Business needTo enable global-brand owners

to manage product performance

and customer experience, Omneo

needed to collect, manage, search

and analyze vast amounts of diverse

data types, and it sought the right

software and hardware infrastructure

to support this effort.

SolutionThe organization worked with Dell

and Cloudera to build a software

solution on top of the Cloudera®

Distribution Hadoop® (CDH)

platform running on a cluster of Dell

PowerEdge C8220 servers, giving

customers total product data visibility

throughout their entire supply chains.

Benefits• 360-degree view of supply chain

data

• Searches billions of data records in

less than three seconds

• Scales to support 300 million

records every month

• Helps manufacturers and suppliers

detect emerging issues

• Saves millions of dollars and boosts

productivity

• Improves product quality,

performance, customer experience

and compliance

Solutions at a glance• Big Data

Seeing the big picture Omneo uses the Dell | Cloudera Hadoop Big Data Solution, accelerated by Intel, to help manufacturers gain a 360-degree view of the supply chain by accessing billions of product data records in seconds

Customer profile

Company Omneo, a division of

Camstar Systems, Inc.

Industry Manufacturing &

Supply Chain

Country United States

Employees 250+ (Camstar)

Website www.omneo.com

“We are able to help customers search billions of records in seconds with Dell infrastructure and support, Cloudera’s Hadoop solution, and our knowledge of supply chain and product performance issues. That’s a powerful combination for our customers.” Karim Lokas, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Product Strategy, Omneo

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“With the visibility provided by this solution, manufacturers can put out more consistent, better products and have less suspect product go out the door. That means you can be more responsive to your customers’ experience.” Karim Lokas, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Product Strategy, Omneo

“So much can go wrong, because you have hundreds of millions of components being sourced globally, put together and pushed through distribution channels to customers,” says Karim Lokas, senior vice president of marketing and product strategy for Omneo, a division of the global enterprise manufacturing software firm Camstar Systems.

In such a complex environment, determining sources of risk is particularly difficult because many manufacturers do not have a single place to view all their supply chain data. “The information needed to make decisions is all over the place, with different partners and in different formats, and much of it is inconsistent as a result,” Lokas says. “Also, the volume of data continues to grow. So companies need one common place to search and analyze that data, and they need to handle very large streams of data.”

In an effort to address these challenges, Omneo wanted to develop a new software solution that would give companies an end-to-end, holistic view of all product and supply chain data. However, the company soon realized that creating the solution with its existing relational database management system was not going to work. “That technology was designed for transactional data processing, not for massive analysis of that data,” Lokas says. “We experimented with relational databases, but we hit a wall. Data volumes from our customers were exceeding the system’s limitations. We knew we needed to find the right big-data system to support the solution we wanted to build.”

Choosing the Hadoop platform and Dell technologiesOmneo evaluated five of the six largest data processing and storage technologies, but the company concluded that a solution based on ApacheTM Hadoop® was the best fit in terms of performance, scalability and total cost of ownership. “Hadoop gave us the best cost-to-performance relationship and could handle large volumes of data and allow us to unify that data,” Lokas says. “It also gave

Every day, manufacturers deliver millions of electronic devices

and other products to customers throughout the world. But

as customers become increasingly global and supply chains

become more dependent on partner networks, manufacturers

face a big challenge: identifying risks to product quality.

Products & Services

Hardware

Dell PowerEdge C8000 Series 4U chassis

Dell PowerEdge C8220 compute nodes

Dell PowerEdge C8220X Series worker nodes

Dell Networking S4810 10/40GbE Switches

Software

Hadoop Platform:

- Cloudera Enterprise

Hadoop Components:

- Data Operating System

- Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop

- Cloudera Search

- Cloudera Impala

- Linux CentOS

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us the opportunity to use cost-effective, highly scalable hardware architectures.”

Once it decided on Hadoop software, Omneo then needed to choose the infrastructure behind its solution. “Early on in the process, we realized we needed a high-performing, scalable infrastructure,” says Manash Chakraborty, vice president of supply chain quality solutions at Omneo. That led Omneo to Dell. “We were already working with Dell on a supplier quality initiative,” he says. “Because of that relationship, we were able to meet with their server engineers and optimize the solution’s configuration.” Dell representatives suggested that Omneo implement Dell PowerEdge C8220 2-socket servers, powered by Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 processors, for the PowerEdge C8000 Series 4U chassis. “The C8220 platform was uniquely designed to meet the performance requirements Omneo was looking for,” says Michael Shepherd, a senior product strategist with Dell. “It has an ideal number of HDD slots with optimal CPU and memory configurations to provide high-performance computing at cost-effective rates.”

Omneo chose to run its solution on a Hadoop distribution platform from Cloudera, a Dell partner. The Cloudera® Distribution of Hadoop (CDH) platform includes Dell’s tested and validated Reference Architecture. “Cloudera offered strong support, and it has a significant number of contributors to the Hadoop project and sub-projects. With that comes deep technical expertise,” says Lokas. “So we really liked the support and innovation we saw with Cloudera.” Omneo conducted an internal assessment to compare the cost of CDH with IBM Netezza and the existing Omneo relational database technology. Cloudera showed a 75 percent lower cost per terabyte than Netezza and 90 percent lower cost per terabyte than the company’s existing system.

Product quality management solution enables fast data search and analysisAfter selecting the software and infrastructure, Omneo created a new cloud-based product data management solution, based on a Cloudera enterprise data hub (EDH) and running on Dell PowerEdge C8220 compute nodes. The application, designed to transform big data into actionable intelligence, ingests raw manufacturing data — including factory, supplier, field services and after-market repair data — and loads it into the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). The data is then transformed, contextualized and analyzed using tools to support different workloads. For example, the Hadoop MapReduce software framework is used to transform the data into any structure needed so it can be manipulated, and the Apache HBase columnar store offers an easy way for users to access specific records in real time. The application uses Cloudera search technology to quickly index all the raw data into a format that makes sense for users. Customers can access the EDH through an Omneo web portal.

The solution ingests millions of data points for customers each day from dozens of disparate data sources. Using the solution, Omneo customers can quickly search, analyze and mine all their data in a single place, so they can identify and resolve supply chain issues before they negatively affect customers or sales. By entering a single serial number, customers can access the entire history of a part and its critical subcomponents.

Some of the largest manufacturers in the world have chosen to implement the Omneo solution. “The amount of data the largest companies handle for decision making and supply chain quality is enormous,” says Chakraborty. “It is all about accelerating your decision velocity. They want an easier way to get at that data faster, so they can make better decisions.”

“This platform is unique in that any user can access the website, point and click, and find what they’re looking for. It no longer takes a database administrator and IT requests to get to the data you need.” Karim Lokas, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Product Strategy, Omneo

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Analyzes billions of records in secondsOmneo customers can use the new supply chain product data management solution to get a 360-degree view of supply chain data — from suppliers, equipment, field service and repair operations — easily searchable and quickly accessible. One customer, in fact, has been able to use the solution to search 1.5 billion records in less than three seconds. “We are able to help customers search billions of records in seconds with Dell infrastructure and support, Cloudera’s Hadoop solution, and our knowledge of supply chain and quality issues,” says Lokas. That’s a powerful combination for our customers.” Several of the largest manufacturers are taking advantage of the Omneo application to quickly analyze global product data. “It used to take our manufacturing test person a week and a half to analyze factory test times for some of our products, and he can do it in one day now because the Omneo system is so responsive,” says one customer, who works for a global technology company. “That really unlocks the potential for exploring data we otherwise couldn’t.”

The Omneo solution also gives more people access to supply chain data search and analysis. “This platform is unique in that any user can access the website, point and click, and find what they’re looking for,” Lokas says. “It no longer takes a database administrator and IT requests to get to the data you need.”

Scales to support 300 million new records a monthBecause the Omneo application is based on the scalable Hadoop big-data system and high-performance Dell servers, customer supply chain data is easily scalable. “We currently have 2.3 billion data records in the system, and it can support 300 million additional new events per month,” says Lokas. That scalability is key for companies needing in-depth insight into their supply chains. “It’s one thing if you’re a company that sells a few thousand units per year, but

if you’re one of the larger companies, and you’re making and shipping tens of millions of units a year — each one possibly having several hundred components — there is no way you could possibly identify all the risks associated with those units without a powerful solution like this.”

Adds an Omneo customer, “It really does come down to the scale of the data. For example, I was asked by management to go into our traditional database system and break down all the different support services purchased by customers. But that’s 38 million records, so I had to break it down further into about 2 million rows to begin to process it. And after about four hours, I came up with only about four charts. But using the Omneo solution, we have the ability to search across all our data sets and generate those charts in a few seconds each.”

Manufacturers can better identify supply chain issuesWith a holistic view of different data sets, large enterprises can more readily solve potential supply chain quality problems. “We have many dispersed product quality data sets in multiple databases,” the Omneo customer states. “For instance, if there is a problem with a product, the employee has to go ask someone for a summary of the repair or return data for that product. Then, they’d have to go find the factory assembly data. There are so many different pieces, and you might only find your problem after weeks or months of searching. We can quickly span across all our different data environments with the Omneo solution, and it’s all pre-aggregated and running in real time. That has solved some major data access issues for us, and it’s opening up an entirely new view of data and helping us start the process of finding problems.”

Saves customers millions of dollars and increases productivity Having better visibility into supply chain data helps Omneo customers spend

more time resolving issues and less time identifying them, which affects revenues and reduces warranty reserves and liability. For example, one manufacturer has reported total annual savings of between $15 million and $25 million because of the new insights it has gained from the Omneo application.

Companies using the application have also boosted productivity. “When thousands of engineers and support staff are equipped with one common set of information, they spend up to 70 percent less time searching for data,” says Lokas. “That unleashes a huge productivity gain. So when thousands of practitioners at customer locations are more productive, they can make better, more informed decisions every day about product performance. With the visibility provided by this solution, manufacturers can put out more consistent, better products and have less suspect product go out the door. That means you can be more responsive to your customers’ experience.”

A partnership based on technology, support and innovationOmneo plans to enhance its partnership with Dell and Cloudera as it seeks to further refine its product data management solution. “This has been a great experience for all of us, from the infrastructure and technology to the overall support we get from Dell,” says Chakraborty. “We see this as a very long-term relationship with Dell, as we grow our business and as Dell brings more performance and power to the infrastructure.” And as Omneo, Dell and Cloudera continue to collaborate, the organizations expect to offer additional innovation. “I think we’re at the start of a multifaceted journey together,” says Lokas. “Looking ahead, we expect to move beyond search and analytics into more data mining and even using the solution to predict product performance and quality issues before they happen. That could have a tremendous impact for manufacturers in many ways.”

Dell, the Dell logo and PowerEdge are trademarks of Dell Inc. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Dell disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. Availability and terms of Dell Software, Solutions and Services vary by region. This case study is for informational purposes only. Dell makes no warranties – express or implied—in this case study. Reference Number: 10013464 © October 2014 Dell Inc. All Rights Reserved

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