Dubai Refreshments streamline IT operations on HP architecture

Dubai Refreshments the sole bottlers and distributors in Dubai and the Northern Emirates of over 15 beverages, including the ever-popular Pepsi, 7UP and Mirinda was established some 45 years ago. Having experienced enormous growth over these four decades of operations has ultimately necessitated this latest upgrade in their IT systems.

'Our bottling technology and product range has grown beyond recognition from our first days of production many years ago. With this growth in our business, it has obviously brought more demands on all our departments and fleets from finance to administration, customer service, production and sales and marketing' said Alan Salem, General Manager of DRC.

'In turn we have looked to consolidate our IT systems and enhance our mainframe environment with mission critical technologies, to ensure a continued and constant high level of service on all fronts', Salem continued.

After closely reviewing their IT goals and considering several options DRC ultimately chose HP and its channel partner Emitac to implement back-end systems to run their Oracle 11i E-business suite on.

To ensure that DRC's chosen applications were always available, reliable and responsive HP and Emitac recommended the implementation of two clustered HP RP5470 Unix servers to run the Oracle E-Business Suite.

The HP Servers rp5470 offers leading entry-level server performance, dynamic scalability, and unmatched investment protection, all in a rack-optimised package, making it the smart choice for the most demanding applications. The rp5470 offers a built-in inbox growth path to the HP Server rx5670 featuring Intel® Itanium® 2 processors.

In addition to these servers HP implemented a Test and Development server and HP Backup solution based on HP data protector software.
'The combination of this HP infrastructure will ensure that DRC can operate its IT applications at optimal levels, ultimately assisting in reducing and managing costs, improving service levels and speeding reaction times as their business needs change' said Samer Karawi, Marketing Manager, Business Critical Systems of HP. 'Finally the HP Infrastructure will allow DRC to be focused on bringer greater return on their IT investment'.

Further commenting on the deal G. V. Rao, IT Manager for DRC said that the motivating factors behind selecting the HP hardware were its demonstrated ability with Oracle e-business suite, its technical ability to right size the hardware to meet the application loads, its reliability plus the reputation of Emitac to offer excellent post sales support.

'With HP and Emitac's help, DRC is able to concentrate on serving its customers and not worry about lost revenues in downtime', said Suhail Issa, GM of Emitac.