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.

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.”

Learn more about IBM FlashSystem