See how a large pharmaceutical company modernized its infrastructure with HPE technology and enabled innovation that brings custom medicine to patients within hours and reduces downtime risk.
Downtime is extremely costly for any mission critical environment. But for PiSA Farmacรฉutica, a large manufacturer of medicines and health products serving North and Central America, it can be a matter of life or death.
Today, PiSA uses the power of edge computing to create and deliver personalized medicines on demand. Patient information is sent directly from hospitals to the companyโs Centro de Datos in Mexico. There, Intel-based HPE technologies run complex calculations to formulate a tailored medicine, manufacture it at one of 14 production plants, and deliver it to the hospital. And all this can be done in four hours.
This innovation is a true lifesaver for the millions of patients, including premature infants who require intensive care, that PiSAโs work supports.
But prior to its modernization project with HPE, PiSA was facing infrastructure challenges familiar to enterprises around the world:
- Avoiding downtime. Operations needed to run 24/7 and share data across the continent. Failure meant delays for patients and productivity losses.
- Finding ways to do more, faster. Even with a 105-person IT team, PiSA was spending too much time on IT fixes and updates. Businesses need to innovate to stay competitive, and IT and data must be the enablers of that innovation.
- Meeting growing needs. PiSA was a 22,000-employee business and growing, but its infrastructure was generations behind the curve.
PiSA worked with HPE to build an end-to-end, hybrid cloud solution that addressed these challenges. What were the outcomes, and how could PiSAโs experience be valuable to your organization?
High availability from end to end
Tight integration between a range of modern HPE technologies powered by Intel enabled PiSA to reduce downtime risks to its critical workloads โ and potentially help save more lives.
PiSA runs a wide range of mission critical workloads, including virtualized SAP ERP environments that connect logistics, manufacturing, and production. To maximize uptime, these workloads now run on HPE Superdome Flex servers with RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability) features that arenโt available on any other standard platform. These include:
- A firmware first approach that prevents errors reaching the OS and applications. It enables predictive fault analysis for system memory, CPU, I/O, and interconnects.
- An analysis engine that constantly analyzes all hardware for faults. It can predict failures, initiate recovery actions, and notify administrators about problems.
HPE has since evolved these RAS features even further in HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200, the next generation of HPE Superdome Flex mission critical servers , featuring powerful 4th Gen Intelยฎ Xeonยฎ Scalable processors, which ships later in 2023.
But itโs not just the servers. PiSAโs workloads are protected from end to end with highly available technologies like HPE Primera storage with its unique 100% uptime guarantee, HPE StoreOnce for backup, and the HPE Serviceguard for Linux high availability and disaster recovery solution.
In the words of Heriberto Olmedo Vera, IT Operations Continuity Director at PiSA Farmacรฉutica: "As a mission-critical compute solution, HPE Superdome Flex offered the perfect combination of flexibility, performance, and reliability. The system operates intelligently, including automatically bypassing problems to keep things running smoothly."
Speeding insight
HPE infrastructure also underpins a key innovation that is helping PiSA to grow its market share.
The companyโs internally developed SAFE solution allows customers โ including pharmacists and doctors โ to create customized medications that meet the specific needs of individual patients.
Such a fast, data-driven service is only possible with infrastructure that delivers extreme speed to connect PiSAโs data center to its 14 production facilities and countless edge locations.
Every layer of the infrastructure โ databases, web applications, storage, and transaction processing โ must work together without disruption or downtime. Integrated HPE technologies make it happen.
"We run SAFE and SAP on HPE Superdome Flex," says Vera in his own account of the project. "This speed wouldnโt be possible at this volume without our new servers supporting all these transactions."
Growing needs
PiSAโs workloads and data volumes are continuing to grow alongside the companyโs market share. The high performance and large memory capacity of Superdome Flex servers โ up to 32 sockets and up to 48 TB of shared memory โ ensure the companyโs infrastructure can also grow to meet the challenge.
At the same time, HPE technologies have helped PiSA become more agile in how it adapts to new and bigger business demands. And HPE OneView management software provides better visibility of the companyโs infrastructure, helping PiSAโs IT teams work more efficiently.
โPiSA faces emerging trends like HANA with the comfort of knowing that we have the power to succeed and the freedom to adjust workloads depending on new technology,โ says Vera. โWe are more agile when it comes to deploying new features, tools, or systems in our environment while remaining compliant with business needs and requirements.โ
Learn more
For PiSA, mission-critical means life-critical. And innovation means not only enhance its service, but saving more lives. With the close integration of HPE technologies including Superdome Flex servers, PiSA has a mission critical foundation it can rely on, even as its needs grow and its services evolve.
To learn more about the technologies in PiSAโs solution, click below.
Diana has spent the past 25 years working with the technologies that power the worldโs most demanding IT environments and is interested in how solutions based on those technologies impact the business. A native from Colombia, Diana holds an MBA from Georgetown University and has held a variety of regional and global roles with HPE in the US, the UK and Sweden. She is based in Stockholm, Sweden.
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