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.