Highly Available Infrastructure Progressive designs and deploys a future-ready, high-performance platform for a leading yarn maker’s SAP implementation
A In Brief Challenge A leading manufacturer of textile yarns was earlier using various piecemeal applications across its manufacturing and retail units. It wanted to implement SAP for its mission-critical business applications, and it needed the right infrastructure for this. Solution Progressive Infotech was chosen for the hardware design and implementation. The solution which was provided by Progressive on the Windows platform, used SQL as the database, and used the platform-independent, 64-bit HP Itanium server series. It also included an online HP backup solution and an automated tape device for storage. Benefits Along with ensuring optimum usage of the application and resources, Progressive’s solution also guarantees that the organization no longer faces a performance crunch at the end of the month when loads tend to go up significantly. The solution provided by them is reliable, easily available and scalable, and has not required any replacements in the eight months since its deployment. This has ensured that the organization does not have any business downtime at all.
leading manufacturer of acrylic, blended and cotton yarns, based in North India, also has an imprint in the retail space. The organization has 20 retail outlets across the country, and its expansion plans involve setting up another 80-100 outlets. The organization earlier had piecemeal applications to track its accounts and business activities. These applications were all running in isolation across its various branches and plants. With a huge expansion plan ahead, the organization realized that it had to go for an ERP deployment. After evaluating various ERP solutions, it decided on SAP.
The Right Infrastructure for SAP
The yarn manufacturer needed the hardware infrastructure for the SAP deployment to be designed and installed. Many companies including IBM sent in their proposals for the same. The organization decided to go with Progressive Infotech’s solution, despite it being the more expensive one. This was because the proposed solution was ready for future expansions, while being able to handle current requirements easily, with total redundancy built in to ensure zero business downtime. The Progressive team first understood the complete requirement for the SAP deployment. This covered the number of users it was being deployed for, how the load was to be distributed, the different types of users on the various modules, and so on. Once the load was decided, SAPS (SAP Application Performance Standard) were generated using the SAP QuickSizer. Based on this information, the hardware infrastructure design inputs were obtained. The organization wanted a Windows-based SAP deployment. Other proposals received by the organization involved Intel Xeon-based infrastructure. Progressive suggested a solution that would ensure investment protection through the Itanium platform, the true 64-bit platform. “If the company needed to move to a new OS after a few months, it would have meant a change of hardware platform also, which would have required huge re-investments,” says the Solution Architect at Progressive. Having an Itanium-based setup would also easily take care of the increased loads that would come with future growth. The yarn manufacturer decided that this was a good technology approach for its business. copyright © 2007