IBM to power Sanyo-BPL JV

IBM has announced that the 50:50 joint venture between Sanyo and BPL will be powered by its solutions. According to IBM, the installation at Sanyo-BPL is a one-of-its-kind in India, with the Sanyo-BPL production, test, development and mail environment consolidated on a single blade chassis.

The IT infrastructure will primarily support ERP and MS Exchange and is backed by suitable hardware to manage other basic functions like security and storage.

A blade server is essentially a housing for a number of individual minimally-packaged computer motherboard blades, each includes one or more processors, computer memory, computer storage and computer network connections. But, it shares the common power supply and air-cooling resources of the chassis.

The idea is that by placing many blades on a single chassis, and then 19-inch rack-mounting them, systems can be more compact and powerful, but less expensive than traditional ones based on mainframes or server farms of individual computers.

Said a spokesperson for Sanyo, "The IT infrastructure backbone provided by IBM will not only support our present growth objectives, but also enable us to meet growth challenges of the future. We look forward to fruitful association with IBM."

According to IBM, as against the traditional rack servers, its solution is based on consolidation on IBM BladeCenter and Total Storage.

A single blade chassis can consolidate all the servers at Sanyo such as production ERP Servers (database and application servers), MS Exchange Servers for mail collaboration and other infrastructure servers like fire wall, anti-virus and intrusion detection. "This type of implementation could replace 14 rack servers," said IBM.

Added the spokesperson for Sanyo: "We chose to partner IBM as we were convinced about performance and the total cost of ownership of consolidation on blades. We now have in place a solid, secure and scaleable infrastructure to enable us to improve the service provided to our customers."

The joint venture company hopes to have sales of Rs 2,000 crore in three years time and expects to garner 16 per cent of the marketshare by then.

While the BPL brand will be used for the volume segment of CTVs, the Sanyo brand will be positioned at the high-end segment of the market with plasma and hi-definition TVs.

The JV started on an equity base of close to Rs 100 crore, will offer the complete range of consumer electronics, home appliances and digital imaging products from the Sanyo stable.