"Farbenfabriken Bayer and Co. Ltd." was set-up in Mumbai in 1896 and heralded the beginning of the history of Bayer in India. It was the first wholly owned subsidiary Bayer operated in Asia at that time.With its above-average growth potential, India has become one of Bayer's most promising markets in the Asia-Pacific regionThe Bayer group in INDIA has set up production sites at various locations in the country. The new corporate Head Office in India was inaugurated in May 2002. It is situated at Thane, within the premises of the Bayer (India) Limited plant site, and is approximately 35km from downtown Mumbai. This is also where the Data Center for the group is situated.

The activities of the Bayer group in India are divided into four business segments – Health Care, Agriculture, Polymers and chemicals. As with their business, the Information infrastructure of Bayer is also wide spread across various locations in India with cutting edge applications from leading vendors in IT being put to use.

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Challenge: Consolidating the enterprise data and provisioning a reliable data backup strategy

Like most enterprises, Bayer India is populated with distributed servers and hence with fragmented storage. The need was felt to consolidate this fragmented data on to a central repository that would provide high-speed access and continuous availability along with a disaster tolerance capable solution. The solution concerns were as follows:

Consolidation of its distributed storage resources.
High-speed access for application servers to the common storage server.
High availability for the IBM Lotus Domino based messaging infrastructure.
Centralize and automate the backup operations onto reliable and faster medium.

Solution: IBM Storage Area Network and Tivoli Storage Software

Bayer chose the IBM SAN and Tivoli solution from Ontrack to meet its challenge on consolidating storage along with high availability and data protection. The design was based around the IBM Storage Area Network that served as the central repository for all the enterprise wide distributed data. The IBM SAN solution itself offers a full range of hardware and software services that address the disaster tolerance needs of the organization.

The IBM TotalStorage NAS 300 Gateway appliance, which has a specially designed Windows as an operating system, is clustered to match the need for continuous availability. The IBM NAS appliance connects to the central data repository on the SAN converging both the unique architectures to provide high speed data sharing and transfers.

Tivoli software was selected because of it offered flexibility and scalability in complex system environments subject to frequent changes and it protected the company’s investment in existing systems and software. The Tivoli Storage management module with the clients for Mail and SAN answered the company’s concern for backups.

The Tivoli storage agents are configured to take LAN free backups of all the systems connected to the IBM SAN keeping the enterprise network free for client access.

Tivoli Storage Manager has addressed the need for an Automated and centralized data backup solution. Bayer uses this to centralize the backup of their entire SAN storage repository along with the forever-online Lotus Domino mail servers. Tivoli Storage Managers for Mail allows ONLINE backup of Lotus Domino data. With the Tivoli storage manager, all the backups have been automated and offer increased performance on an IBM LTO Ultrium library (3583)

At Bayer IBM Lotus Domino messaging solution needed protection from failures. This was done by implementing the Domino Cluster Services, a part of the Domino Enterprise offering. With Domino Clustering Services, we built in redundancy into the Domino environment at a Server level. Both servers are connected to the SAN and share the same IBM FastT Storage Server.

Results: Total Automation, Centralized Administration

Deployment of IBM SAN and Tivoli software has helped Bayer immensely in addressing their immediate and long-term concerns. The IBM SAN and Tivoli software together achieve the objectives of reliability, centralized management, protection & scalability, a primary concern for any organization.

“Ontrack has given me peace of mind in the form of IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, says Mr Bipin Surve, Manager Office Automation at Bayer India. Further Surve adds, “It has automated a lot my routine activities and helped reduce the backup window to a great extent.”