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When limitations posed by a legacy infrastructure prevented Raymond from bettering its business, the company chose to upgrade to an infrastructure running on AMD’s latest processor family. This move helped Raymond improve its IT performance, communication and increase the overall productivity, while keeping operational costs in check
By Harshal Kallyanpur, NC, September 10, 2009, 1530 hrs
Around 2006, Raymond evaluated its IT infrastructure and realized that it posed several challenges. The legacy IT infrastructure, with disparate systems running on different configurations, prevented the company from aligning its business operations with the market trends. While some systems were running on a RISC-based infrastructure, others had x86-based architectures powering them. On some incongruent hardware boxes, there were variations even in terms of operating systems running.
“We wanted to have a standardized infrastructure, running on commoditized systems. We were also looking at standardizing our applications and databases, and have a single consolidated system,” says Vinay Hinge, General Manager-IT, Raymond.
The company zeroed in on SAP for enterprise-wide consolidation, and opted for Microsoft’s operating systems and SQL Server solution for its databases. On the hardware side, it wanted to deploy systems based on 64-bit architecture. Having determined its requirements, the company turned to vendors for a solution that best suited its requirement.
“The cost and performance of the processor plays a major role in the server lifecycle. Hence, we had numerous discussions with both vendors, Intel and AMD, to evaluate their offerings,” says Hinge.
After looking at benchmarks, it was concluded that AMD’s products offered Raymond a value proposition that suited its requirements the best. Being power conscious, the company was also looking at saving on the power costs generated from its active infrastructure. According to Hinge, AMD’s processors offered a good power rating. Also the level of engagement offered, in terms of training, guidance, pre-sales, support and performance management, led Raymond to choose AMD-based hardware.
Following this, in December 2006, Raymond, as a first phase of implementation, deployed HP servers—running on AMD-based processors—to host and run its SAP implementation. It was soon evident that the processing power offered by AMD processors adequately met the performance requirements of both, transaction and Business Intelligence (BI) processing.
In the second phase of implementation, the company deployed hardware from IBM running on AMD’s Opteron 2376 and 8384 quad core processors for its apparel business. The deployment was aimed at improving performance for running the company’s existing development, testing and staging environments, and homegrown, third party and browser-based applications. To further save on power, the company also adopted a blade infrastructure.
On further evaluation, it was realized that this infrastructure’s utilization levels were only 10 percent—even during peak hours. To improve utilization and availability, the company in 2009, virtualized its servers and currently has two servers running 10 virtual servers each. While the deployment has helped Raymond save on power and management costs, it has also allowed the company to save on capital expenditure. The remaining servers can now be re-deployed as and when the need arises.
The AMD implementation has helped in making communication faster for the company’s Unified Communications deployment. Around 150 of the Raymond’s textile outlets are connected by Microsoft’s Unified Communications solution that provides shop employees features such as screen sharing, and audio, video and text chat. The company also uses video conferencing solutions within its enterprise.
The solution uses Microsoft’s Windows Media Server architecture for video conferencing and audio-video broadcast. The multi-stream, multi-codec platform runs on a stream server, which responds to live on-demand video broadcast requests thereby leading to increased resource requirements. Through a combined consulting and deployment by Microsoft and AMD, the server infrastructure is now able to meet these demands. Looking at the benefits on the server side, the company also standardized AMD for its desktops and laptops as well.
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