RMZ Corp Modernizes IT, Streamlines Operational Efficiency and Optimizes Scalability With Converged Hitachi Solution

Overview

Challenge

• Keep up with the growing business needs.

Solution

• The converged solution from Hitachi provided a high-performance platform for enterprise resource processing (ERP) that can support current and future growth.

Outcome

• Seamless scaling capabilities.
• Enterprise-class reliability and manageability.
• Virtualization of external disparate storage systems.

Challenge

RMZ Corp is a leading Indian corporate real estate developer, with diversified interests in various real estate segments. Having established itself as a leading player in the development of office spaces, RMZ Corp has expanded its road map into the areas of retail, residential and hospitality. The real estate giant was looking to accelerate growth and therefore wanted to enhance its IT systems by moving its existing ERP application to an enterprise-class solution. Boosting its IT systems to an enterprise-class solution would also help the company to keep pace with the anticipated growth.

Head of Information Technology at RMZ Corp, C. Balasubramanian, explained: “With our business growth and expansion, we expected data storage and data management challenges. We required a high-performance platform that could support current and future growth.”

The existing ERP solution at RMZ was not able to cater to its growing business needs. With increased investments and business expansion being planned, there was a pressing need to ensure its ERP solution supported all departments, provided greater automation and transparency, and helped to further streamline business functions. RMZ was in the lookout for a platform that guaranteed reliability, availability, scalability and performance to ensure optimal performance of its SAP applications.

The SAP Business Suite powered by HANA was a critical application that impacted every department within RMZ Corp. Therefore, the company required best-in-class support and service capabilities from the hardware vendor that they selected.

Solution

RMZ Corp selected SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA to replace its existing home-grown ERP application. The ERP solution encompasses all business functions, including supply chain management, partner management, material planning, accounting, human resources, legal and contracts. Given the mission-critical nature of the application, RMZ carefully selected Hitachi Unified Compute Platform for the SAP HANA Platform (UCP for SAP HANA). The solution is composed of Hitachi Compute Blade (CB) 500 servers and Hitachi Unified Storage VM. It can scale from 512GB appliances to 6TB appliances in the scale-up model and up to 32TB on the scale-out model, without disrupting existing infrastructure or implementing new infrastructure. The SAP application servers were consolidated on three CB 500 servers using VMware Virtualization. RMZ opted for SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) for its SAP HANA deployment model as opposed to the more conventional appliance-based model. The TDI approach provided flexibility and choice that RMZ required for its deployment.

The local Hitachi Global Services Solutions (GSS) team was involved from the pre-sale phase of the project through the post-sale implementation, which was conducted flawlessly. The results exceeded the key performance indicators laid out by SAP. Balasubramanian commented, “Now whenever we need to scale, we can upgrade by adding blades instead of having to disrupt or replace the entire compute and storage appliance fabric, thanks to Hitachi.”

Outcome

Hitachi’s common building block approach ensured that RMZ received a unique value proposition and tailor-made solutions in the form of seamless scaling capabilities. By choosing the Hitachi solution, RMZ Corp has ensured reliability and application availability on its critical workloads. Furthermore, RMZ was able to successfully virtualize its UCP for SAP HANA environment on VMware. The combination of SAP HANA and UCP for SAP HANA delivers the performance that is required to make smarter and faster business decisions; it dramatically reduces the traditional delays between operations and analytics, thus enabling RMZ Corp to gain near-real-time reports and insights. Moreover, the platform is easy and simple to use, and hence not much retraining is required.

Balasubramanian concluded, “Since implementing Hitachi’s UCP for SAP HANA within our IT system, our data storage and management have been easy and smooth. The scalability of UCP for SAP HANA plays a crucial role in helping RMZ Corp to manage its exponential growth.”

By opting for the Hitachi solution, RMZ Corp has clearly secured distinct advantages. Hitachi’ long-standing partnership and collaboration with SAP, both as a customer and as a partner, were key factors in RMZ’s decision. This meant that the relationship between the two companies is time tested and, therefore, RMZ Corp stands to gain from this lasting relationship.