Amara Raja Batteries plugs into IBM

INDIA: Amara Raja Batteries, one of the leading manufacturers of lead acid storage batteries for industrial and automotive applications in India, has selected IBM to implement a robust hardware platform to support their SAP implementation.

Amara Raja Batteries, after careful evaluation, chose IBM System Power6 570 servers with virtualization, DS 4700 Storage and Tivoli middleware for their server and storage requirements.

Amara Raja Batteries required a cost effective yet highly available solution at both the server and storage levels and has selected IBM’s hardware platform to run their SAP application. Apart from superior performance per core and the legendary reliability of the POWER based solution, it is the flexibility attribute that compelled Amara Raja Batteries to select IBM.

Amara Raja Batteries has chosen to deploy the SAP environment in a consolidated footprint wherein the company will use virtualization to define flexible server environments for different modules including Test and Development.

The ability to move about resources based on business needs dynamically, would give them the benefits of greater Return on Investment and utilization. All these result in tangible cost benefits to the business. In addition, adopting the platform will improve our operational excellence and IBM hardware and software would help enhance efficiency by incorporating automation elements for better manageability.

Jayakumar C., IT Head, Amara Raja Batteries, said: "Amara Raja Batteries is committed towards latest generation technologies by developing and manufacturing globally competitive, customer focused products of world class quality and introducing these products into relevant markets.

"We are committed to give our customers the benefits of newer technologies, without losing focus on our core business. We wanted to partner with the best technology advisor in the industry in order to leverage their expertise to lay the way for our future growth, while streamlining our operational costs."

Rahul Bindal, VP-Power Systems, Systems and Technology Group, IBM India/South Asia, added: "Amara Raja Batteries recognized and realized that they needed to build a robust infrastructure to address their current and future expansion plans.

"IBM POWER6 processor-based servers are designed to help clients implement a dynamic infrastructure. We will be able to provide Amara Raja Batteries with a combination of leadership performance, energy efficiency and flexible virtualization features that are designed to reduce cost, improve service and reduce risk – especially for mission critical applications and highly virtualized, consolidated operating environments."

The combination of more performance per core and more I/O and memory capacity and bandwidth per core of P570 servers helps clients to reduce the number of servers or the number of cores per server. Also, Power 570 servers are twice as efficient as competitive offerings. This has a major impact on reducing cost of server acquisition and total cost of ownership for the clients IT environment.