Farming just got better with SAP

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. KrishidhanÂ’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 SAPÂ’s Enterprise Resource Planning suite running on IBMÂ’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 SAPÂ’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.

KrishidhanÂ’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." 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, KrishidhanÂ’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 IBMÂ’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 pro tection 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 realtime 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. Moreover, the HACMP cluster on the pro duction server also guar anteed 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.