Mahindra & Mahindra: Consolidating into Top Gear

Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) is the flagship company of the
Mahindra Group. Set up in 1945 to make general-purpose utility vehicles for the
Indian market, M&M soon branched out into manufacturing agricultural
tractors and light commercial vehicles (LCVs). The company has recently started
a separate sector, Mahindra Systems and Automotive Technlogies (MSAT) in order
to focus on developing components as well as offering engineering services. As
makers of the Armada and the Scorpio, Mahindra is a name to reckon with the
Indian auto sector.

The leitmotif behind M&M going in for SAN deployment was
consolidation. With eight plants running across the country, Mahindra's entire
IT architecture used to be decentralized; consequently the automotive giant was
using disparate islands of DAS. However, with the company growing exponentially,
the direct corollary was a data explosion, and having disparate DAS
infrastructure to support this volume of data was no longer possible.

According to Vijay Mahajan, Mahindra embarked on the
consolidation route about one and a half year back; "and that was when we
felt the need for SAN," he adds. However, the shift from DAS to SAN did not
happen overnight.

There was a technical evaluation done of the top storage brands
besides seeking inputs from Gartner experts. Only after this due diligence,
Mahindra opted for four boxes of CX700 SAN as its first step towards moving into
a consolidated architecture. Out of these four CX700 boxes, two are supporting
the SAP 4.7 ERP running on both Mahindra's production as well as DR site.
Primarily, these support 6,500 IT users out of which 2,000 are dedicated SAP
users. With a single SAP server now co-located across the production as well as
DR site, the CX700 boxes along with IBM-Unix servers have really set Mahindra on
the path of consolidation.

The other two CX700 boxes are located at Mahindra's R&D
centers at Kandivli in Mumbai and Nashik where nearly 600 designers working on
Teamcenter applications are generating huge amount of data. With nearly 6TB
capacity, these CX700 support the voluminous engineering and design data
generated from these centers. "Considering our previous experience with EMC
as storage for our SAP applications, the choice for the R&D applications was
easy," informs Mahajan.

Each year, the company regularly goes on an infrastructure
upgrade; in fact Mahajan is now contemplating about DMX for two more SAN boxes
planned for the R&D centers in Nashik and Pune. In fact, the company is
planning for more SAN infrastructure-to support the company's SAP CRM system
for all dealers, Mahindra plans to opt for two more CX700 boxes in about two
months. Also on anvil are plans to have SAN for business warehousing and
exchange server for mails. These again are part of the move towards
consolidation-there are plans to consolidate the Exchange architecture that is
currently distributed, while the business data now primarily resides on DAS.
"Obviously weightage would be given to the existing vendors," informs
Mahajan that could only spell good news for EMC.

Rajneesh De


rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in