Enercon’s clean green energy

Enercon India Limited, a manufacture and marketer of wind turbine generators, has consolidated eight physical servers to two HP blade servers and implemented networked storage using HP EVA 4000. It will help Enercon in reducing equipment costs of windmills as well as power and cooling cost of its data center, says Akhtar Pasha

Enercon India Limited is engaged in the manufacturing, installation, service, maintenance, and marketing of wind turbine generators in India. It offers wind energy converters and concrete tower segments. The company is also engaged in the identification of sites and development of projects. In addition, it offers customer survey and spare parts services, as well as financial services for setting up of wind energy projects in India and internationally. The company also offers heavy machinery and has 75 machines installed in remote locations.

Kishore Banerjee, Head-IT & MIS, Enercon India Limited, stated, “Our project size is huge—both in terms of sizing & scope and costing. We use multiple ERP products that are deployed in decentralized environment and each business processes were operating in silos, which was resource intensive. For example, application used for approval procedure, document management and expense management system was not integrated leading to operational delays and leading to inefficiencies. Additionally, we have a huge workforce of 3,500 employees and over 1,000 other people in supply chain and contractors deployed in various project sites in different locations. Keeping a track of their work, expense, etc., was complex task. “

Tracking and monitoring projects— a tough ask

Enercon has a large workforce and many of them used to travel extensively to the project site. Keeping a track of the materials procured at the site was a tedious task that required several rounds of approval going back and forth. Additionally, the company was using a large number of legacy applications to approve projects, employee self service, document management, expense management and more. All the official communications were done through IBM Lotus Notes.

Second issue with the legacy applications was that none of them were tightly integrated leading to data duplication and manual consolidation of data, which slowed down the decision support system. Additionally, Banerjee said, “We kept on adding servers to our data center (DC) as our new application requirement grew to support business growth, which resulted in a server farm—that required additional cost to manage and maintain it. In total, Enercon had about eight servers at its DC operating at different utilization levels.”

When the cost of managing these servers spiraled and became complex to manage, Enercon looked at technologies that can not only reduce the TCO but also gave them the option to consolidated their storage and move the DAS to networked storage architecture so that they can plan their future DR and BC planning.

Server and storage consolidation

There were at least eight servers that were running at different applications at poor utilization levels such as SAP ERP, Oracle app server, e-mail server as Vayu Batra, BlackBerry app, Internet Proxy, network management server and security and like.

Banerjee said, “As our business grew we kept on addition computing resources over the years and ended up a large server farm, which was becoming difficult to manage. Additionally, we ran out the data center space. There was space constraint as we were not able to grow our ceiling space beyond 100 sq ft.” He continued that this business hurdle prompted them to look for technologies that could help them save DC space, power and cooling costs. Banerjee added, “Since we ourselves promote green clean energy through wind energy, we wanted our technology for the DC to be green as well and meet the emission norms in all grounds.” As a policy, Enercon India had always invested in the latest enterprise technologies, be it for hardware or software.

The company wanted to plan its business continuity strategy by having consolidated networked storage architecture so that it could set-up a disaster recover site in Bangalore. The DR site at Bangalore would then become the replicating center for Enercon India. For its networked storage deployment, Enercon showed faith in HP EVA 4400 storage system. Banerjee said, “We have about 200 users who log into the application systems accessing data [read/write] and generates reports such accounts, project analysis, inventories, stocks, sales, etc., simultaneously which puts pressure on databases and storage infrastructure. We wanted a storage sub-system that would offer very high storage IPOS for read/write. EVA 4400 allowed us to size/plan our capacities for handling high performance for applications at a much better price point.”

Additionally, Enercon bought two blade servers from HP BL 870C (as application and database servers) and one BL 860C server (standby application server) and consolidated all its eight servers on HP BL 870C. Banerjee added, “Managing 200 users’ workflow and ERP application is so much easy on blade servers than the traditional tower/rack servers. We can also add application/users horizontally as our business requirement scales in future.”

The entire infrastructure was ready [blade servers and networked storage] in October 2008 and functioned smoothly.

New infrastructure to help reduce equipment costs

Banerjee is confident that the new infrastructure [blade servers and networked storage] would give more RoI that will help Enercon to reduce the cost of the products. He said, “We expect that IT cost per unit of Wind Energy Convertor (WEC), which is nothing but the end product, to reduce to 10-15% in the next 4-5 years with our new infrastructure.”

The company has not noticed any increase in the power envelope and cooling expenditure. In other words, Enercon is now getting significant server performance without increasing its utility bills. Eventually over a period of time, it will save power and cooling costs for Enercon. Banerjee explained, “Earlier, viewing a Purchase Order used to take 5-10 minutes depending upon the workload on the servers, which now take 2-3 seconds. Similarly, reports on inventories used to take very long time to prepare such as status of inventories at various locations, etc. The search used to take a long time as it had to look into various databases in different applications and it was a time consuming task. Additionally, this reporting tool was a resource hungry application. Post deployment, users have noticed higher throughput.”

Since EVA 4400 allowed Enercon India to have additional 30-40% capacity, all it needs is to add additional storage disks when its storage requirement soar up or add/upgade RAM/or add processors to its blade servers whenever they want to add additional applications/workloads/users. The new infrastructure can scale to meet its computing requirement for the next 3-4 years.

akhtar.pasha@expressindia.com