Leading smart meter manufacturer modernizes India
Genus Power Infrastructures Ltd. is the leading smart meter manufacturer in India, using proprietary technology to develop innovative and customized meter solutions for utility and energy boards.
Thanks to Genus’s smart meters, the traditional “meter reader” is a thing of the past; instead, the meters themselves digitally monitor consumption data, transmit that data to the energy provider and can be adjusted from afar as necessary.
Genus’s installation base surpassed 70 million meters across India, and the company wanted to implement SAP HANA in order to better control its transactional and analytical workloads. However, the company’s current IT infrastructure was not capable of meeting the storage requirements of SAP HANA, and thus it required an upgrade. Because its infrastructure was at the end of its lifespan, Genus also needed an overhaul to increase storage capacity, improve performance and availability, and support future business growth.
While Genus was looking for a “futuristic” infrastructure, its current system was mired in the limitations of the past, and so it required a new system that would provide it with the compute and storage that would let it scale up without facing growing pains.
Genus’s installation base surpassed
meters across India
Storage upgrade was completed in
delivering immediate improvements in optimization, speed and business continuity
Data-driven management of energy transmission, distribution and measurement will be one of the key initiatives for the upcoming ‘Smart Society.’
Data-driven management of energy transmission, distribution and measurement will be one of the key initiatives for the upcoming ‘Smart Society.’
Abhrajit De — Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Executive Vice President, Information Systems, at Genus — set out to look for a Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe)-ready storage solution that could run Genus’s home-grown applications and deliver the highest throughput and fastest response time for its enterprise workloads. Additionally, Genus wanted a solution that would make it easy for the company to implement SAP HANA.
With the help of IBM Business Partner BM Infotrade Pvt. Ltd., De found just what he was looking for in IBM FlashSystem® technology from IBM® Storage.
IBM FlashSystem provides the data foundation to accelerate data access and delivery with consistency and ease. Built with IBM Spectrum® Virtualize technology, the industry’s only single-platform family readily scales to deliver market-leading performance, cost efficiency and consistent enterprise-class data services. The platform, designed for security and high availability, functions across on-premises, hybrid cloud, and virtualized or containerized environments, streamlining management and operational complexity.
Additionally, it comes pre-loaded with IBM Storage Insights technology, predictive analytics software that helps users monitor and optimize their storage infrastructure.
As a long-time IBM user, De knew that the IBM FlashSystem array provided the necessary power and speed to meet all of Genus’s performance requirements and would offer a competitive advantage from using Storage Insights to analyze data sets.
“As India’s most state-of-the-art smart meter company, we need a state-of-the-art system that will give us at least seven years of comfort for the organization — five years of support and two years of extension,” says De.
Preparing for the future of cloud
Genus also chose IBM FlashSystem because it supports hybrid cloud deployments. The fact that this system is cloud-ready from day one was part of the draw for Genus over other solutions. It allowed the company to accelerate its move from a completely on-premises system to hybrid cloud or tier data on public cloud, thus optimizing the efficiency of data placement. In addition, Genus has obtained the speed necessary for its future migration to SAP HANA with a system that is SAP TDI certified.
Implementing IBM FlashSystem was a quick and seamless process, according to De. “It was done in seven days’ time flat,” he notes, adding that his team was able to “monitor the behavior of the storage while they are migrating the data from the older system.”
After implementing IBM FlashSystem, Genus saw immediate improvements in storage optimization, speed and business continuity.
IBM Storage Insights provided the team with a look into what’s happening on the block level of the system itself, much to De’s delight. The level of control that his team has gained thanks to Storage Insights has allowed them to make better strategic decisions going forward, including the implementation of big data and predictive analytics.
Such innovations are also made possible thanks to the speed of their new solution, which has proven to be a game-changer. “I don’t think the speed will be a bottleneck anywhere,” De says. “And the file system storage has been optimized.”
Thanks to this speed and storage, De’s team will be able to implement a fast, easy-to-use and highly available virtual system to manage loads of data. This is especially important for Genus, which has a large amount of proprietary design, engineering and R&D; information stored in the form of model data, including electronic and mechanical models and drawings.
Additionally, the data resiliency and security features included in the all-flash storage system are vital to Genus’s current and future plans. Having previously lost data in a systems crash, De is extremely mindful of ensuring that never happens again. With IBM FlashSystem, he is able to rest easy knowing that increased data security and cyber resilience help to ensure Genus’s ongoing continuity of operations, along with better performance and lower infrastructure costs.
Looking toward the future, Genus plans to implement SAP HANA for ERP, and to launch a managed service help desk for the energy boards to which Genus’s meters provide information. “We’ll be getting inputs from millions of meters spread across the country in different projects,” says De. “They will be culminating in one of our central control management centers, and that data will be stored in IBM storage.”
As this project grows, so will Genus’s storage needs, requiring the kind of scalability that is a specialty of IBM FlashSystem arrays. As De sums up: “We may have to add more storage in a few years’ time, so expandability — particularly horizontally — was one of our considerations. We couldn’t find that agility with other competitors.”
GenusExternal Link , an integral part of the USD 400 million Kailash Group, offers highly innovative and sustainable solutions to the Indian power sector. Genus is committed to developing innovative and customized solution at an affordable price. Its top-notch R&D; center has enabled the company to dominate the country's power infrastructure and be at the forefront of new technology.
BM InfotradeExternal Link is an Indian company providing IT and consulting services to businesses of all sizes. With more than 1,000 satisfied customers to date, BM Infotrade’s success is based on a philosophy of implementing complete solutions while maintaining full transparency when making deals.
GenusExternal Link , an integral part of the USD 400 million Kailash Group, offers highly innovative and sustainable solutions to the Indian power sector. Genus is committed to developing innovative and customized solution at an affordable price. Its top-notch R&D; center has enabled the company to dominate the country's power infrastructure and be at the forefront of new technology.
BM InfotradeExternal Link is an Indian company providing IT and consulting services to businesses of all sizes. With more than 1,000 satisfied customers to date, BM Infotrade’s success is based on a philosophy of implementing complete solutions while maintaining full transparency when making deals.
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Produced in the United States of America, December 2021.
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