While the on-premises IT environment they’d used for years had fulfilled its role, HD Supply’s servers were straining under more applications and competitive features, leading to higher latency for customers. In the digital shopping vertical, where millisecond delays are the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart, achieving sub-10ms latency was both a technical goal and a business requirement. To continue innovating with the market, a cloud migration was necessary, but HD Supply’s existing ecommerce database platform provided an additional complication: their stringent licensing requirements meant dedicating an expensive VM cluster to each user, even if utilizing a fraction of the resource.  

Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) quickly emerged as the remedy to their challenges. With its ability to rapidly lift-and-shift their existing environment into a virtualized one with VMware, and dynamically isolate cores on VM clusters, the platform enables HD Supply to isolate their ecommerce workloads. By controlling the number of cores being licensed to their legacy provider, HD Supply avoids the higher costs associated with unnecessarily licensing an entire cluster.

Employing a unique agile methodology to accelerate the migration, HD Supply divides the process into three parallel teams—red, blue, and gold—with each responsible for a specific set of workloads. These cross-functional teams, composed of storage, server, and security experts, manage the entire migration lifecycle for each of their assigned applications, from development and testing to rollout.

Deploying a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network in Google Cloud, HD Supply worked with Google Cloud and Avvale engineers to create a compute instance to act as a jump host for accessing the GCVE environment. To ensure a seamless transition of their on-premises network configuration and security posture, HD Supply faithfully reproduced their NSX firewall rules within GCVE, leveraging its support for complex network topologies without the need for refactoring. Without the ability to easily replicate their security and network architecture, HD Supply would have to painstakingly translate and recreate each firewall rule to their new cloud framework, extending the migration and delaying the realization of cost savings and benefits.   

Once the virtualized environment was ready, HD Supply began strategically isolating workloads running their ecommerce platform within individual clusters on GCVE. By segmenting these clusters, the IT team gained granular control over the precise number of cores allocated to these workloads. Aligning licensing with the actual usage means that HD Supply avoids cost overruns and can scale resources up and down based on demand.

While GCVE facilitates the lift-and-shift migration of existing VMware workloads, Compute Engine allows HD Supply to enhance its application infrastructure with other cloud-native technologies. Modernizing their traditional SAP architecture to a SAP HANA in-memory database results in dramatic increases in processing speeds and stability improvements so reports generate faster with zero downtime since their migration. 

The hybrid architecture enables a dynamic interplay between virtualized and modernized systems. When a customer requests custom pricing on the GCE-hosted ecommerce platform, the request is passed to the SAP HANA system, also residing on GCE, which manages the complex pricing calculations. To provide accurate, customer-specific pricing, the SAP HANA system securely queries the critical business data stored within the database on GCVE.

Leveraging the low-latency, high-bandwidth connection between GCE and GCVE, the database on GCVE swiftly provides the necessary customer data. The SAP HANA system then processes this information, calculates the custom price, and returns the result to the GCE frontend for display to the user in under 10 milliseconds. Unlike their on-premises infrastructure GCE and GCVE dependably meet this pivotal benchmark.