A Smoother Test Ride
Test Data Migration Server from SAP is helping Apollo Tyres pull out the brakes in its application development and testing process
By Sanjay Gupta
Time to market is a key competitive differentiator in today’s marketplace. The frenetic pace of change is visible in faster product launches, quick obsolescence or upgrade cycles, and rapidly changing consumer behavior.
 | Dheeraj Sinha |
While it is easy to appreciate such trends on the front end, there’s a whole lot of back-end work that goes without notice for most people.
Apollo Tyres, one of India’s leading tyre makers, was undergoing a situation where data was growing at about 500GB a year and the need to develop, test and roll out applications on top of its business software was becoming more and more urgent.
“We had about 2TB of production data and we had to use this entire set for development and testing as well,” says Dheeraj Sinha, Head of the company’s Corporate Management Services. “I didn’t have a method to cut this data or use it partially for the development and QA environments.”
This posed several challenges for Apollo Tyres. For one, it faced unwanted production system downtime due to whole data transfer to development and quality system each time something needed to be developed and tested. Besides, the company incurred increasing infrastructure and maintenance expenses. Add to that the need to manage multiple test systems for different in-house projects and you get a less-than-rosy picture.
How was the tyre-maker going to prevent the situation from skidding out of control?
To tackle the problem, Apollo Tyres decided to implement SAP’s Test Data Migration Server (TDMS) solution, which is used for creating and refreshing non-production systems with a reduced but consistent data set.
Even though Apollo Tyres didn’t have too many examples in India to look at (the company is one of the first to go for TDMS), “we looked at some implementations elsewhere and chose to deploy it,” says Sinha.
The solution was implemented directly by SAP. “The implementation was a quick and smooth process without any roadblocks,” says Nagaraj Bhargava, Vice President - Marketing, SAP Indian Subcontinent. Usually a period of 14 days is budgeted for a project of this nature, he says, but the implementation at Apollo was completed in “a record 10 days.”
Small is smarter
Among the benefits, Sinha counts the reduction in space required for data storage as "a huge saving.” Says he, “Using TDMS, I now have a way of slicing the data and use only one quarter of the production data in my development and QA.” Besides, it has become much more easy and quick to work on a smaller footprint of data.
There are several other benefits as well, say Sinha. For instance, response times on development and QA have increased. In addition, the development team’s ability to reconfigure and tweak the data has increased.
Bhargava adds that there’s provision of increased control over the development process by enabling the IT department to refresh and create new non-productive systems in the future and exercise more control over the operation of test environments.
According to Bhargava, through TDMS, Apollo Tyres will be able achieve 100 percent uptime during the data migration process and will also be able to support multiple projects running simultaneously. Over time, he says, Apollo will also benefit from improved quality of development and training activities by using business-relevant and up-to-date test data.
With TDMS firmly in place, the development and testing process at Apollo Tyres seems set to remain in top gear.
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