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 285 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
Page 2
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.
Case study
Greaves
Cotton Ltd.
Industry
Engineering
Page 3
Greaves deploys state-of-the-a rt infrastructure and IT systems at all its
faci lities across geographies in India
Benefit
Reduced Total Cost of Ownership
According to Mr. D’souza, the new
HPE infrastructure has reduced Total
Cost of Ownership (TCO) considerably.
He comments, “We benchmarked the
new system against our existing
equipment, and found the TCO would
come down drastically.”
As part of this benchmarking, Greaves
calculated that power consumption
would come down by 27 per cent and
heat dissipation by 30 per cent, and the
infrastructure would use 285 per cent less
space. Another factor driving down TCO
is that Greaves can share the new storage
with other applications, including Product
Lifecycle Management.
Manageability has improved, with fewer
points of failure, due to reduced cabling
in the blade server infrastructure.
Software deployment is now more flexible
and eicient, thanks to HP-UX Virtual
Partitions (vPars) and Integrity VM v61.
Backup time halved
With the new system, which uses a
newer generation of tape technology,
the backup window for the SAP system
has reduced by 50 per cent, from more
than six hours to only around three
hours. Mr. D’souza explains, “We have
parallel backup processes, so at the same
time we can do a backup of two or more
systems, which means that the production
backup time has drastically reduced.”
“If our system is taking too much time
in backup, it puts more load on the
infrastructure,” says Mr. D’souza. “Our plants
are running 24/7, so with the backup
window reduced, our users can now do their
normal transactions in the time that is freed
up on the system.”
Greaves has also found that jobs
are now running faster, due to the
increased performance of the new
HPE infrastructure and higher LAN
and SAN bandwidths, and that response
time has improved for end users.
The storage system allows for radial
placement of production data on outer
rings, which enables faster read/write.
File system re-organisation time has
also been drastically reduced, due to
automatic zero reclaim support with
thin provisioning support.
Fast support
“HP-UX is a very stable environment,
everything is very smooth, and it’s simple
to manage,” says Mr. D’souza. “We feel
assured in the resilience of the system.”
If support is required, Greaves calls
HPE, and Mr. D’souza comments, “We are
very confident, with nothing to worry
about – 24/7, we can definitely rely on HPE.”
Case study
Greaves
Industry
Engineering
Cotton Ltd.
Customer at a glance
Application
SAP Enterprise Central Component
Hardware
• HPE Integrity BL860c i4 Server Blades
• HPE Integrity BL870c i4 Server Blades
• 3PAR StoreServ 7200 Storage
Software
• HP-UX 11i v3 operating environment
HPE services
• HPE TS Support Services for
5 years (24*7 service) with 4 hour
response time
“HP-UX oers a highly robust and stable environment,
coupled with round-the-clock ease of management, we
know we can rely on HPE.”
— Anil D’souza, general manager - IT, Greaves Cotton Ltd.
HPE also provides predictive maintenance,
with a direct connection to Greaves’
hardware. This enables HPE to see logs and
other information, and to respond quickly
to any faults, or indications that a failure is
likely to occur.
“The HPE team have been very good when
we required them for a technical discussion
or any other contact,” says Mr. D’souza.
“The team in Mumbai are very helpful,
and when needed they have put in a request
to HPE in Singapore, and have always got
back to us very quickly.”
Based on its overall company policy,
Greaves will refresh the current HPE
infrastructure when it reaches the end
of its planned six-year lifetime. With the
HPE long-term roadmap for Itanium-based
servers, Greaves feels confident in its plans
for its mission-critical IT.
Mr. D’souza comments, “Our business
growth is stable, and enables us to plan
ahead – by and large we are sizing our
system for up to the next ten years,
and we have also seen additional benefits
from HPE advanced compression.
Long-term commitment
For the future, Greaves will continue to
use the HPE infrastructure for its core
SAP systems, and is also planning to add
customer relationship management software
running on the infrastructure. The company
will also evaluate the SAP HANA in-memory
platform, but has not yet made a decision
on whether to move in that direction with
its SAP environment. The scalability of the
servers and storage mean that disruption
will be minimized when the system adapts
to meet future challenges.
“Overall, I’m satisfied with the solution,
and I would definitely recommend HPE,”
says Mr. D’souza. “In fact, there have been
two or three people who have come to ask
me about our experience of the refresh,
and I have recommended they go with HPE.”
Learn more at
hpe.com/solutions
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© Copyright 2016 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without
notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements
accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
Oracle is registered trademark of Oracle and/or its ailiates.
Intel and Itanium are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.
4AA6-6838EEW, September 2016
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