Larger corporations continuously require the capability for systems to scale out and reduce the time to process information. Along with effective storage and high availability, the necessity for technology to run large and demanding workloads and reduce risk has become increasingly important to business.
Tiger Brands, a prominent consumer brands company in South Africa, required a robust solution to support their expansion into emerging markets.
SA Outsourcing, a leading IT solution provider, which has a long-standing relationship Tiger Brands, was successful in providing the appropriate solution to meet its requirements. The solution, one of the first to be commissioned in the country in a high availability status across two state-of-the-art data centres, used high-speed Cisco equipment to comply with the Datacentre 3.0 framework.
“SA Outsourcing has acquired the knowledge of more than 11 years of IT industry experience,” says Pedro Viudez, CEO of SA Outsourcing. Pedro goes on to explain: “By joining forces with cutting-edge technology brands such as Dell, EMC, Linux Redhat and Cisco, SA Outsourcing was able to assist Tiger Brands in reducing their energy consumption, server footprint, processing time and their total cost of ownership.”
Pedro states that the partnership, strongly positioned within the fast-moving consumer goods industry, meets the growing needs of this ever-changing, fast consumer goods industry.
By partnering with Tiger Brands and Dell, SA Outsourcing was able to successfully implement high performance Dell Blade servers as part of the consumer brands' data centre upgrade. SA Outsourcing identified that the blade servers were a critical component of the company's virtualisation strategy and database performance, and as such, selected rack-dense and energy efficient servers as the appropriate solution for Tiger Brands' demanding IT requirements.
“Uptime is of vital importance to any organisation and owing to their proven after-sales support services, we selected Dell as the logical solution,” Pedro elaborates.
As with any large corporation, Tiger Brands required a framework that would host their Oracle E-Business Suite on a RAC Environment. By upgrading to the latest Oracle DB RAC technology and running on a stretched Linux Redhat cluster, SA Outsourcing was able to deploy a cost-effective solution that offered increased performance with the benefits of stability, scalability and reliability.
This solution was delivered in accordance with Tiger Brands' requirements to create an enterprise cloud that was based on a high availability and an effective storage data centre to run large workloads with minimal downtime or impact on other parallel processes.
Storage, as another critical element for any large organisation, played a pivotal role in the success of this project. By partnering with EMC, SA Outsourcing provided a superior solution to Tiger Brands. EMC's powerful three-tiered storage solution provided a very efficient solution to meet Tiger Brands' growth requirements.
On SA Outsourcing's recommendation, Tiger Brands installed the latest VMax storage solution, which lead to substantial time and financial savings for the business. In addition, it was able to enable rapid information retrieval for BI with automated archiving processes within the organisation. The tiered storage solution with self-healing properties identifies hot spots and moves the data to enterprise flash disks for quicker retrieval, and to SATA discs for cheaper storage of 'cold' data.
“We have been very impressed with the performance of the new system. It has allowed us to run complex application software that has added enormous value to the business. Previously, the system was too slow to complete these important tasks. SA Outsourcing has played a valuable role in the architecture of the solution for our business,” says Darryl Thwaits, the CIO of Tiger Brands.
“As a result of the latest cutting-edge technology, SA Outsourcing, along with its partners, was successful in completing the Tiger Brands project with a unique and appropriate solution,” Pedro announced. “Due to the unique consulting expertise and broad knowledge of each client's niche market, we at SA Outsourcing are able to provide valuable service offerings to our clients.” Pedro adds: “This alliance allows SA Outsourcing to expand our knowledge to a wider range of consumer goods industry leaders, solving the complex challenges associated with this industry.”
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