National Paints deploys NEC servers to boost productivity

Since its establishment in Amman (Jordan) in 1969, National Paints is now the largest paint consortium in the Middle East with an annual production capacity of 200,000 tons with more than US$200 million in annual sales. It has around 54 distribution centres located worldwide to serve its customers with paint solutions to meet their needs.

National Paints offers a large variety of paint products from decorative paints to Industrial paints and marine paints. The company strives to make its presence deeper and stronger in the local and international markets. As one of the region's market leaders, it leverages some of the best technologies available to produce one of the widest ranges of paint products in the Middle East.

The challenge

The National Paints' factory in Sharjah has the latest, fully computerized paint manufacturing machines that have a 24/7, high-volume production schedule during which it needs secure access to the company's priceless formulas and related data required for its production every minute. The old system was based on cluster and while it provided high availability, it needed dedicated resource, and an increased level of support to run applications in order to keep the system running.

The company's production and technology team were looking for a solution that could not only reach its expectations of high availability (no down time) but without the need for additional expertise for the support or maintenance, ensuring business continuity and low total cost of ownership (TCO).

The solution

After about two months of research, the team at National Paints opted for NEC's Fault Tolerant, six NEC Standard 2U rack mount server and a Backup Smart Way. The installation, completed in October 2008 by Radiant Computers & Electronics, took around four days to complete and involved one NEC certified engineer, two Technical Support engineers and a member of National Paints' IT team.

Ohans Bagduyan, IT Manager at National Paints UAE said, “I am so glad that we chose to use the NEC fault Tolerant Server. We tried more than one solution to solve our problem and the fault tolerant server provided by NEC was the best among all the other options available regarding the high availability and total cost of ownership.”

According to Bagduyan, the advantages of using this solution gave National Paints fault detection with no interruption for work continuity providing continuous availability (99.999% up time), operational simplicity with easy management, resulting in a reduction in TCO.

The NEC FT server is designed in such a way that it delivers its high availability straight out of the box. The high availability is handled by the specialized chipset found inside the FT server that makes it independent of the software that runs on the server. Therefore, it is not only works out of the box but it supports any kind of application without any modification or configuration. Its integrated management features and accompanying software offer pro-active failure alerts and can notify the administrator of an impending failure via a number of methods including e-mail, so there is no longer a need for continuous monitoring.

By turning to NEC for its high availability solution National Paints was able to fulfil all the goals set forth when the project was started. By paying close attention to the requirements of National Paints and having invested greatly in the area of High Availability NEC was able to propose one of its High Availability solutions to fully meet the needs of the client.