Highly Available Infrastructure

Progressive designs and deploys a future-ready, high-performance platform for a leading yarn maker’s SAP implementation

A 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 SAPThe 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.

ChallengeA 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.

SolutionProgressive 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.

BenefitsAlong 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.

In Brief

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Designing for High AvailabilityProgressive helped the company understand the entire landscape of the SAP from the hardware infrastructure perspective. It also provided the hardware platform, and designed and implemented the solution to make it easily available and redundant for both flavors of SAP.

The organization has deployed SAP ECC 6.0 for manufacturing and IS Retail for their showrooms. There are 176 users for ECC 6.0 and this number is expected to grow to 250 users in the near future. There are also 20 users for IS Retail. The ECC production and IS Retail production environments have been designed in high-availability cluster mode with total redundancy. The production environment has an application server and a database server. Both servers are powerful enough to take the load of both the applications.

Engineers can take a planned downtime for any major replacement that may be required. If the database server ever goes down because of a power fluctuation or hard drive or CPU failure, the application shifts to the other server. The servers have been tested thoroughly to ensure that the shift takes place smoothly. And enough headroom has been built inside the servers to ensure that performance does not go down in such a scenario.

All pieces put together in this solution, including the

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 — Solution Architect, Progressive

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Solution Diagram

infrastructure software, are from HP. The application is hosted in the organization’s data center, housed in its corporate office. This has WAN connectivity to other locations. The storage requirement was approximately 2TB for ECC 6.0 and IS Retail, which also ensures future scalability of the solution.

No Performance CrunchMost organizations face a fair bit of pressure at the end of the month, with the closing of accounts and MIS reports being generated. The regular CPU utilization through the month ranges between 30-40%. By the month’s end, the load shoots up, and this can impact performance. But with the new hardware setup, such a crunch does not happen at all. Progressive’s infrastructure has ensured the optimum utilization of the application and the company’s resources.

Current Backups, Excellent Storage The organization is also using an online HP backup solution. Even when the systems are up and work is happening, backups can be taken. Thus, users always have the current backup. The backup policy has been designed so that an incremental backup is taken each day, and a full backup happens every week.

The tape device offered by Progressive was an automated tape device, which ensures easy operation and tracking of data.

The organization is satisfied with the solution and has faced no problems since the deployment. There has been no downtime and the system is highly accessible as it has been running continuously since it went live.

Application: SAP, deployed on the Windows platform Server: 2 x HP Rx3600 ECC Production servers, 1 x HP Rx2620 ECC Test and Development server, 1 x HP Rx2620 IS Retail Test and Development server, 2 x HP Rx2620 IS Retail Production serversDatabse: SQLStorage: EVA 4000 with 14 x 146 GB FC drive, 1 x HP MSL 2024 Drive LTO 3 with a 24-slots tape libraryBackup: 1 x DL380G5 Backup Server/SAN, 2 x 8-port FC SAN Switches

Old Setup

New Setup

There was no single application for tracking or reporting all activities in the organization. Piecemeal applications were being used for carrying out different functions.

About ProgressiveProgressive Infotech (Progressive) is a leading independent provider of IT Infrastructure Services encompassing Integration and Management of IT Infrastructure, through its robust world class delivery processes to varied corporations of high repute. With an Integrated Quality Management system that comprises ISO 9001:2000, ISO 20000-1:2005 (previously BS15000-1) as well as ISO 27001:2005 (previously BS7799) standards, Progressive has redefined the way IT Infrastructure management is being practiced across the globe.

Progressive Infotech Pvt Ltd C-161, Phase - II Extension, Noida - 201305 Phone: +91 - 120 - 4393939 Fax: +91 - 120 - 2563838

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