Server Consolidation Results in Savings for Rayon

The Indian Rayon unit of the Aditya Birla Nuvo group is the second largest producer of viscose filament yarn (VFY) in India, in terms of its market share. With the distinction of constituting 50 percent of VFY exports from India, the company has consistently raised the bar.

Highlights

-- The first challenge was convincing the management to consolidate ERP applications and the database server in one box

-- With the enhanced RAM, the single DR server was faster than the production server

But, with the financial crisis, there was pressure on the IT team to contain costs. The best way to do that was to consolidate its servers. H. Krishnan, assistant VP-IT, Indian Rayon also needed a DR solution for one of his remote sites.

"The ERP installation was done on two servers - one for development and other for quality assessment. Two years into the installation, the IT team found the servers were grossly underutilized," says Krishnan. He decided to install both instances in one server. This required the re-installation of the OS, ERP kernel, and configuration. While most IT teams would have stopped here, satisfied that some consolidation had been achieved, Krishnan's IT team did not.

An online DR server was proposed. "To maintain the same performance of the production server, the DR server had to be identical to it. We decided to put both the app and the database on a single physical server which acts as a DR server - to be used when the production server fails," says Krishnan.

The first challenge was going against the advice of technical experts and convincing the management to consolidate ERP applications and the database server in one box. "We also risked a potential business loss for one day (time window to switch back to production server, and update all transactions) in case one server DR system failed," says Krishnan. Considering the company's average daily sales of Rayon and chemicals are about Rs 45 crore (US$9,606) per day, this was a huge risk.

To counter performance degradation, the memory on the DR server was enhanced from 8 GB to 24 GB. When users were switched to the DR server for testing purposes, the IT team was in for a pleasant surprise. With the enhanced RAM, the single DR server (running both, the application and the database) was faster than the production server (cluster) which actually consisted of a separate box for application and database.