When CFCL’s disparate servers, storage, and applications began driving running costs up and impacting efficiency, the company turned to HP for assistance.By Akhtar Pasha.

Chambal Fertilisers and Chemicals Limited, (CFCL) found that its legacy IT environment was becoming a hindrance to its growth. In the recent past, CFCL has consolidated its position in the areas of fertilizers, phosphoric acid, agri-inputs & seeds, agri-biotechnology, textiles, information technology and shipping. CFCL is the largest Urea manufacturer in the private sector and it operates two nitrogenous fertilizer plants at Gadepan, in Kota district of Rajasthan.

V S Rao Manager–IT, CFCL, explained, “Given our diverse business interests, we needed a radical shift in focus to stay ahead of the competition. Instead of concentrating time and money on managing standalone applications and services, we wanted to focus on improving our business outcomes—greater business agility, lower costs in managing legacy applications and standalone servers, and fewer operational risks.” Additionally when CFCL decided to standardize its business processes on mySAP ERP ECC, it wanted a solid platform that could scale and ramp up its business transactions with ease. To achieve its business objectives and growth, the company decided to implement SAP ERP on DB2 and standardized on the HP platform.

Disparate IT systems increased maintenance cost

CFCL’s data centre was expected to support the company’s new business initiatives while simultaneously controlling costs and streamlining operations. Its IT landscape consisted of disparate IT systems with standalone x86 servers running discrete homegrown applications spread across regional offices to manage its financial and transactional systems [developed in-house]. These standalone x86 servers were running at various utilization rates and had performance issues whenever the production demand was high. At the manufacturing plant too, certain servers ran commercial and other core applications alongside niche applications on x86 servers, which made it hard to consolidate data [financial, stock, inventories and production]. “It was a case of too many servers, too many applications, and too much customization—leading to increased spending on maintenance,” said Rao.

CFCL decided to mitigate unexpected risks through the installation of HP Integrity servers running HP-UX 11i v2 to ensure high availability and simpler management. All the HP Integrity servers installed were fitted with dual-core Intel Itanium 2 processors. In the application layer, two HP Integrity rx7640 servers running the HP-UX 11i v2 operating system hosted IBM DB2 V8 database software alongside SAP software. Two HP Integrity rx7640 in cluster mode are virtualized to run mySAP ECC database, data warehousing, and Advance Planning Optimization (APO) database. Two HP Integrity rx3600 servers run mySAP ECC application on HP UX 11i v2.

Read the entire article from Express Computer here.