HPCL-Mittal Energy Limited (HMEL)

Story Details

Formed in 2007 from a joint venture between Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL) and Mittal Energy Investment Pte Ltd, HPCL-Mittal Energy Limited (HMEL) was established to build a new oil refinery in India. While HMEL had the support of the two partners, it was a greenfield company, loaning manpower from its partners, and starting business essentials like office space and technology. The HMEL team initiated the process to establish the company's own operating infrastructure including resourcing, practices, and IT in 2007.

One of the company's first steps was to establish its own Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, which would help HMEL define and manage processes for a number of tasks, including finance, projects and human resources. In July 2008, the company selected SAP and licensed seven SAP ERP modules to support its operations: Financials, Controlling, Materials Management, Human Resources, Project Systems, ERP, Enterprise Portal, GRC, MDM, PI & BIW based on ECC 6.0.

To implement the required modules successfully, HMEL needed to procure the necessary hardware. HMEL knew the chosen hardware solution would need to support the predicted number of 650 users when the oil refinery went into production in 2011, and as the company ramps up over the next two to three years. HMEL gathered requirements for running the selected SAP modules, and determined both current and forecast capacity. To be able to scale over the next four years, the company realized that it would need an additional 40 percent capacity in its servers and storage.

HMEL opted to use RISC-based servers due to their reliability and scalability, and identified Sun, and other two leading vendors who could provide RISC-based solutions. To save space and minimize power requirements, the company wanted to virtualize its end solution rather than run a number of physical servers for individual applications. HMEL chose to use software partitioning over hardware partitioning to provide maximum flexibility in a consolidated server environment. HMEL wanted to deploy the minimum number of servers as the IT team was mindful of the cooling requirements of large server deployments and was seeking power efficiency.

With its requirements clearly defined, HMEL invited Sun and two other leading vendors to participate in the selection process for its new IT infrastructure. The company reviewed available benchmarks from the solution that is running on Oracle and SAP, for the three proposed server solutions, with the Sun solution offering high performance. Based on submitted proposals, Sun also had the lowest space requirements of the three vendors, with just two racks required to meet HMEL's needs as opposed to three to five racks for the competing solutions. Sun proposed Solaris 10 Containers to meet the company's virtualization requirements.

HMEL performed detailed analysis on the power demands of each proposed solution and found that the power consumption costs for the Sun solution would be $20,000 to $30,000 less per annum than the other vendors, and there were significant savings in other areas. The company realized that they were getting the required performance levels from Sun, with a solution that required less space and was more power efficient. When evaluating the total cost of the solution, they discovered that Sun would cost 40 percent less than the nearest competitor and, when taking into account the additional scalability provided, the actual difference would be 60-70 percent. based on these factors, HMEL selected Sun to provide its hardware.

HMEL deployed a total of eight Sun servers including a cluster of two Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 servers on which to run the SAP modules for the production environment. The T5440 servers include Chip Multithreading technology, giving the performance and reliability required for mission-critical applications. The Sun solution also provides the necessary scalability for HMEL to expand its IT infrastructure as the company grows.

HMEL uses Solaris 10 Containers to increase utilization of the servers and add further savings in power, space and cooling, by running the application and the database for each module in separate containers. Solaris 10 Containers use flexible, software-defined boundaries which allow the creation of many environments on a single server, as well as giving administrators the ability to allocate system resources to individual containers. This provides the one application per server environment while consolidating those applications onto shared hardware resources.

For storage, HMEL uses a Sun StorageTek 6140 array, which has a total of 8 TB capacity, and the Sun StorageTek SL500 Modular Library System with 100 available tape slots for tape backups. The Sun infrastructure easily supports HMEL's entire production environment and provides the required 40 percent excess capacity for scalability.

HMEL has realized several key benefits from deploying the Sun solution. The company's initial investment in the IT infrastructure was low in comparison to estimates provided by other vendors, which means the amortized cost will be lower over the next few years. The Sun solution is power efficient and does not generate excess heat, which leads to reductions in power and cooling costs and shall go a long way in protecting the environment. Finally, all eight servers are accommodated in just two racks instead of the three to five racks quoted by other vendors.

After several months of operating the Sun solutions HMEL has experienced no unplanned downtime and is impressed with the reliability of the new solution, and are satisfied with Sun's Support Services.

The company also discovered that Sun was the most cost-efficient in planning upgrade investments so HMEL can manage the cost of scaling its IT infrastructure. Looking forward, HMEL recognizes that the scalability of the Sun solution gives ample additional capacity to handle business requirements as the company grows and more applications or SAP modules can be added to handle the specific requirements of the oil refinery. The company realised that they were getting far more computing power and better technology at a lower cost than the competing solutions.