Textiles: Drape and Trade

Madura Fashion & Lifestyle has the largest network in the apparel industry in India, with a presence in over 1,500 multi-brand outlets and over 300 shop-in-shops across 125 department stores in India.

The Storage Challenge

As Madura F&L began adding various brands to its portfolio, it was dependent on varied applications and database, on multiple storage sub-systems. Business applications like SAP, Oracle Retek for retail, and document management systems data were stored in separate SAN storage systems. This resulted in creating information silos across the enterprise.

Data back-up was taking much longer and add to it the challenge of managing a mixed environment. Therefore the company expanded their back-up capacity, leading to significant increase in their operating costs. Madura now needed a new, long-term storage strategy.

The Solution: XIV Storage System

Madura F&L chose IBM XIV Storage System with 27TB usable capacity. This storage system was connected with all the ERP and supporting applications, which are hosted across hardware platforms including the power series, Wintel X platform, and Sun Sparc.

Assisted by IBM's hardware implementation team, Madura F&L migrated the production environment onto the XIV Storage System and integrated it with the existing server infrastructure. The entire project ranging from installation to nearly 20TB of production data migration was completed in just 75 days. A migration plan was put in place to ensure minimum disruption to the business.

XIV Storage offered a higher asset utilization rate, improved response time, and accelerated storage provisioning for new applications. Using thin provisioning feature of XIV, the team was able to free up storage space, which was earlier locked due to over-provisioning.

During their pre-sales engagement with IBM, Madura ensured all issues and risks of migration were well documented.

The Benefits

The XIV Storage System reduced administrative overhead through automation of load balancing, higher capacity utilization, and complex tasks. It offered a fully scalable solution across features including disk capacity, interfaces, cache, CPU power, and internal bandwidth, allowing system performance to grow in proportion to capacity.

The XIV's snapshot functionality provided the software development team with instant, non-disruptive copies of production systems. Prior to implementation of XIV, Madura had 3 storage units, which were 3 different racks in the data center. Today, all this has been consolidated into a single storage rack, which in turn helps in reducing footprint and keeping the power and cooling costs low.

Signs off NP Singh, CIO, Madura F&LIBM's XIV Storage System provides a powerful, fully integrated set of software capabilities including snapshots and thin provisioning. We achieved over 13,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) and all this paved way for a reduction in AMC cost by `12 lakh per annum as well as savings in power and cooling consumption of nearly `6.5 lakh per annum.