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Automobile: A Cutting-edge Solution

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Chakan based Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers (MVML) is a manufacturing hub for heavy and light commercial vehicles, SUVs, pick-up vehicles, and 4-wheeler vehicles for domestic and export business. Spread across a 700-acre campus, MVML currently has 14 major shops in its phase I while it plans to add additional 20+ shops in phase II.

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The Infrastructure

Like any large manufacturing hub, the IT infrastructure at MVML too was developed with high redundancy for catering to overall business requirements and providing resource availability to critical business applications.

The architecture and the solution currently deployed was selected to cater to the future requirements.

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Copper cables were replaced by fiber cables in the server consolidation stage. By operating a virtualized environment (VMware) on the server end, MVML thereby reduces physical hardware and saves power, space, green gases, and cost.



Crossing the Hurdle

Thanks to the exponential increase of data usage per annum, the IT team was expected to struggle with an explosive data growth; this was compounded by the need to ensure data security, accuracy, and availability from the compliance viewpoint.

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Meanwhile, the infrastructure has to be open and scalable for handling the future growth; hosting of critical repository servers for each shop; high efficiency of servers and applications; and managing the storage space requirement for hosting new services on the fly.



The Solution

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The manufacturing process was designed to run on an automated mode using the Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), which would ride on the IT backbone across 14 shops. The applications rollout for this demanded 40 physical servers to host the whole gamut of process control systems.

Therefore the IT team devised an out-of-the-box solution with an innovative approach. "We consolidated the requirement and virtualized everything, thereby reducing it to 6 physical servers on the VM platform which was thereafter hosted on a storage box resulting in a saving of `2 crore," beams proudly Venkatakrishnan. To support the design, Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) was chosen to blend with the overall architecture.

"We selected this platform keeping in mind the long-term strategy, so that there will be no need to change the architecture. All applications that were running decentralized, got consolidated to a single platform; we also migrated data to the current platform keeping in mind the future requirements," says Venkatakrishnan.

MVML deployed AMS 2100 for its mission-critical 'Factory Automation' application. In its deployment landscape, MVML includes multiple virtual servers on very few scalable physical servers. Storage is provisioned from AMS 2100 using iSCSI interface. Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software provides thin provisioning capabilities and also delivers the required performance through wide-stripping data across all the disks in the designated pool.

In addition, Hitachi In-System Replication software bundle assists MVML in creating quick snapshots of production data for development and testing purposes.

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