Project Log

Upgrading storage to meet business requirements

Rajesh Mishra, Chief Information Officer and General Manager, Eicher Motors tells Vinutha V about how the company improved application performance and attained 24x7 availability by using IBM’s TotalStorage DS4500.

A major transformation of Eicher’s IT infrastructure took place in 2001 when we decided to centralise our IT operations in Delhi by consolidating the IT infrastructure of five business units—Eicher Motors, Eicher Tractors, Eicher Gears, Eicher Group Office and Eicher Royal Enfield. We wanted to further enhance the hardware configuration to provide centralised services from our corporate office situated in New Delhi. In 2002, again as per our business requirements, it was felt necessary to upgrade our SAP ERP installation from 3.1H to 4.0B. This was to keep pace with changing business scenarios and growing business needs and to keep Eicher’s IT department abreast of the most recent technological developments.

Shrinking the backup window

We had to give some serious thought to introducing a highly capable storage solution as we were facing certain IT bottlenecks. The backup window of SAP was too large, it was taking 8-10 hrs for backup. During the backup process, SAP was unavailable to users for background processes. The storage was Direct Attached Storage (DAS)-based and there were pockets of unutilised disk space on a few servers. There was an absence of storage availability for test purposes such as a new SAP version upgrade, reorganisation of the database and other related project-based activities. We also felt the need for disaster recovery (DR) and we planned to have one in Delhi as it falls in the seismic zone. Some of the SAP production servers had become old and were DAS-based and not ready to meet the requirements of the newer SAP 4.0B version with respect to storage requirements. The response time from the DAS-based environment also became a bottleneck for SAP 4.0B installations since all the servers were using DAS for storing data. Eicher had limited scalability, high disk management efforts, non-optimised disk utilisation, low performance and high backup time.

First upgrade

Driven by these challenges, we decided to introduce a Fibre Channel-based SAN solution from IBM, the DS4400 (formerly FAStT700) with 3 TB of RAW space on 73 GB HDDs. Its flexible storage allocation resulted in better space utilisation for all SAP installations. The backup time of server got reduced to 4 hours as the backup over SAN (Fibre Channel) was faster than the previous SCSI or LAN-based method. The flash copy feature was used to create a test server and move in a short time to a production environment. The storage management become centralised for all servers and was easily maintainable.

With a new set-up, our users can avail of load balancing. We offer high availability and redundancy by clustering critical applications Rajesh Mishra chief information officer Eicher Motors

A second SAP upgrade

In 2004, Eicher decided to once again upgrade their SAP environment to SAP R/3 4.7 Enterprise. The load generated by increased user activity was leading to performance bottlenecks with the two-year-old SAN. It was observed that after upgrading to SAP Enterprise the present DR scenario would not hold good as DAS-based servers were not in position to provide new space and meet the input/output (I/O) requirements. We wanted to provide better service levels to users. With more users logging into our systems, performance was again becoming a bottleneck. The disk I/O was creating performance issues as we were expecting our I/O per second (I/OPS) to grow from the current 6,000 IOPS to 12,000 IOPS in the next three years. The backup window of 4-5 hours was also proving to be an issue as new applications were putting extra load onto the DS4400. The entry level DR that was operational since 2002 by sending archive logs through tapes got discontinued after the version upgrade as the old DR servers were not capable of taking the load of 4.7 version of SAP and were discontinued for lack of available storage space and memory.

High-end storage

The servers (IBM’s NF 7100 and NF 5500) in addition to being inadequately equipped to handle current load of applications, were 5 to 6 years old, bulky and not rack-mountable. It was proposed to replace these servers with thin (1U/2U) rack mountable or blade servers. This would have enabled us to save a lot of space at the data centre. To overcome all these problems it was proposed to once again go in for an enhanced storage solution with high-end servers in a clustered environment

We again decided to revamp our IT storage infrastructure in 2004-2005 to meet the above requirements. Eicher negotiated with IBM, EMC, and Dell and finally went for IBM’s DS4500 as we were able to implement their solution in a phased manner. IBM Global Services was our partner during the entire implementation.

Reliable business continuity

Now, our previous DR solution, which is based on the DS4400 solution that we transferred to the Pithampur unit is fully capable of meeting our flexible DR requirements with respect to storage. The new storage solution is an IBM DS4500 with switched disk architecture and multiple access paths to each disk. Eicher’s part of DR is getting implemented with the use of double-take replication software (Host-to-Host-based) and will replicate over the WAN. Finally, we have been able to achieve above average application performance and round the clock business continuity. Eicher began implementing the solution and completed doing so in July 2005. The implementation was not spared from few challenges of downtime and load balancing. The data transfer of more then 2 terabytes from one portal to another took time. The challenge of transferring data of four business units to a new environment was a challenge and was usually done at night and on Sundays to avoid inconveniencing users. With a new set-up we have been able to give users load balancing feature, high availability and redundancy by clustering critical applications.

vinutha@expresscomputeronline.com