Case Study: Canadian Pacific Railway Limited achieves improved business continuity and lower total cost of ownership with SAP HANA

How Can IT Deliver More Value with Improved Business Continuity and Lower Total Cost of Ownership

Canadian Pacific Railway (CP), a North American Class I railroad founded in 1881 with more than 12,000 miles of track, needed to increase capacity while improving operational control, ensuring safety, and optimizing costs. To do that IT had to deliver more value from data and reduce complexity across many disparate systems and infrastructure after insourcing IT in 2012.

CP consolidated its SAP environment onto SAP HANA with SAP MaxAttention services, Intel Optane persistent memory and Xeon Scalable processors, and Cisco UCS servers, cutting its SAP instances from 400 to 120 and shrinking the IT footprint by two‑thirds. The move delivered an 8x faster restart time (150+ minutes to <20), 15–20% faster SAP performance, 20% lower storage costs, 4–5x greater capacity with a 2:1 persistent‑memory:DRAM ratio, fewer production nodes (22→13→7), and 8x more solution updates per year—improving business continuity, speeding innovation, and lowering total cost of ownership.

Canadian Pacific Railway Limited

Mike Redeker

Chief Information Officer