Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories gets a digital boost

Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd. (DRL) is an integrated global pharmaceutical company committed to providing affordable and innovative medicines for healthier lives. The company has been leveraging digital technologies to optimize operations, elevate its business model and existing processes, and chart out new ways of competing differently in the marketplace.

To meet the above digital goals, one task needed to carry out by DRL’s IT team was to consolidate and upgrade its storage systems.

“Our existing storage system was nearing end-of-life, and so was the support provided by the OEM,” says B. Vijayaraghavan, Global Lead–Infrastructure Projects and Operations, Dr.Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd.

Pharma is a highly regulated industry, and DRL needed to ensure compliance with several legal requirements and standards, including the management of regulated content through every step of the products’ lifecycle. The company already had a standardized Electronic Document Management (EDM) system in place, based on Documentum, to control the creation and distribution of documentation across its plants.

“Documentum is critical to our business, and it required huge amount of compute resources and storage Input/ Output Operations Per Second (IOPS). In addition, the size and complexity of datasets was doubling every year,” informs Vijayaraghavan.

Like Documentum, many of its other important applications required extensive computational and data management capabilities. The existing storage system was unable to keep pace with performance requirements. In addition, DRL had multiple storage systems across its plants and wanted to consolidate. Around 50 percent of these storage systems were going to hit warranty expiry date, and the costs would only escalate if they went for renewal.

DRL had two options. They could extend the annual maintenance contract (AMC) and spend more year-on-year on renewing the warranty of its existing storage system or opt for a new solution.

GETTING THE STORAGE DOSE RIGHT

While DRL wanted a highly redundant storage solution that could meet the performance requirements and future business needs, it also wanted a solution that had the capability to run its SAP ERP and enabled its Software Defined data center strategy.

After evaluating a few storage providers on various parameters, DRL selected HPE’s 3PAR solution.

According to Vijayaraghavan, HPE’s solution aimed to integrate hardware infrastructure, software and services on a single platform. This would also enable the business to be well positioned for the adoption of private cloud. HPE’s solution would also pave way in their consolidation strategy to reduce administrative over head and Operational Expense. It allowed allocation and de-provisioning of compute, storage, and network resources for traditional business applications such as system and network management, data file transfer, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and security systems.

“Apart from meeting the requisite parameters of evaluation, HPE came up with a proposition that was unmatched. It became one of the key reasons to partner with them,” shares Vijayaraghavan.

CAPTURING VALUE, DRIVING RESULTS 

The value delivered from HPE’s 3PAR solutions has been multifold. It has helped DRL create a highly redundant storage infrastructure with zero-downtime for business. There has been ease of administration and swift provisioning that provides an advantage for upgrades on any new implementations.

The solution has allowed DRL to configure a flexible OS environment (with both RHEL and Windows) providing built-in high availability, container monitoring and security, and backup and restore functionality.

There has been optimal usage of storage with delivery of reports. Instead of distributed storage the hybrid solution with Flash and SSD helps to allocate resources appropriately. There have been lesser business disruptions due to outages from SAP and other critical apps that are hosted out of HPE’s storage solution.

“Our decision in continuing with HPE-3PAR storage product stands vindicated with its reliability, performance and ease of administration by hosting mission critical apps like ERP, Documentum and other GxP apps,” says Ritesh Mishra, Global Head, Infrastructure and Security, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Pvt. Ltd.

According to DRL, the ROI with HPE’s solution is around 18 percent year-on-year for the next five years. “So for the next five years we may invest in getting additional storage capacity but not on high-end storage systems,” says Vijayaraghavan.

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