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| Case Study - Godfrey Phillips |
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| Home > Case Studies > Case Study - Godfrey Phillips |
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| Godfrey Phillips |
| Today Godfrey Phillips is the second largest player in Indian cigarette industry with an annual turnover of over $265 million. Incorporated in India in 1936, the Company established its own manufacturing facilities in 1944. |
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| Today, it operates in the entire northern and western part of the country, with two manufacturing facilities located in Ghaziabad (near Delhi) and in Andheri (Mumbai), a state of the art R&D centre in Mumbai and a tobacco-buying unit in Guntur (Andhra Pradesh). |
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| Headquartered in Delhi, the Company has its sales offices across the country at various location like Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Delhi, Chandigarh and Hyderabad. They are the proud owner of some of the most popular cigarette brands in the country like Red and White, Four Square, Jaisalmer, Cavanders, Tipper and Prince. Its products are distributed through an extensive country wide network comprising - 484 exclusive distributors and over Eight Hundred Thousand (800,000) retail outlets. |
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| Service and Infrastructure setup by Tetra: |
| Migration |
Lotus Domino server (700+ users ) into Enterprise “Qmail” Mail Environment |
| Applications |
E-Mail Server with cluster , LDAP database |
| Business benefits |
ROI of 200% within 6 Months. Low Startup Cost and TCO much less than comparable Other system, superior end-to-end growth and risk management capabilities, scalability, reliability and security on one high-powered server system. Multi location benefits. Improved service quality; reduced operating costs; simpler and more flexible IT infrastructure requiring less management. |
| Installed Platform |
Linux implementation of country spread Two servers working in cluster mode and directory services replication and failover on LDAP. Email services over Qmail with Cluster support. Over 1000 users scalable to 1 Million users. Expandability to collaborative applications of Qmail and Linux. |
| Hardware Platforms |
IBM Netfinity 5000 Servers on High speed Internet back bone. |
| Services |
Over 5 Locations are supported , connectivity via RF / VPN links |
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| Challenges |
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GPI was using Lotus Domino 5.0 for last 5 years |
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There were 5 location where these servers was placed. |
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No strategy can be defined in terms of fail-over. |
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Huge up-gradation cost. |
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Partial hosted domain as modi.com was shared by other group companies |
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Users have very clear mind-set of using features given by Lotus solution. |
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New solution needs to be feature rich as well as taking care of the lotus functions. |
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New solution needs to give seamless path of migration without any visual disturbance to the users. |
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New Solution needs to support the concept of High-availability (fail -over) to have service and hardware redundancy. |
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Solution suggested needs to consolidate the other location servers to central concept and needs to scale up without loosing the performance. |
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Same hardware needs to be utilized without having any performance slow downs. |
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| Solution suggested and migration |
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Suggested and Implemented Qmail based MTA solution on Redhat Linux. |
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Major components were - Apache , Squirrel Mail , Courier IMAP , Fetchmail ,Open LDAP , PHP scripting Language , Qmail-MRTG , Heart-beat etc. which were free open-source components. |
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Migration of users in terms of there policies and their data were achieved seamlessly via Linux Scripts and few open-source migration tools. |
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Concept of partial domain concept was implemented. |
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All the location servers was consolidated to Single server at HO and clustering based on High-availability and fail-over Server was deployed. |
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Users were mixed environment with off-line client - Outlook 2002 and web-mail. |
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Typically it took 20 days make the concept and servers live.
Achieved |
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Achieved |
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Since the implementation of its Email system with Qmail-LDAP running under Redhat Linux, GPI has observed that applications run from six to nine times faster than they did on Microsoft Windows servers and Lotus Notes. |
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Costs are running at 5% percent of the costs for Windows servers because of reduced administrative support requirements, no licensing fees and faster responses. |
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Through it all, the company hasn't had to increase its IT support staff. Both Open-systems and support groups have rallied very effectively around the Linux platform. |
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More so the comfort level wide spread user community has tremendously increased. It is a pure case of Linux advantage what GPI has today. |
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This initiated an open-source movement in organization. They have deployed now major of their portal applications, oracle databases, CRM application etc. on Linux and open-source. |
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