Burson Automotive
handles growth with
Case Study
Objective
Replace existing infrastructure with
scalable and stable systems to cope
with business growth
Approach
Compared upgrade to replacement and
consulted with application provider on
available options
IT Matters
• Quadrupled performance, cutting time
required for overnight batch process
from eight or nine hours to only two
• Improved response times so users
no longer experience any lag
between screens
• Reduced number of racks required
for the system from eight to two,
saving costs
• Simplified installation, as the new
system could be set up and tested in
parallel to existing infrastructure
• Provided suicient performance
and storage capacity to handle new
ERP features
Business Matters
• Enabled the system to scale with
unpredictable business growth, from
originally 112 stores to 175 or more
• Reduced total cost of ownership, with
15 month payback period
• Cut operating expenditure, as support
costs included in the system price
scalable infrastructure
Fast, flexible system scales with
retailer’s expansion
Burson Automotive needed
to replace its main
IT infrastructure to handle
growth. It chose a HPE
blade system with HP-UX
and HPE 3PAR StoreServ
7450 flash storage, which
has improved performance,
cut operating costs and
provided the required
scalability. The new
system has enabled
Burson to consolidate
multiple systems and
improve its disaster
recovery capabilities.
Challenge
Unpredictable growth
Burson Automotive keeps Australia’s cars
and light trucks on the road, supplying
aftermarket parts, accessories and workshop
equipment from more than 120 stores and
500 delivery vehicles.
Since it was founded in 1971, Burson has
continually expanded. Recently, this growth
has accelerated, requiring the company’s
IT systems to scale in response.
“We were running servers and storage
area network (SAN) from Hewlett Packard
Enterprise but with the business’s growth
we were coming to a point where we’d
either need to upgrade or replace our
infrastructure,” says Leon Rawlins, business
systems manager at Burson Automotive.
Case study
Burson Automotive
“The project has gone very well and exceeded my expectations. I was
surprised at the ease of deployment – all the dierent components
integrated well together.”
— Leon Rawlins, business systems manager, Burson Automotive
Industry
Trade
Page 2
At this point, Burson had 112 stores but
was planning to expand to 175 within five
years, both via acquisition and organic
growth. Rawlins comments, “We looked at
what had to change to reach that point.
We either needed to upgrade the CPU
and buy additional disks for the SAN,
or replace everything – we considered
both possibilities.”
Solution
Proven HP-UX stability
Rawlins spoke to HPE and discussed the
options, and talked to the provider of the
main application used at Burson, which is
the MomentumPro Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) system running on a
Progress database.
“The application provider did have a version
running on Windows®, but we wanted the
proven stability of UNIX®, and in particular
of HP-UX. MomentumPro is businesscritical, and runs all our inventory and
financial systems.
“We considered systems based on other
UNIX platforms, but that would have
involved bringing in a completely new
operating system, which would add
additional risk.”
“If we had a year for the project we might
have looked at other UNIX versions, but our
business’s rapid expansion meant we had
tight timescales – so we stayed on HP-UX
to simplify the migration.
“Once we had decided on HP-UX, we looked
at the blades, storage and chassis available
from HPE,” says Rawlins. “The blade system
had the benefit that, as well as handling the
expansion of the ERP, we could consolidate
Windows environments and other servers
onto the new infrastructure.”
Rawlins chose an infrastructure housed in an
HPE BladeSystem c7000 enclosure, and it
selected an HPE Integrity BL870c i4 Server
Blade featuring HP-UX 11i v3. For storage,
they selected HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7450
Storage System with thirty-two 480GB solid
state disks (SSDs). The system includes HPE
FlexFabric interconnects.
Fast payback
“Had we upgraded, we would have had
perhaps just a year before we had to
upgrade again,” says Rawlins. “Also, with an
upgrade, maintenance costs are increasing
each year – but the replacement system
included support, so we are ahead on
operating expenditure. When we did a
comparison, the replacement was lower in
cost than the upgrade, with a fifteen month
payback period on the hardware.”
Case study
Burson Automotive
Industry
Trade
Page 3
“By replacing the system, we could build
everything and get it up and running
without interfering with the current
operation. If we had done an upgrade, there
would have been significant downtime,
even if there were no problems – but with a
replacement we could build it all in parallel,
do comprehensive testing and make sure
everything was working.”
HPE Technology Services designed the
new system with Burson’s Infrastructure
& Operations manager Nick Dawson to
check all aspects were considered. Rawlins
comments, “The implementation went
extremely well, and the engineering support
people at HPE were excellent – everything
was here on time or early, and it all
went smoothly.
“We built the new system and got the
operating system loaded, the disks up and
database restored, and were able to run
tests until we were satisfied to give us a
comfort factor,” says Rawlins. “Then we
took the users o the system and started
the migration of data at 6pm, and had
everything up and running by 11pm
that night.”
Benefits
Performance quadrupled
With the new infrastructure, Rawlins says
the biggest single benefit is improved
performance, not least due to the system’s
solid state storage. He comments, “Although
going all flash with the 3PAR storage was
more expensive, it was worth it for the
performance advantage.”
Burson runs an overnight batch job to
process all the orders from its stores, and to
calculate the orders and picking lists needed
for its warehouse management system
(WMS). Previously, this took up to four to
five hours, but the new system and disk I/O
has cut this – a saving of at least 75 per cent.
“We knew we had to speed up the
processing, if we expand into Western
Australia we would lose three hours from
the overnight window, due to the time
dierence,” says Rawlins. “We had to do the
same tasks in a smaller timeframe.”
As of today, Burson has grown to 121 stores,
and Rawlins says, “The old system would
already have been unable to cope – we
would have been on about 99 per cent
CPU, but at the moment we’re sitting at
15 per cent CPU. It’s a massive change – we
would have been happy with a 50 per cent
improvement, but we’ve got almost an
80 per cent increase.”
Based on its current application layer,
this speed increase means that Burson
has plenty of headroom for growth to its
planned 175 stores and beyond. The HPE
server can also be upgraded to double the
performance if required. Rawlins comments,
“While the store rollout is the priority,
we’re also going to look at adding extra
functionality in the ERP application. In the
past we were constrained by hardware
performance, but the new system is giving
us the opportunity to add more modules.”
Case study
Burson Automotive
Industry
Trade
Customer at a glance
Applications
• MomentumPro ERP system
• Progress database
Hardware
• HPE BladeSystem c7000 enclosure
• HPE FlexFabric interconnects (four
1GB copper, four 8Gb SAN SFP)
• HPE Integrity BL870c i4 Server Blade
(four 9540 CPU, 512GB RAM)
• HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7450
Storage Systems
Software
• HP-UX 311i v3
HPE services
• Data centre consulting
• Care Pack installation services
“When we did a comparison, the replacement was
lower in cost than the upgrade, with a fifteen month
payback period.”
— Leon Rawlins, business systems manager, Burson Automotive
Consolidation reduces costs
As well as the main ERP system, Burson is
also starting to use the new infrastructure
to consolidate its other systems, including
file, print and Exchange servers. By moving
from a rack-based server system to
blades, the company will be able to shrink
its infrastructure from eight cabinets to
only two.
“HPE’s deduplication features will also save
us money, as we will need to buy fewer disks
to migrate our existing external servers onto
Hyper-V virtual machines on the blades,”
says Rawlins.
“We were at full storage capacity on the old
system, but now with the 3PAR we will be at
around 70 per cent after we have migrated
Exchange onto the infrastructure – and
that’s even before we add in the benefits of
deduplication,” says Rawlins.
The current system has two controller nodes
for the storage, but for the future, Burson
is expecting to scale this to four nodes if
required. Rawlins comments, “This was a
deliberate choice – we wanted a system with
the flexibility to grow, without having to buy
hardware now that we wouldn’t use for six or
twelve months.”
Another reason Burson replaced its
infrastructure was to improve disaster
recovery (DR). Previously, when it failed
over to its DR site Burson had to reduce
the number of users to 50 per cent. Now, it
uses its old production system for DR, which
enables Burson to run at around 90 per cent
capacity if it has to fail over to the DR site.
Exceeded expectations
“The project has gone very well and
exceeded my expectations, and I was
surprised at the ease of deployment – all
the dierent components integrated well
together,” says Rawlins. “Overall, the biggest
benefits for us were performance, simplicity
of implementation and cost.
“Due to this positive experience with HPE,
we’re now looking at working with them
in other areas of our business, and we’re
already rolling out HP Thin Clients at some
of our stores,” concludes Rawlins.
Learn more at
hpe.com/go/3par
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© Copyright 2014-2016 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.
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4AA5-5925EEW, March 2016, Rev. 2
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