In Texmo Industries (Texmo), manufacturer of Taro and Texmo brand products, is a market leader in the electric motor and agricultural pump industry, employing around 1,800 people in two manufacturing plants and 28 offices located throughout India.
Founded in 1956, and headquartered in Coimbatore, the company produces approximately 3,700 products, which are sold by partners to local farmers and industrial customers, and increasingly to a growing international market.
Texmo relied heavily on its centralized server infrastructure to support the companys enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and mission critical applications. With increasing orders and a daily billing cycle, heavy demand from users during peak periods would lead to unplanned downtime of up to 30 minutes, system delays and unfulfilled orders.
These inefficiencies impacted internal users as well as partners performing actions through the companys web portal, who would face delays and downtime when the infrastructure could not support the workload. As a result the company strained to meet monthly production and sales targets, placing additional pressure on employees and IT staff.
Long-term centralized storage solution
Texmo needed a solution to improve system performance, increase user efficiency, and guarantee efficient billing and fulfilment of orders. Without a centralized storage solution, the company relied on multiple disparate physical rack servers to support its critical applications, an infrastructure that was ill-equipped to support the companys existing operations and planned growth. With transactions taking around two to three hours to complete during peak hours, and employees facing system downtime, the processing of invoices was slow and inefficient, and orders would go unfulfilled, causing disruptions to dealers who were selling Texmos farming products. Working within a highly competitive industry and reliant on partner sales, Texmo needed to ensure that the company processes were reliable and fast for its partners and customers; failure to do so could mean dealers moving to competitors.
The company wanted a long-term solution that would scale easily to meet planned growth and provide efficient service to customers. As G. Gokul, Assistant Manager Systems, Texmo Industries, explains, During peak hours, when our branches completed daily billing and queries on the database, we faced a tremendous challenge to prevent system delays and downtimeWe realized we needed a centralized storage solution or we would face increasing revenue loss.
Scalable storage
Texmo selected a highly scalable virtualized iSCSI storage solution using Dell EqualLogic PS6500E storage area network (SAN), and Dell EqualLogic PS6000XV SANs to optimize the performance of virtual servers running on Dell PowerEdge servers - Dell PowerEdge R905 servers featuring AMD Opteron Processors and Dell PowerEdge M910 and M610 blade servers featuring Intel Xeon processors.
The company has virtualized the majority of its applications and is currently running VMware ESXi 4.0 hypervisor architecture, with plans to move to VMware vSphere 5.0 virtualization platform. We wanted to consolidate onto a storage area network and, in consultation with Dell, we evaluated the Dell EqualLogic storage array. The iSCSI technology met our requirements for an easy-to-administer, highly scalable storage environment and made our decision very easy, says Gokul. Training was provided by Dell and, due to the ease of use of iSCSI SAN technology, the team was quickly up and running.
Staying ahead of competition and increasing satisfaction
Texmo has improved both partner and customer satisfaction through providing fast, reliable billing processes and a high performing company web portal that can meet the demands of heavy users. System uptime means partners and customers are assured of rapid order fulfilment and ease in their dealings with the company, which has encouraged greater sales and deeper relationships with Texmo.
As a result of this ease of maintenance, the Texmo IT team now has the time required to develop new tools to support their partners further, such as mobile applications and an authorized service center portal.
Furthermore, Texmo management can measure the tangible benefits achieved from investing in technology. We have achieved significant savings through moving to the Dell solution. As a result of the efficiencies achieved in business performance, the management teams response to investing in new technology is very fast. The benefits to our business from the underlying technology we use are now clearly visible to them, says Gokul.
Data backup time reduces by 95 percent
Texmo wanted to automatically schedule and create storage-based volume snapshots while ensuring business continuity for users. With the consolidated storage solution applications kept online, Auto-Snapshot Manager enables fast online local backups and quick restoration of virtual machines.
Gokul comments, When we take a snapshot or a clone of a virtual machine on the Dell EqualLogic storage solution, we replicate to our disaster recovery site where further backups can occur, which ensures there is no impact on performance. When the data is needed, the team can retrieve it quickly with minimum impact on user productivity. Gokul explains, We can retrieve data by restoring the snapshot within 10 minutes if we receive a call from a user. From the snapshot, we can select the exact file to be restored to the user, so the process is incredibly efficient.
Texmo completes daily scheduled snapshots for system backup. Each weekend the entire volume of snapshots is cloned and then replicated to the disaster recovery site, a process that is now far more efficient now that reliance on detached USB drive storage has been eliminated. With our upgraded storage solution, the backup time has been dramatically reduced to 30 minutes. Previously the backup had to be completed at night using almost 60 external USB hard drives, which would take 12 hours, adds Gokul.
Improved business agility
With all virtual servers running on the iSCSI SAN solution, Texmo can quickly create new virtual machines and scale storage on demand to ensure efficient utilization of resources. We had space constraints that severely prevented our growth and constrained our users. For example, we had strict file size limits in place for each user with additional space requiring IT approval, which required a further layer of administration, says Gokul.
Now the team can add disks and additional storage arrays as needed, and has become highly responsive to the needs of the business. Disk provisioning is lightning fast compared to our decentralized storage. A task that previously took around 30 minutes is now completed within one to two minutes, Gokul says.
Billing efficiency improves by 50 percent
User efficiency has improved significantly through superior application performance due to the scalability and high availability offered by the iSCSI SAN solution. The IT team can optimize the way data is stored so employees have faster access to applications, efficiently eliminating system delays and unfulfilled orders.
We dont even realise that billing has started as this task now has zero impact on our upgraded storage infrastructure. As a result, we have experienced a 50 percent improvement in the speed of invoice generation, which in turn has enhanced our speed of processing orders, says Gokul.
Reduction of administration time by 50 percent
Through the elimination of manual tasks involving the provisioning of additional storage, the 15 member IT team at Texmo has saved large amounts of administration time. Gokul explains, Weve definitely noticed changes in our IT teams behaviour with the deployment of the storage solution. With improved performance and automation of what were previously time-consuming manual tasks, we have reduced our administration time by approximately 50 percent. As a result the team is now more focused on improving production cycles and business operations.
We can now dedicate more time to on-going research and development projects to understand how we can use the technology more effectively and improve the way we do business, comments Gokul. Texmo employees need to keep the business running smoothly through consistent access to line-of-business systems such as ERP software. To ensure maximum uptime the IT team uses Dell ProSupport with Mission Critical, 4-hour onsite response service.
As a manufacturing company partnering with third parties selling our products, we need to be able to guarantee system availability. We face strong competition and, if our system performance causes delays, our dealers can go elsewhere. Dell ProSupport provides us the peace of mind that, should we have an issue, it will be resolved without any impact on our partners and customers, says Gokul.
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