Peer-to-Peer

Marico gets a boost out of SAN

Implementing a SAN solution has helped Marico consolidate its storage resources, says Venkatesh Ganesh

The rules of the FMCG game start, continue and end with responsiveness. Companies need to be extremely fast and proactive in responding to the changing needs of consumers and distributors. Marico Industries, an FMCG company with a turnover of Rs 900 crore, is present in segments such as hair oils, fabric care and jams. It needed a system that would give it the ability to respond rapidly. Consider these statistics. Every month, over five crore consumer packs are dispatched to approximately two crore households through a distribution network that consists of over 15 lakh outlets both in India and abroad. This calls for an efficient supply chain management (SCM) system, which is why the company adopted SAP APO. The solution is integrated with the company’s distributors.

With a supply chain network that connects manufacturing locations to dealers and retailers, timely availability of information is critical for planning and decision-making. The com-pany had a diverse storage set-up, consisting primarily of direct attached storage. As its storage needs were growing at a fast clip, these data storage systems were under pressure while trying to cope with the demands of a host of diverse systems such as ERP and Mi-Net, an Internet-enabled B2B platform.

Marico wanted to move to a fully networked storage environment, wherein it could consolidate, control and manage its storage infrastructure as per the needs of its users. It decided to implement a SAN solution from EMC. The SAN infrastructure supports Marico’s core applications and e-mail, ensuring faster performance and providing enhanced storage capacity.

Says Girish Rao, Systems Manager, Marico Industries, “Having a SAN solution means that we can protect investments and re-assign storage resources without affecting production.” The storage consolidation done through the EMC SAN allows Marico to backup, store, access and restore information much faster that it was able to in the past. Earlier, restoring data from tapes took days; now it takes a few minutes. Adopting a networked storage infrastructure gives Marico significant cost benefits as server-based storage means that disks are likely to be discarded every time an upgrade is done. Centralised storage management lets the company share common resources, simplify system administration and improve productivity. Another advan-tage that Marico reckons is that when a server goes down, so does the data on it. Restoring from a tape can take a day or so, putting a halt to important business functions. A SAN solution helps backup, restore, store and access information quickly, enhancing daily business functions. Using the SAN solution, Rao says, Marico has seen performance improve by 30 percent.

CLARiiON call

Over time, as its storage requirements grew, Marico decided that its SAN infrastructure needed to be upgraded. Its marketshare in the FMCG space was increasing in almost all the categories that the company was playing. Spurred by this growth, Marico knew that it needed a more scalable storage system to provide advanced storage management capabilities such as full and incremental replication, and mirroring across long distances. Secondly, for years, Marico used to connect its HP servers to EMC’s FC 4500 SAN using SCSI interface. As its application infrastructure grew, the company decided to make another change. It upgraded from the fibre channel solution to a CLARiiON CX 500 SAN with 1 terabyte of capacity. The migration took all of two hours. The Brocade SAN switches were supplied by Connectix, an OEM partner of Brocade.

Moving to the CLARiiON CX 500 SAN has helped the company increase its storage capacity. Today, the SAN supports all applications involved in transaction processing, order management and customer maintenance, supporting throughputs as high as 21,000 I/O (input/output) operations per second.

According to Rao, “With the CLARiiON CX 500, we have got faster performance and increased scalability. The option of pay-as-you-grow is also a good advantage for organisations such as ours.”

Marico has invested approximately Rs 1 crore on SAN. The current storage infrastructure supports the company’s core applications and e-mail systems.

Apart from centralised management, the SAN solution gives Marico a shorter data backup window. Currently, the company has consolidated close to 1 TB of data from a previously distributed heterogeneous environment on to a single platform for centralised management and backup.

Managing diverse storage platforms is a significant plus. Comments Rao, “Some of our applications run on 64-bit Windows 2003, while we have others that run on HP-UX. The ability of EMC’s solution to inter-operate with each application and improve its performance has been a tremendous advantage.”

The company is also utilising EMC’s Navisphere Management suite software to manage its storage systems from a single console. Using

the Navisphere Analyser, the company can collect performance information in a graphical format to identify performance patterns and trends. Its capabilities include detailed trend analysis, reporting and capacity management from a single console. One can even customise and automate common storage management tasks by writing scripts. Explains Rao, “Navisphere gives us the ability to control, discover, monitor and configure storage facilities anywhere using a Web-based console.”

The move to a CLARiiON CX 500 reflects Marico’s efforts to manage its transaction processing systems from a central data centre. “With EMC’s SAN solution, the company can effectively allocate its storage resources and fully utilise them to reap a significant return on its IT investment,” adds Rao.

A step toward ILM

The SAN solution is the first step in Marico’s ILM strategy. Notes Rao, “Research has shown that data retrieval activity declines with time.” However, even infrequently accessed data such as historical sales records can be of considerable value to a company. At the same time, no company can afford to keep all its data in a high-end, high-availability storage system because the cost borne by the organisation would be prohibitively expensive. Marico is currently mapping its information needs according to the importance of the data.

venkatesh@expresscomputeronline.com