Founded in 1950, Ypê is a leader in the Brazilian hygiene and cleaning market, with products present in more than 95% of the Brazilian homes. Operating seven factory complexes, four corporate offices and seven distribution centers, the 100% Brazilian-owned company exports iconic brands like Ypê, Atol and Perfex across Latin America, Asia, Africa and Middle East.
Ypê has 75 years of experience in providing high-performance, sustainable and accessible hygiene and cleaning products to millions worldwide. The company aims to contribute to people’s health, well-being and quality of life through over 450 products including soap, bleach, detergent, personal care products and more.
At-a-Glance
Ypê set out to transform its legacy on-premises infrastructure in preparation for a conversion to SAP S/4HANA. With SUSE solutions supporting Ypê’s new SAP environment, the company has achieved almost 100% availability and a 40% performance boost for these business-critical systems.
Preparing to migrate to SAP S/4HANA
To meet demand for its products, Ypê’s factories operate around the clock. Enabling the manufacturing operations is a team of around 60 IT professionals, who manage a hybrid IT infrastructure. A key part of this infrastructure is Ypê’s on-premises SAP environment, which supports processes from finance to HR to logistics.
For over a decade, Ypê’s SAP ERP environment had been running on IBM Power servers and the IBM AIX operating system. Although this architecture was stable, it was becoming increasingly difficult and costly to maintain, and the reliance on specialized expertise for AIX management complicated routine maintenance and made it harder for the team to keep up with regular updates, threatening the environment's long-term security posture.
Facing the necessity for the environment’s innovation and modernization, and the conversion from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA, Ypê decided to reassess its IT infrastructure. Ypê recognized that its legacy Power and AIX infrastructure lacked the scalability required to handle SAP S/4HANA’s modern, data-intensive in-memory workloads. Completing the migration on the existing hardware was unfeasible. To break free from these constraints and modernize its IT operations in preparation for the future Ypê targeted a shift to a flexible x86 architecture.
"For Ypê, sustainability is not a trend; it's our essence. Modernizing our IT infrastructure with efficient servers and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications aligns with our goal of doing more with less and ensuring the longevity of our business.”
Bruna Ferreira
External Communications Analyst
Ypê
Why SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications?
To support its strategic transition, Ypê selected Dell hardware running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications as the backbone of its future SAP platform. This decision built on Ypê’s positive experience with SUSE solutions, having already used SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications and SUSE Multi-Linux Manager to run its SAP HANA database on IBM Power for several years.
“We had considered Microsoft Windows Server but ultimately found that it could not match the enterprise-grade stability and security of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications,” explains Luís Paulo Cerezer, IT Infrastructure Specialist at Ypê. “We could not accept anything but the most robust solution for our mission-critical SAP workloads.”
Simultaneously, the SUSE solution offered features like saptune — which automatically checks and tunes the system against SAP Notes best practices — and the SUSE Linux High Availability Extension to manage and automate failover between active/active clusters across data centers.
Working to a tight deadline to ensure that the new system was ready for its year-end financial close, Ypê installed eight Dell PowerEdge R960 servers with a total of 64TB of RAM. With support from SUSE and Dell’s consulting/services, a SUSE partner, the company migrated its SAP workloads onto the new hardware. Leveraging the SAP-aware automated installation workflows in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications, Ypê rapidly provisioned entire SAP landscapes with minimal effort. This automation minimized error-prone manual operations, allowing the team to spin up isolated testing environments on VMware and validate the conversion processes without impacting production — a process that would have been prohibitively slow on the legacy architecture.
Why SUSE Support?
For Ypê, high-quality enterprise support for its SAP environment was another key factor in choosing SUSE. SUSE Customer Success and SUSE Support had already proven to be reliable and responsive when Ypê adopted SUSE solutions for its SAP HANA database. As a result, the IT team was confident in relying on SUSE Support for the SAP S/4HANA transformation project as well.
“Compared to other vendors, the superior support we had received from SUSE proved that they would give us the partnership we require to maintain our vital SAP platform,” confirms Cerezer.
The impact of SUSE solutions
Enables 99.96% availability for business-critical systems
By deploying its SAP environment on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications, Ypê can not only meet current demand, but also scale to support its growing global footprint. Ypê’s IT environment has achieved 99.96% availability, enabling its factories and distribution centers to maintain always-on operations. As a result, the company consistently and efficiently delivers cleaning and hygiene products to consumers.
With SUSE Linux High Availability Extension providing seamless replication and automatic failover between the company’s two datacenters, Ypê’s IT team can rest assured that the most critical IT environments will remain online in the unlikely event of unplanned downtime in one location.
Boosts system performance by 30-40%
By adopting modern Dell hardware and the latest version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications, Ypê achieved a 30-40% performance increase across its systems, boosting business productivity.
“Some of our processes used to take hours. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications gave us the processing power to significantly speed them up,” says Cerezer. “Notably, SUSE solutions enable us to complete our business reports and month-end closing procedures 50% faster, giving the business teams more time to focus on higher-value analysis tasks.”
Bruna Ferreira, External Communications Analyst at Ypê, adds: "For Ypê, sustainability is not a trend; it's our essence. Modernizing our IT infrastructure with efficient servers and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications aligns with our goal of doing more with less and ensuring the longevity of our business.”
Supports robust security for key IT environments
By transitioning to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications, Ypê benefits from simpler and more cost-effective infrastructure management. Using SUSE Multi-Linux Manager, the IT team can centrally manage system updates across 96 virtual machines, managing the entire test-to-production lifecycle through a single interface with built-in compliance controls. Furthermore, SUSE Multi-Linux Manager strengthens Ypê’s security posture with features like automated patch management and CVE auditing across its Linux environment.
Enables best-practice SAP configuration
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications is designed as an SAP-aware operating system. Leveraging built-in tools like saptune, Ypê automates the application of SAP Note recommendations. This ensures every system depending on the installed SAP application has an optimized configuration for performance and stability, effectively eliminating configuration drift and minimizing the risk of human error during manual tuning.
The impact of SUSE Support
SUSE Support proved instrumental in helping Ypê complete this complex SAP transformation. For example, when the IT team discovered a critical interoperability issue due to obsolete Windows SMB protocols, SUSE experts diagnosed the problem and provided configuration parameters to stabilize the connection between SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications and the legacy Windows environment.
SUSE Support and SUSE Customer Success continue to provide proactive assistance, with monthly meetings to review support tickets, discuss best practices and plan future optimizations.
“Ypê has a very close relationship with the SUSE team,” confirms Cerezer. “As we refine our new environment, SUSE Support is actively helping us bridge any knowledge gaps to help our team become more self-sufficient.”
What’s next for Ypê?
The Ypê IT team is now planning to deploy Trento to unlock deeper observability into the SAP cluster. Another priority for the near future is the implementation of SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching to enable security updates without downtime, strengthening the system’s high availability.
Looking further ahead, the company is evaluating SUSE Virtualization to replace its VMware environment due to rising licensing costs. Simultaneously, Ypê plans to modernize application delivery by adopting a containerized architecture, considering SUSE Rancher Prime as its container management solution.