Rahee scales new heights on IBM solution

Rahee Technologies did not even have a tally solution till it got IBM on board which not only solved its problem of downtime but also enabled remote client management. By Pupul Dutta

Rahee Technologies, a Kolkata based manufacturer of innovative products for railways, is a joint venture between two leading industrial forces VAE GmbH, Austria and Rahee Group, India. The company which manufactures steel sleepers, complete layouts, turnouts and turnout components like crossings and switch devices for railway tracks, etc recently implemented IBM’s IT infrastructure for increasing scalability and business efficiency.

The company has a typical set up of 100 to 1,000 employees but has been nimble in terms of growth. However, the organisation which churned profitable revenue in business, lacked considerably in its IT infrastructure. Before partnering with IBM, the company just had a single desktop which was used as a file server and for every other purpose. Neither did Rahee had any data centre nor any facility for back up of data. For an organisation that was growing at a stupendous rate, IT was a disability that they had to overcome. Hence, Rahee chose IBM to guide it through this particular turmoil.

“The organisation started off as a typical start up wherein a single desktop doubled up as a file server as well as a computer to cater to the surfing needs of the staff. Hence, there was no fail over, reliability was an issue and so was downtime. Our team after deliberating on the issues faced by Rahee decided to build cluster for their database and file server. What it really meant was that if something failed anywhere in the network it would fall over to a back up server, and is hence called clustering,” said Jyothi Satyanathan, Vice President, Mid Size Business (India/ SA), IBM.

Rajib Ghosh, Manager IT, Rahee Infratech Limited explained that the company did not have any IT infrastructure initially and hence, lost out on many important orders from the clients. “There was lack of coordination between the departments and top management and also amongst colleagues since the company lacked in a proper data structure. Not just the IT setup at that point was rudimentary but also insufficient for the business need. While we had set targets to achieve business goals across verticals, there was no system of information or data sharing for the same. Data storage was disorganised and haphazard. What we needed was an organised structure of data along with better storage facilities,” he said.

Answer to the riddle…

A comparison between the December 2011 architecture of Rahee and the March 2012 architecture showed a rapid change in the infrastructure and investment made for the same. In 2011, the company had only one IBM 36400 server and 3400 server. Along with that there were two desktop PCs configured as the terminal servers to manage the total desktop users. But after December 2011, the company decided to implement an ERP solution.

“For the same, we evaluated several ERP solutions like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft etc. However, keeping in mind several parameters like company’s acceptance, user manageability, quality and also the financial impact, we decided to take up Microsoft Dynamics for the software part of it,” said Ghosh. Given the implementation of new IT infrastructure by IBM in Rahee, the company’s productivity went up by several notches.

According to IBM, Rahee was assisted in building the clustering wherein IBM installed the file server, database server, application server and domain controller server backed up with physical-virtual (replication server) machine to keep up the downtime. IBM LTO5 served as the backup solution for this manufacturing company.  Now Rahee is able to address client manageability concern post the implementation of remote management system of IBM server and clustering and along with replication server the company has also overcome downtime issues.

Noted Ghosh, “Post the implementation of IBM solution at Rahee, we have witnessed a significant increase in the productivity. Previously, there were a host of complaints that we received from the users internally in terms of performance of the IT infrastructure. Now users experience not only a considerable increase in the speed of performance of the system but there is also a decrease in the occurrence of corruption of data. All the applications run smoothly post the implementation and the number of complaints has noticeably gone down.”