Redlily is an online shopping portal that provides designer apparel, stationery, shoes, baby accessories, footwear, and other items. The Hyderabad, India-based company, a brand of Saisanj Retail Pvt. Ltd., is a popular consumer service with sales growth that is doubling with each month.
Redlily uses Microsoft Dynamics NAV software for its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The ERP is integrated with applications for the company’s payment gateway, logistics, and distribution systems, providing a seamless online shopping experience for Redlily customers. Initially, Redlily hosted its Microsoft Dynamics NAV application on premises. But this led to frequent downtime—and loss of business—because of recurrent hardware and network failures and power outages.
Redlily considered upgrading its IT hardware infrastructure to address this problem but discarded the idea due to the high cost of the acquiring and maintaining new hardware.
“The downtime affected our customers’ experience on our website, which clearly affected our business and revenues,” says Redlily Founder and Chief Executive Officer Sashi Somavarapu. “We were also concerned about the high capital expenditures needed for a technology refresh of our aging infrastructure. So we looked for a partner who could understand our business and technology and support us with a scalable, cost-effective model.”
Redlily had previously migrated its Magento-based website to Amazon Web Services (AWS) by working with Minjar Cloud Solutions, a member of the AWS Partner Network.
Redlily uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances running Windows Server 2008 for its Dynamics NAV operations. In preparation for the migration to AWS, Redlily and Minjar Cloud Solutions re-architected the Microsoft Dynamics NAV application components into three tiers, separating the Dynamics NAV Server, Dynamics NAV SQL database, and the Dynamics NAV Web Client, which is installed as a role-tailored client (RTC). The tiers are hosted in different security groups to avoid a single point of failure.
The solution involves requests from the Dynamics NAV Client that are passed to the Dynamics NAV Server, which in turn accesses data in the Dynamics NAV SQL database. Redlily uses Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) to take snapshots of its Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) repository to ensure backups in the event of power outages.
The solution architecture is shown below:
Redlily’s main goal was to improve availability of its Dynamics NAV ERP system while reducing the cost of running it. Over a three-year period since the migration, Redlily reduced its IT capital and operational expenses by 70 percent and increased uptime 19 percent to 99 percent.
The migration was also fast. Redlily migrated Dynamics NAV to AWS in less than one month without any disruption to its business. Redlily also leverages advanced AWS security features such as Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Security Groups, Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to support a robust, reliable, secure, and cost-effective platform to run its online store.
Amazon VPC helped Redlily in provisioning a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud where it can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that it defines. The company has complete control over the virtual networking environment, including selection of its own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. Also, the AWS IAM that enabled Redlily to control access and permissions to AWS services and resources through enhanced security, granular control, temporary credentials, flexible security credential management, leveraged external identity systems and seamlessly integrated into AWS services.
“With AWS, Redlily has realized significant capex and opex savings,” says Somavarapu. “We have achieved our objective of completing a technology refresh using a cost-effective pay-per-use model.”
An Advanced Partner of the AWS Partner Network (APN). Minjar provides cloud and big data consulting services including readiness assessment, implementation, cloud management, and support services to help companies leverage the business value and benefits offered by on-demand computing.
For more information about how Minjar can help your company run on the AWS Cloud, see Minjar's listing in the AWS Partner Directory.
To learn more about how AWS can help you run Microsoft Windows applications in the cloud, visit our AWS for Windows details page.