Preserving Agri-Wealth

As a research-driven
organization, Krishidhan Seeds India is a pioneer agricultural
biotech company that delivers high-quality seeds for the Indian seeds
market. The company has thrived and eventually become a global player
in the agricultural biotech seed industry. Krishidhan's seed
products include cotton, cereals, oils and vegetables that boast of
improved yield and are able to withstand harsh weather conditions.
And apart from seeds, the company can also take care of the needs of
farmers related
to fertilizers and nutrients. Krishidhan added a feather to its cap
when it became the first in India to migrate its IT infrastructure
onto SAP's Enterprise Resource Planning suite running on IBM's
AIX platform. The migration was aimed to equip its sales and
distribution channels with enhanced computing tools and integrate it
with all other departments.

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

Four years ago, the
company had shifted all its operations to SAP's Online Real Time
system that sits above the IBM AIX platform to connect 35 locations
from its headquarters to production and processing plants to sales
offices. Krishidhan's technical team mapped all the business
processes onto My SAP ECC 6.0 with data stored at a common IBM DB2
database. A private virtual network was put in place to ensure a 24x7
business. A No Single Point of Failure (NSPOF) strategy was
implemented company-wide, enabling dual-mode operation.

Vinodanand Jha, group IT
head, Krishidhan Seeds India said, “Our products are distributed
worldwide through a network of channel partners and distributors, and
we have 32 sales offices connected to the headquarters' central
database for sales management, delivery, and collection. Hence 24x7
availability is essential to perform our daily task and deliver
necessary reports,” he said. Jha added that with thousands of
transactions passing through its system on a daily basis, an
unexpected disaster could result in a direct and damaging loss to the
business. Krishidhan's system was available online only for data
backup on a staggered basis. Fortunately, no disasters occurred in
the 3-plus years prior to implementing a more aggressive disaster
recovery environment. “A disaster does not pick up the phone
and call to tell us it is here. We need to be proactive,” said Jha.

SOLUTION

One year ago, Krishidhan's
technical team began evaluating the potential disaster recovery and
data replication tools
available on the IBM platform. Having a close relationship with IBM
limited its choice of disaster recovery and data replication tools,
but Krishidhan based its criteria on reliability, availability, and
security. Having High Availability Clusters Multiprocessing (HACMP)
on IBM's AIX platform proved an added benefit. And though the
company was satisfied with HACMP solution for high local
availability, it felt vulnerable to site related issues. After
evaluating various solutions available in the market, Kirshidhan
decided to go in for Vision Solution's disaster recovery software,
Double-Take RecoverNow and run it on IBM's AIX platform.
“Double-Take RecoverNow for AIX was our choice as it offered the
simultaneous ability to retrieve and replicate data in case of a
disaster without going offline. And it was easy to use,” said Jha.
Krishidhan worked with Vision Solutions' partners, Avnet Technology
Solutions to deploy Double-Take RecoverNow for AIX and Trimax IT
Infrastructure & Services to host the servers.

Sunil Golani, director,
technology and solution practices, Avnet Technology Solutions, said,
“Avnet Technology Solutions acted as a solutions distributor with
regards to this project, wherein we have helped our channel partners
to deploy and deliver solutions for their end customers. In this
particular case, our channel partner was Trimax IT Infrastructure &
Services. We helped Trimax in designing, sizing, and delivering the
solution and implementing it on site. This was our overall role in this
deployment.”
“We are the distributor of Vision Solutions and also a partner of
IBM. Vision Solutions was our choice to deliver the DR solution.
Trimax was the face of the customer. In terms of the transaction,
Avnet sold the solution to Trimax who in turn sold it to the
customer,” added Golani.

Double-Take RecoverNow is
a single solution to bring the physical and virtual data protection
together. It replicates efficiently at the byte level to reduce the
impact of data protection on physical or virtual hosts, and is
designed to replicate over limited bandwidth connections, enabling
true disaster recovery capabilities. Moreover, Double-Take RecoverNow
for AIX acted as a true continuous data protection (CDP) solution
that delivered nearly instantaneous recovery of the applications and
data at the push of a button. Unlike traditional backup solutions, it
enabled the company to recover data from any point in time, easily
and immediately. Golani further stated, “Double-Take Recover- Now
is a DR solution which is tailor-made and built for IBM's AIX
platform. It provides real-time data replication for IBM-based
systems irrespective of what is the application. In this case, SAP
was the application and we built the real-time replication to the DR
site in Bengaluru. In addition, this solution provided continuous
data protection (CDP) to the customer helping them to reduce RPO and
RTO.”

REAPING THE BENEFITS

Double-Take RecoverNow
proved to be a reliable, cost-efficient and user-friendly choice for
Krishidhan. Furthermore, the company was able to gain a competitive
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) in
comparison to the previous 12 hours to 12 weeks depending on the kind
of disaster. Jha added that Krishidhan met its File Systems-level
backup requirement with the new RTO between 3 and 5 hours by
implementing Double-Take RecoverNow.

More over, the HACMP
cluster on the production server also guaranteed NSPOF at the
hardware level. Plugging Double-Take RecoverNow into the HACMP
cluster ensured that users would enjoy uninterrupted access to data
locally and remotely in a protected environment. “As a user of
Double-Take RecoverNow for AIX, we are very pleased with the almost
real-time data protection and disaster recovery capability that it
has given our organization. We are very much satisfied with its
performance,” said Jha. The integration of Double-Take RecoverNow
within Krishidhan's IT infra structure also secured the mission
critical systems and improved the company's overall disaster
recovery strategy. “The partnership between Vision Solutions as the
supplier, Avnet as the executor, Trimax as the
host and Krishidhan as user, demonstrated an excellent example of
teamwork for a successful implementation,” added Jha.

“Vision Solutions was
quite supportive in this entire project considering the initial
hiccups we faced as the implementation
partner. Since this was our first implementation in the SAP
environment, we faced a few challenges during the deployment phase.
We received good support from Vision's technical team out of Hong
Kong in terms of dealing with both trivial and larger issues and
keeping the customer's confidence high,” said Golani. The
challenges faced were in terms of the prerequisites on service pack
levels, patches not in order, replication of database, and typical
installation issues amongst others. The team systematically put all
the before mentioned challenges in order and went about installing
the solution. Post implementation, the customer has a done a few DR
drill and is very happy with the overall performance of the solution.