HPE AM377A Product Data Sheet

Objective

Replace IT infrastructure which was
reaching the end of its six-year
refresh cycle

Approach

Reviewed solutions from three
IT major vendors

Case Study

Greaves cuts Total Cost of
Ownership considerably with
SAP infrastructure upgrade

HPE servers and storage provide reliable
mission-critical system

IT Matters

• Reduced power consumption by
27 per cent and heat dissipation by
30 per cent

• Reduced space usage by 285 per cent

• Halved backup time, from six hours to
three hours

• Compressed database by 52 per cent

Business Matters

• Reduced Total Cost of Ownership
(TCO) considerably

• Ensured reliability of system running
mission-critical SAP environment

One of the si x Greaves manufactu ring facilities i n India

Engineering company Greaves
Cotton Ltd. needed to replace
its core IT infrastructure,
which was reaching the
end of its planned lifecycle.
After reviewing proposals
from three major IT vendors,

Challenge

Infrastructure refresh

Based in Mumbai, Greaves Cotton Ltd.
is a well-established Indian engineering
company, with six manufacturing units
throughout the country. It produces a wide
range of automotive engines, industrial
engines, generators and farm equipment,
with customers in India and overseas.

the Company chose a solution
from HPE based on HP-UX
and Intel® Itanium® processors.
The new system is reliable,
easy to manage, and has
improved performance.

To manage its business, Greaves runs
SAP Enterprise Central Component software
on its main IT infrastructure, with Oracle as
the database. This provides a broad range
of Enterprise Resource Planning functions,
including handling financial transactions,
production and business intelligence.
These applications are mission-critical
for the company, and must run reliably to
enable Greaves’ 24/7 production operations
to keep functioning without interruption.

Case study

Case study

Greaves

Greaves

Cotton Ltd.

Cotton Ltd.

Industry

Industry

Engineering

Engineering

Page 2

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Greaves m anufactures more than 400,000 engines annual ly with a turnover close
to USD 300 Mi llion

For its core infrastructure, the Company
has a policy of reviewing and refreshing
the system every six years. Until recently,
Greaves was using i2 series server blades
and EVA storage from Hewlett Packard
Enterprise (HPE), which were providing
a reliable solution with no downtime or
major issues, but had reached the end of
the six-year refresh cycle. There was also
a steady increase in the number of end
users, which was placing increasing
pressure on the hardware.

“With an ageing infrastructure, we wanted
to reduce the risk of downtime. Additionally,
our CPU and memory utilisation were high,
and we wanted to reduce them,” says
Mr. D’souza, general manager – IT at
Greaves. “Our storage was also almost full,
and we were bringing in additional users.”

Solution

Intel® Itanium® architecture

To meet its needs, Greaves reviewed
proposals for its SAP system from three
large IT companies, which included solutions
based on an x86 architecture. Following this
review process, Greaves selected a solution
from HPE, based on Integrity BL860c and
BL870c i4 Server Blades with Intel Itanium
processors. The solution includes HPE 3PAR
StoreServ 7200 Storage, and uses the
HP-UX 11i v3 operating environment.

“Although the competitive vendors reduced
their prices drastically, we decided to
stick with HPE for the simple reason of
technology, and for its reliability,” says
Mr. D’souza. “We had been users of HPE for
the previous six years, and that gave us an
additional reason to choose them – we felt
very confident that HPE was supporting the
hardware and software for the long–term.”

The HPE Technology Services team
designed the architecture for the new
system, with inputs from Greaves’
IT department. HPE local partner,
Unique Solutions, worked with HPE
to handle the move to the new system.

“The partner did a great job, and
everything went smoothly, with the
migration completed on time,” says
Mr. D’souza. “One of the commendable
results was that they managed to achieve a
52 per cent compression of our database.”

The new HPE infrastructure is located
in a data center near Mumbai, and the
SAP applications running on it are used by
900 people throughout Greaves’ business.