První novinová společnost has modernized its SAP hardware infrastructure with HPE GreenLake.

První novinová společnost a.s. (PNS) is a leading print distributor in the Czech Republic with a tradition spanning nearly 70 years. It provides news delivery for both open-market sales and subscriptions, while also offering hundreds of supplementary product items across nearly 15,000 retail points nationwide. Thanks to an extensive logistics network, it services one of the densest retail networks in Europe and collaborates with hundreds of publishers. From Monday to Saturday, it delivers print not only to stores but also directly to end-customers' mailboxes. PNS is also a significant player in the field of addressed distribution. As a postal operator, it delivers approximately 70 million shipments annually throughout the Czech Republic. The service portfolio also includes finishing services—tailored packaging and assembly of shipments, including manual processing.

In 2020, PNS—in cooperation with our company—consolidated three data centers into a single hyper-converged solution built on the VMware vSphere vSAN platform (Dell VxRail), which served for the operation of key enterprise applications until the end of 2025.

At the same time, the hardware infrastructure support for running critical SAP applications at PNS expired in 2025, which is why planning began on how to further consolidate the infrastructure to ensure the secure operation of all enterprise applications, including SAP, for the next 5 years.

Initial architectural proposals counted on upgrading the hyper-converged infrastructure and expanding it with additional hardware nodes. However, following changes to VMware's ownership and its licensing and pricing policy—particularly for VMware vSphere vSAN licenses—it became necessary to reassess the entire solution and return to the proven combination of servers and external storage arrays in a VMware Storage Cluster variant.

PNS initiated a tender process comparing the solutions of two major vendors, Dell and HPE. A key role in the final decision was played both by trust in the long-term implementation partner Aricoma and by HPE's exclusive offer to acquire the entire infrastructure as an HPE GreenLake service.

Based on joint consultations between PNS and Aricoma specialists, an architecture was designed based on the separation of critical and supporting systems with maximum data availability.

The production environment consists of two identical clusters of HPE DL320 Gen12 servers featuring the VMware vSphere 8 virtualization platform. One is dedicated to running SAP applications, while the other serves other enterprise systems. Both VMware clusters are connected via Fibre Channel infrastructure to a pair of HPE Alletra MP B10000 storage arrays operating in a Storage Cluster mode. This ensures synchronous data mirroring and high availability.

Data protection against a complete data center outage is handled by asynchronous replication of critical application data to a disaster recovery site using the HPE Zerto solution. This solution provides continuous data protection, disaster recovery, recovery orchestration, and the necessary granularity during system recovery.

Backup operations are secured using Veeam Backup & Replication, which fully addresses key security requirements, including data encryption and immutable backups. Data is stored on an HPE StoreOnce 5260 deduplication appliance. This approach ensures high resilience against attacks and rapid recovery capabilities.

The implementation of the entire solution proceeded without complications. The migration of applications and virtual servers was executed according to a pre-planned schedule with no operational impact. Consequently, PNS transitioned to a new environment characterized by higher performance and a significantly elevated level of operational security.