HPE E7X91A, AM378A Getting Started Guide

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 suicient 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 dierent 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.”