Simplicity and efficiency levels increase for RJ Corp with HPE’s hyperconvergence tech

In recent years, Hyperconvergence (HCI) has been making news as the technology of the future for enhancing IT processes. As the early adopters of the latest HCI tech, RJ Corp, a client of IGTPL, has improved business processes while saving enormous OPEX costs. Intensity Global Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (IGTPL) is one of the key players who has already performed implementation of SimpliVity, the hyperconvergence technology by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), for various businesses. Let’s take a closer look at the HCI infrastructure and how it has increased the revenue at RJ Corp with streamlined processes and optimised costs.

Optimisation of IT processes over the years

Looking back, the IT infrastructure of organisations began with legacy processes. The major purpose of IT infra has been to provide businesses with the capabilities to compute, network and store. The approach of using separate hardware elements for running business processes led to a lot of inefficiencies initially. Integrated technology solutions arrived and bundled up the functions to increase process efficiency. Still, that wasn’t enough for companies to grow or smoothly run businesses of scale. Convergent infrastructure came next. Here, organisations did receive considerable benefits compared to its predecessors. In converged systems, the components of the technology stack such as Hypervisor, Storage and Physical Servers got consolidated in a logical manner. However, the entire IT infrastructure was still not compact or efficient enough for the globalised businesses of today. Many companies continue to losing revenue by not performing timely technology upgrades. Hyperconvergence came in as the technology of the future. It is engineered to combine the capabilities of compute, network and store into a compact device that has several benefits including data efficiency. In HCI, the convergence takes place at the hypervisor level and that’s the reason it’s called Hyperconverged tech. Therefore, business revenue increases when the total cost of IT ownership reduces due to the optimisation offered by hyperconverged tech.

Challenges pushed RJ Corp for a Hyperconvergence upgrade

RJ Corp is a multinational company that was established two decades ago. The company is into several businesses such as beverages, retail, fast-food restaurants, ice-cream, dairy products, education and healthcare. When the legacy IT infrastructure was not adequate for the growing organisation, the company decided to explore converged infrastructure. The goal of the infrastructure upgrade was to minimise the cost of operations while getting an enhanced workflow.

The entire IT infrastructure of RJ Corp rested on a public cloud. Internally, it became a tad easier to manage technology. However, the ERP system that utilised the public cloud gradually turned out to be expensive. Several system inefficiencies emerged during that phase. The scalability capabilities of the business were restricted due to underperforming technology. Also, RJ Corp found it difficult to reach the desired performance levels. Also, the upgraded systems were not able to cope with the growth taking place across the organisation. The organisation’s needs weren’t met when it came to leveraging Business Intelligence tools, SAP, Dynamics and secondary sales tracking software across various business divisions. RJ Corp wanted a more robust IT environment to optimise the current performance and to improve scalability features. Also, challenges increased when the company felt restricted by the system to expand and scale up. Potential problems such as systems being compromised and the impact of a system crash became a huge concern for the company. 

Mission-critical apps were running in the virtualised environment. Data security and quick data backups were key to RJ Corp and its business functions. RJ Corp needed an immediate remedy to mitigate the identified risks. No doubt, the way ahead was Hyperconvergence tech for RJ Corp. When approached by RJ Corp for a suitable solution, Intensity Global Technologies Pvt. Ltd. studied the challenges and recommended HPE SimpliVity to overcome them. The proposed solution was going to stabilise the existing systems and deliver YoY efficiency. The implementation aimed to restore normalcy to support and operations as well as back-office functions. The transformed IT environment would significantly optimise the existing systems. And the organisation was already happy with the support provided by the HPE team. Additionally, RJ Corp’s existing converged systems were utilising HPE so it was a strategic move to use HPE SimpliVity for HCI implementation. Another major reason for choosing HPE SimpliVity was the OmniStack feature. OmniStack is hardware-based and provided an added benefit of backup that can be restored within seconds along with de-duplication and robust security. 

Inside HPE SimpliVity, the next-gen hyperconverged support system

In their January 2019 report, Gartner placed Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) as a leader in the Magic Quadrant under the Operations Support Systems category. HPE SimpliVity is the HCI tech portfolio for enterprises coming from the widely recognised business solutions brand, HP. Hyperconverged infrastructure by HPE focuses on creating compact local datacentres and consolidating resources from remote datacentres. Here, every resource can be easily managed with a single, centralised system across boundaries. Compared to convergence-based infrastructure, hyperconvergence boosts the speed of virtualised deployments and reduces the costs by minimising the complexity of the system. Also, HPE’s HCI tech makes it possible to backup as well as restore virtual machines in seconds. SimpliVity streamlines the IT infrastructure by combining the existing IT infrastructure and cutting-edge data services into an integrated all-flash solution. When it comes to cost, the investment is much lesser than other expensive hardware upgrades. HPE is so confident about the data efficiency of the HPE SimpliVity portfolio that they are giving a complete guarantee on an upgrade of the entire IT stack of a business. 

For businesses, HPE offers a policy-based VM-centric management system that increases productivity of system users and development teams through data mobility. HPE SimpliVity also provides an average improved data effectiveness of 52:1 across deployments. It is created to run virtualised tier-1 apps for different workloads while safeguarding data with built-in data security features. Recently, HPE introduced HPE Composable Fabric software-defined networking. By adding it to the HCI stack, businesses can scale up to 16 nodes/cluster as well as 96 nodes/federation. An optional software tool called HPE SimpliVity Rapid DR can be used for a guided disaster recovery planning and management capability. Another effective solution for forward-thinking businesses is the latest HPE SimpliVity 2600 platform that protects ROBOs with its built-in data efficiency features. 

Scalable HCI tech increases operational efficiency

HPE’s implementation of SimpliVity at RJ Corp was completed with minimal downtime of mission-critical business process. At RJ Corp, HPE SimpliVity now manages the workloads of SQL server, Windows Server OS, Microsoft Dynamics, Secondary Sales Application software, Backup application and Qlik Sense Business Intelligence tool. While several organisations are still thinking about IT infrastructure upgrades, RJ Corp took the leap to solve their problems. For RJ Corp, inadequate infrastructure was already posing as a hurdle in the growth of the business. Holding on to a public cloud would have led to more losses in the long term. As far as investing on an on-premise HCI solution was concerned, RJ Corp had already spent that much on Azure in a period of 2 years. 

Once HPE SimpliVity was successfully implemented, RJ Corp was able to develop an entire stack together with VMs in 30 minutes. The organisation witnessed a tremendous improvement in business processes with accessibility to more effective and easily manageable hardware. Operational efficiency benefits are clearly visible and therefore, RP Corp has secured a 3 years hardware, software and license support along with the solution from HPE. In addition to efficiency, RJ Corp has witnessed a reduction in operational expenses. The time to generate BI reports and make order entries has also decreased. Faster business processes are leading to cost savings and increased productivity.

“HPE SimpliVity enabled significant improvements in the areas of availability of VMs as and when required which earlier was taking months when procurement of hardware had to be done, data compression of ~40%, 50% rack size space saved in data centre, time saving (efficiency) of 40-50% which has resulted the organisation in doing more work in less time enabling teams to focus on more strategic work rather than managing day-to-day operations.”

Improved Profitability for RJ Corp

RJ Corp has already recovered 50% of the amount invested on the hyperconverged infrastructure upgrade. Also, the impact created by the HPE SimpliVity solution has encouraged RJ Corp to utilise the solution for its healthcare business. HPE SimpliVity will replace a data centre that has limited capacity and higher operational expenses. Also, HPE’s hardware is three times higher in capacity compared to the existing data centre being used in RJ Corp’s Healthcare business. Today, RJ Corp is happy with HPE’s SimpliVity solution and HPE Support team’s responsiveness when it comes to handling incidents. Also, RJ Corp’s 20TB database is running on HPE SimpliVity. 90% of RJ Corp group including Diagno Labs, Devyani Foods, and Varun Beverages are smoothly running on HPE SimpliVity. The organisation plans to use the same technology for powering their future businesses as well. 

On a concluding note, the IT industry is offering application-centric solutions and slowly moving away from a hardware-centric approach. Businesses are going global and leaders have to take decisions to leverage IT solutions beyond legacy processes. HCI tech uses a single hyperconverged node to deploy and manage processes. This, in turn, makes organisations ready for the future with business efficiencies across worldwide operations.

Upgrade your outdated and incompetent systems. Explore HPE SimpliVity to simplify complex business models and gain enormous business value through improved operations.

Viny Velayudhan