Raheja Group Simplifies a Tricky Virtualization Project

Summary:

Virtualization is the mother of all tricky projects after ERP, feel some CIOs. Here’s the story of a CIO who took a rather bold step and won.

Highlights:

The company had 43 physical servers running their business critical applications leading to an unmanageable server sprawl.Leaving the 10 servers that were running the legacy application, Mahajan reduced the number of physical servers from 33 to 3.

Organization: K Raheja group has been building world class hotels and convention centres across the country with enhanced facilities to meet the business and leisure needs of international and domestic travellers. The makers of Mumbai’s Mindspace offer services in diverse fields of realty, hospitality and retailing outfits. K Raheja were the first to introduce the concept of new-age self-contained townships and commercial business district s which encompasses all the facilities like residential apartments, office spaces, retail and entertainment, virtually making it a mini city with mega comforts. The company has been expanding from residential to commercial spaces rapidly over the past few years.

A lot of my peers have turned to server virtualization, but I found very few of them had consolidated all their mission critical apps and their ERP on a virtualized platform

Business Case:The company had 43 physical servers running their business critical applications leading to an unmanageable server sprawl.  As the business expanded, data centre space, power and cooling cost were mounting.  “Manageability, availability, scalability were some of the few challenges that pushed us to look for a cost- effective solution, “explains Rahul Mahajan, AVP-IT, K Raheja.

Growing business needs demanded that they added still more servers to accommodate new business applications. “Many of the existing physical servers were outdated and had reached the end of warranty support, “explains Mahajan.

 Project: Mahajan had been toying with the idea of server virtualization for sometime, but he wasn’t thoroughly convinced it was the best solution for them. The company was running a rather complicated stack of IT applications. On one hand they had a set of in-house developed legacy applications and on the other hand they were running the latest SAP suite of applications. “A lot of my peers have turned to server virtualization, but I found very few of them had consolidated all their mission critical apps and their ERP on a virtualized platform, “explains Mahajan.

 Thus began Mahajan’s meticulous search for a solution that would best suit his business. First he had to identify the applications which could be virtualized and discern which existing hardware could be upgraded and made compatible to run virtual machines. Besides, they also had to keep physical network infrastructure ready with best security practices for starting the project. They further prepared the virtual network infrastructure in order to build redundancy, reliability, performance and security and categorized the application as most critical, medium critical and less critical.

 First Steps: After consulting  their technology partner, Gartner, Mahajan decide to virtualize his IT environment in a three step phase. In the first phase, all least critical applications were migrated from physical to virtual. In the subsequent phases, he migrated the rest of the semi critical and mission critical applications. “Between each phase, we allowed a stabilization period of 2-3 weeks, “explains Mahajan. Phase I went Live in April 2011, Phase II in May and Phase III in June 2011

Challenges: The biggest challenge of adopting a phase-wise approach, feels Mahajan, was ensuring that other projects that were running simultaneously as they migrated the infrastructure, did not get affected. “A good partnership between business and IT helped us give prioritization to business projects and achieve this with minimum downtime,” says Mahajan.

Benefits: Leaving the 10 servers that were running the legacy applications, Mahajan reduced the number of physical servers from 33 to 3. This has lead to better resource utilization, centralized management and better availability. Cost pressures have eased due to the reduced data centre space and reduced power and cooling costs.

And IT is winning praises from everyone. “The availability and performance of IT systems has gone up substantially in the past couple of months. Kudos to the IT folks,” says Mahajan’s colleague, Manoj Sharma, Sr. VP Finance. Mahajan will be able to achieve an ROI of Rs. 80 lakhs in three years.

A lot of my peers have turned to server virtualization, but I found very few of them had consolidated all their mission critical apps and their ERP on a virtualized platform

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