EMC Solutions Enabling The Hospitality And Retail Business Growth

Rajesh Ramnani, Regional Director at VCE

Technology is instrumental for the success and business innovation irrespective of the industry. It not just enables growth but also improves the quality of service. Organizations all over the world are going through transformation and are experiencing tremendous growth and demand. To ensure efficient customer service, smooth internal operation and increase the overall productivity of the company, it is crucial to upgrade the IT infrastructure.

Retail and hospitality industry are the two important industries contributing significantly to the Indian economy. With the entrance of eCommerce, the retail industry has grown notably. With more and more people using internet to avail services, both hospitality and retail industry are banking largely on innovative technology to serve their customers better. Being in the service industry both retail and hospitality industry require IT infrastructure that would help them to serve customers seamlessly with minimal glitches and in real time.

The most common challenges faced by the IT heads in the retail and hospitality industries are –

• Traditional infrastructure does not provide scalability, flexibility and agility required to meet business needs
• Aging IT infrastructure does not meet the growing demand of the company
• The surge in online booking and transaction
• Maintenance and internal operation
• Inefficient and time consuming backup and recovery process
• Security

In a competitive market like India, inefficient technology can lead to the debacle of the company, who fails to serve their customers effectively and maintain their internal operation efficiently. Advanced technology empowers the players in these domains to grow their business.

One of the most recent example of successful implementation of EMC’s technology is Heritage Food Ltd, one of the leading food and grocery retailer in South India. The company experienced tremendous growth, with retail outlets increasing from 70 to 110 in less than two years. The company also has ambitious plans to reach to 150 retail outlets and expand its presence in other parts of India by the end of 2016.

The previous IT infrastructure was unable to cope with the growing performance and data availability demands. Heritage's business-critical applications were deployed on IBM P520 RISC-basedUNIXservers with IBM V3700 storage. The company was using RXL as the front-endbillingsystem to manage the point of sale and back-office transactions of the retailoutletswhile SAP was the backbone ERPsystem. There were large number of to and fro transactions between retail outlets andcentralsystem as the data from the RXL system at the POS level was pushed to MSSQLdatabase at the central server, which in turn was integrated with SAP system. Intheexisting IBM infrastructure, there were performance issues in SAP system. Alsotheintegrationprocessbetweenthefront-endPOSsystemandSAPwastime-consuming.

To ensure quick transaction response, the company needed an IT infrastructurewithhigh IOPS - as high as 15,000 in certain cases. The existing IBM infrastructurehadlimited IOPS levels, less than 1,000.

In the existing set-up, Heritage was not able to design a business continuityplan,given the lack of a remote Disaster Recovery (DR) site and no surety onRecoveryPoint Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) parameters. Tomaintainbusinesscontinuity,theywantedtoensurecontinuousprotectionofmission-criticalSAPand SQL databases, and a streamlined backup mechanism while avoiding singlepointof failure at all layers.

The existing platform also lacked the flexibility needed to release newservices,leading to delayed application delivery while the cost involved in scaling up theIBMRISC platform to match the performance requirements wasphenomenal.

 

UPGRADING TO SCALABLE, FLEXIBLE,COST-EFFICIENT INFRASTRUCTURE

Heritage wanted to upgrade to a scalable, flexible, and sustainablycost-efficientinfrastructure for its business-critical SAP and front-end POS systems. It wasclearfrom the very beginning that this had to be a consolidated and virtualizedplatform.

Heritage initiated the change to a consolidated platform with a vision to buildacompany-wide integrated infrastructure and replace old equipment.Objectivesincluded improved performance, infrastructure flexibility and scalability, high levelsofdata availability, improved infrastructure utilization, reduced operating costs,andsecure business continuity for criticalapplications.

After careful evaluation, the company chose an EMC® VSPEX® ProvenInfrastructurecomprising of EMC VNX®5200 unified storage, EMC Avamar® deduplicationbackupsoftware, EMC RecoverPoint™ data protection and recovery tool, VMware®vSphere™virtualization, Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers, and Ciscoswitches.

RAPID DEPLOYMENT, LOWERTCO

During the restructuring of its infrastructure, Heritage was highly satisfied bytheaccelerated project implementation made possible by the ensured interoperabilityofVSPEX.

VSPEX helped Heritage eliminate the high licensing costs associated withIBMRISC-based UNIX servers and also reduce time and effort in operationsmanagement,both leading to a significant reduction in TCO. In addition, with the implementationofvirtualization, VSPEX improved the utilization of the entire IT infrastructurebydistributing the infrastructure as per the usage requirements.

REDUCING BACKUP TIME FROM HOURS TOMINUTES

At Heritage, the traditional backup process was highly inefficient and inconsistent asitwasn't able to centrally backup user data over the wide area network (WAN). The source-based data deduplication capability of Avamar, helped Heritage to achieved50xbackup data reduction.This helped them to significantly lower their backup disk storage requirements and network backuptraffic.

Heritage also implemented a FLASH 1st strategy by combining VNX, FAST Cache, and a combination of solid-state and SAS drives. VNX, along with FAST Cache, can attain the performance benchmark of as high as 15,000 IOPS which will help Heritage easily manage I/O extensive workloads.

With the implementation of EMC’s solution Heritage was able to maximized performance, business continuity, and uptime, reduced backup time from hours to minutes, reduced backup data storage requirements and network traffic with 50x data reduction and educed OpEx significantly.