“Not a single hour’s downtime in three years”

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, one of the country’s top 25 drug manufacturers and research companies, swears by HP when it comes to storage and servers, says RAHUL NEEL MANI

GLENMARK Pharmaceuticals, a research-based company with its headquarters in Mumbai, is one of the leading drug manufacturing and medical research companies in India. With a focus on areas such as dermatology, gynaecology and cardiology, and metabolic, respiratory and gastrointestinal disorders, Glenmark conducts original research and manufactures pharmaceutical products. Incorporated in 1977, the company has a total of 15 offices, a workforce of over 2,000 (including around 150 scientists and researchers), and operations in 27 countries across North America, Asia and Europe. Ranked among the top 25 in the Indian pharmaceutical industry, Glenmark grew at an annual rate of 33.4 percent during the past three years, easily outperforming the industry average of 8.1 percent. As the company grew, its data storage and management demands kept pace. But Glenmark is fully equipped to handle the challenge. Reason: unlike others, it trusted the concept of single-vendor-based solutions.

Need for storage

Glenmark was facing many challenges in terms of IT hardware and storage management. The first challenge, even before implementing ERP, was to have constant connectivity and upgrade its desktops to a higher hardware configuration. Secondly, for ERP, the bandwidth required and the bandwidth utilisation are usually high, hence the LAN cabling had to be upgraded—which posed another challenge. Thirdly, Glenmark wanted to standardise on the hardware platform so that there was uniformity of systems.

The company generates a lot of data from SAP ERP modules such as SD, MM, PM, FI, CO, QM & PP. The data comes through the Exchange server (Microsoft Exchange 2000) from various sites of the company. Another major application is Microsoft SharePoint Portal (document management system). Besides, there is a large amount of data generated in the labs at the manufacturing plants and the research centre on High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and gas chromatographers. This data needs proper storage in a fully-secured environment. The need for storage at Glenmark was nearly 1 TB, and it was proving to be an uphill task in terms of management and security.

It was three years ago that the company made the transition from legacy systems to global standard ERP systems to cope with growth. The initiative was taken by Glenn Saldanha, managing director and chief executive officer, and executed by Edsel Pereira, the company’s deputy general manager for Information Technology.

Says Pereira, “The server architecture that has been used includes a separate system for SAP production, test and development, and a DR site with individual storage boxes attached to it. The company is planning to migrate from two-way processors to four-way processors, increase the RAM, and add one more fibre storage box. “

Single-vendor approach

Why did Glenmark choose to go with a single vendor when considering hardware for its storage needs? Explains Pereira, “We believe in the one-vendor concept. We think a vendor is more a business partner than a vendor. We have a certain amount of faith in our business partner.” When Glenmark migrated their mission-critical applications to a SAP environment, they chose to adopt HP storage solutions across the company.

At that time the company was running its ERP applications on the Unix platform. HP’s competency in the Unix area also helped Glenmark choose it. “In the course of our independent studies, we found that roughly 60 percent of the world’s SAP implementations run on HP hardware. I strongly believe that HP-UX along with an Oracle database is the best combination for a SAP implementation in the world today,” declares Pereira.

Glenmark also feels that HP’s roadmap in terms of its R&D expenditure and the variety of offerings available in the areas of storage, DLT drives and storage media make it the ideal choice for any company. “Another major advantage with HP is their global presence. We were looking at a company which had a global presence to support us with products and services including servers, storage, storage media and their OS,” informs Pereira.

The infrastructure backbone of Glenmark comprises a disaster recovery server, a production server and another server used for test and development. These are served by the HP 9000 line powered by HP PA-RISC processors. The Microsoft ISA Firewall, domain controller, DNS, WINS, Anti-Virus, user data, SMS, MS SQL and Helpdesk systems are all handled by HP TC2110 servers. The SharePoint Portal Server (document and knowledge management system) runs on a HP ML350G3.

“We are a pure HP buyer in terms of hardware. I’m happy to say that in the last three years, we’ve not had a single hour’s downtime”, says Pereira.

Did Glenmark benefit?

Pereira says that though they have not done a cost-benefit analysis or any study of their return on investment, the company is getting the online information it desires, and access to data anywhere in the company’s domain network globally. “We can now close our books of accounts and balance sheet within 15 days of the period ending as compared to three-and-a-half months prior to the SAP implementation. This is a significant benefit. We are also able to centralise our backups thereby giving a high level of data security and uptime.”

He also says that today information is available to anyone within the network who has the requisite authorisation, which was not possible earlier. Due to the earlier legacy systems, there were islands of databases which were not integrated, and the data stored in different plants or locations did not have a common coding structure. Today it’s all centralised. “For me, as an information systems manager, support is the most important thing. When I talk about hardware, support is critical, and HP has never failed to deliver,” says Pereira.

When the modern infrastructure of SAP R/3 in combination with Oracle databases and HP servers were brought in to replace existing legacy systems in 2000, Glenmark was a Rs 150 crore company. Within three years, revenues doubled. Pereira is confident that the infrastructure can absorb the rapid pace of growth and scale up to meet the demands of the coming decade.

Peep into the future

In terms of hardware upgradation, Glenmark is now looking at moving its production servers from L class 2000 two-way configurations to four-way configurations, and adding 5-7 GB of RAM. A similar upgradation will also be taking place for the DRS servers and test and development server. The latter, a one-way server, will be converted into a two-way server with an increased RAM of approximately 6-8 GB.

rahul@expresscomputeronline.com