Set up as early as 1905 Eveready is a reputed enterprise in the Indian subcontinent which primarily deals in manufacture and marketing of batteries. The company is also involved in manufacturing other products such as flashlight cases, electrolytic manganese dioxide, arc carbons, photo-engravers plates and strips for printing, castings, hard facing and tube rods, carbon electrodes. The company had implemented an ERP solution as early as 2005 and had a set-up of Dell and EMC servers in its initial phase. It has now decided to acquire a concrete data storage solution, with maximum data privacy.

“Business is expanding rapidly and performance issues regarding data storage utility and diffusion were cropping up regularly, which was deterring performance. We needed a data solution where we could ensure that data flow is not interrupted and downtime could be minimized,” said Arup Choudhury, Senior GM-IT Department, Eveready.

To address this problem, the company decided to invest in an effective data solution. Eveready solicited with HP on data storage issues and the latter was quick enough to ensure they gave the company, a sustainable plan, ensuring product application and systems migration with the minimum hazards.

Need for Solution
“In terms of technology, servers of different vendors yield more or less the same results. However, what differentiates
it is the solution and the migration part. We selected HP besides evaluating Dell and IBM primarily because of its ability to virtualise the environemnt while on the fly,” Choudhury added.

Commenting over HP's Proliant and EVA 440 servers, Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, Storage Works, HP, said, “EVA 440 servers, which were deployed in Eveready recently is capable of virualising an environment while working in the background. One can have a backup while the system is running and hence, there is no need of having a downtime when a backup action or scan needs to be done”.

In the deployment, HP claimed it has not faced any major challenges. Commenting over the same, Krishnamoorthy emphasised, “We have been with Eveready for quite sometime and the company has a mature IT plan. Since, the IT structure is developed enough in the company, there has not been any major issues in the deployment”.

The solution
Eveready has a centralised data center structure system based in Kolkata which caters to the company's 34 warehouses, 10 manufacturing units and 15 sales branches spread across India. While on the go, HP in the first place clearly surveyed the client requirements and studied the present one and thereafter came up with the solution.

Offering the solution, Krishnamoorthy illustrated, “Eveready needed a solution where they could ensure that their data could grow and can be managed at an ease. With the company already in ERP zone with Oracle and AMD backbone, it was easy to ensure that the present data migrates fully without getting corrupted and consolidation of data clusters in the servers can take place overtime”.

Satisfied with the solution offered and the efficacy HP put up in the process, Choudhury is keen on working with HP again if and when required. However he said, “In the present scenario, after the data storage solution, the company is not keen on having another major IT deployment”.

Bright future ahead
HP has claimed that in its deployment process, altough unplanned downtime factors was there, there has not been a single point of failure as the Proliant and EVA 440 servers are supposed to be superior in design and technology. Besides implementing the ERP and storage solutions, Eveready has a well knit and structured plan where hybrid networking platforms based on UTMs are in place with PoP and USB intranet chords. Also, the company has a security solution from CISCO in place.

“Presently, we are having a supply chain project on the current hardware infrastructure and would like to consider HP for future referral. Next year, in February we will be revising our existing hardware plan and is needs arise, we would like to consider HP”, Choudhury concluded.

Avishek Rakshit
avishekr@cybermedia.co.in

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