Manufacturing

As manufacturing organizations continue to globalize, they must collaborate with a steadily increasing number of suppliers, distributors, customers, and field operations staff. This collaboration relies extensively on the use of information technology in order to automate supply chains, provide online customer support and deliver information and collaboration tools to their sales organizations. IT is under pressure to deliver the required business functionality and support the growth in transaction volume, all while keeping costs under control. Faced with these challenges, IT must remain determined not to compromise on meeting consistently high SLAs!

This medical equipment manufacturer required the sales portal to grow from 1,500 users to over 10,000 users in 6 months. This pivotal application must be highly secure, available, and responsive to changing sales activity levels and business needs. However, IT had deployed the portal on a cluster of 40 small servers, and this traditional scale-out deployment had grown beyond its initial configuration and was posing critical short-term challenges:

• Poor Responsiveness. The application's peak capacity fell well short of the sales force's workload demands causing user dissatisfaction and impacting sales productivity. Each application instance had hit its maximum scalability limit, constrained by the memory heap size which could not grow beyond 2 GB without creating unacceptably long garbage collection pauses. Adding more instances was not an option—the existing architecture could not scale any larger and maintain coherency.

• Data Center Overload. The data centers were already cracking at the seams under the power and cooling requirements for all the existing hardware, and the electricity bill had tripled from last year. There was no way to add more servers in the datacenter in order to support the growth.

• High TCO. Total cost of ownership for the sales portal, (including hardware, administration and facilities costs), was high and steadily increasing. To remain competitive and deal with flat operating budgets, IT had to reduce TCO and achieve better cost control.

Something had to change and yet many things could not change. Sound familiar? You're not alone.

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New Approach, New Opportunities - No Risk, No Change, No Disruption

This medical equipment manufacturer turned to Azul to help develop a plan that would scale its sales portal and complement the existing infrastructure using Azul Compute Appliances. With no changes or upgrades required to the application and middleware or existing servers and storage, three Azul Compute Appliances were quietly introduced to the network. Designed from the ground up to provide unprecedented Java™ scalability and efficiency, the Azul solution enabled the application to support 600% growth in the number of users, while reducing infrastructure costs by 30%, and delivering fast, consistent response times.  Specifically, the Azul approach yields the following benefits:

• 600% More Users with Consistent & Fast Response Times. Each application instance, previously limited to running on a memory heap no larger than 2GB, is now able to utilize 20 GB of memory without pausing. This was achieved with Pauseless Garbage Collection from Azul, the industry’s only hardware-assisted garbage collector. The result? Each application instance can support 7 times more users, enabling the sales portal to support the required 10,000 users while consistently delivering under 200 millisecond response times.

• 50% Less Data Center Power and Cooling. Power and cooling requirements were decreased from 30 kW to less than 15 kW, freeing up datacenter power and cooling capacity for new innovative applications that will support future revenue opportunities.

• Reduced 3-year Total Cost of Ownership by 30%. The 3-year TCO is reduced from $3.5M down to $2.4M. The 5-year TCO looks even better. Better hardware utilization (through more efficient near real-time sharing of capacity), lower administration costs (due to 50% fewer systems and OS instances), and 50% less power and cooling and space requirements all represent permanent savings that go straight to the bottom line.

Extensively tested and delivering incredible ROI: that’s an unbeatable combination. Network attached processing is simple to use and deploy, and will change the way you think about compute capacity.

Contact us today at sales@azulsystems.com or call 650.230.6650 to learn how we can improve your business.