Huhtamaki India, one of India’s leading manufacturers of primary consumer flexible packaging and labelling materials, has migrated its captive, on-premise data centre to Yotta NM1 data center at Panvel, Navi Mumbai.
Huhtamaki India is a part of Huhtamaki Oyj, a Finnish-based global food packaging major. The Huhtamaki team outsourced the data centre management to Yotta Infrastructure, in an effort to achieve cost savings and at the same time spur business innovation.
Until last year, Huhtamaki’s India data centre operations were managed in-house. It was a five-server rack set up at their head office.
The company had deployed a self-sustaining solution, which was supported by 2-hour UPS and 11 KVA DG. It was a full-fledged micro data center set up with multiple ISP link redundancy which again dependency on ISP for business application services uptime.
However, for managing a captive data centre, Huhtamaki India was dependent on multiple service partners to keep the operations up and running.
With the Covid-19 pandemic, managing the data centre became a challenge. Apart from the lockdown challenges on account of the pandemic, the ageing infrastructure in and around the office was another area of growing concern, company executives said.
Sensing the manageability issues arising out of the pandemic, the IT team of Huhtamaki India, headed by Udit Pahwa, brought to the notice of the senior management, that managing data center is not their core job. Instead, they wanted to focus on business innovation and outsource the data center management to a third-party service provider.
“As we had planned infrastructure investments in and around the office premises to support the data centre, we thought this is an opportune time to prepare a business case on cost implications of running a captive data center vis-à-vis outsourcing it to a third-party service provider. Besides, being a listed company, we must adhere to the audit compliances like maintaining logbooks concerning data center operations,” stated Pahwa. Since we were able to project considerable savings and better RoI on an annual basis, it made business sense for the management to go with a specialised colocation provider, he added.
Migrating to Yotta’s DC
After getting an in-principal approval for this move, the IT team evaluated multiple data centre service providers in Mumbai. Even though Huhtamaki has a global tie-up with a leading cloud infrastructure provider, and data center services, the organisation decided to go with Yotta NM1 in India.
“Since Huhtamaki had a strategic partnership for the utilisation of cloud services, we had to evaluate their services here in India as well,” said Pahwa. Many factors worked in Yotta’s favor, during the evaluation. The first and foremost is the depth of experience of setting up massive hyperscale and modernise data centres and the futuristic vision of Sunil Gupta, to serve the needs of enterprises across the country.
Sunil Gupta, Co-founder and CEO, Yotta Infrastructure said, “In a bid to drive innovation agenda and align their business transformation efforts, enterprises across industries are gradually moving from their captive data centre set up to a third-party, multi-tenant data centre. Being chosen by the county’s leading packaging major reaffirms our commitment to meeting the demands of India’s growing colocation market.”
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The business agreed for a downtime of 16 hours over a weekend. “We were able to accomplish everything under the given timeline. Apart from transit insurance, the end-to-end physical DC infra migration was owned up by Yotta,” said Pahwa.
Currently, Huhtamaki hosts 20 plus applications at Yotta NM1, including the core ERP, Active Directory (AD) Authentication, AD Server, Single Sign-on service, Gateway Firewall, and other applications. These applications are accessed by 3,300 users across the country.
Esko WebCenter, a critical and heavy application used by the printing and packaging industry and is certified to work only on LAN, is also hosted at Yotta NM1 data centre.
Hasan Ali, who heads Infrastructure at Huhtamaki India said, “We hired a 12-seater room at NM1 and moved 17 Mac workstations. Our prepress designers accessed these workstations while sitting at their homes through a secure remote access service. This is how we made the application work on LAN. We also did a trial to run Esko directly on WAN, and it has been successful. Soon, we will be moving out all the Mac workstations back in the offices, as this application henceforth will run on WAN.”
While Huhtamaki began its association with Yotta by availing pure-play colocation services, in January 2021, the organisation also opted for the private cloud services from Yotta. Currently, Huhtamaki has an active Disaster Recovery (DR) in Bengaluru with another DC operator. But in the future, the organisation may consider migrating the DR to the upcoming Chennai facility of Yotta.