanced security with faster issue resolution and greater control 
• Supporting innovation at the speed of business