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.
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Dheeraj Sinha
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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.