Controlling data center OPEX with virtualization

Consolidation and virtualization of hundreds of 2p and 4p servers has helped Reliance General Insurance Company Ltd bring down its operational expenses and given it the flexibility to roll out business functions on the fly with zero downtime says Akhtar Pasha

Sriram Naganathan, Chief Technology & Operations Officer, Reliance General Insurance is thrilled and totally satisfied with the recent server virtualization project that has gone live, which has given his company an instant return on investment. An excited Naganathan said, “Our data center is outsourced to a third party who maintains it for us to support all our business functions. We had 19 racks that occupied our data center space and we ended up paying Rs 6 lakh per annum per rack, which translated to Rs 1.14 crores in recurring annual costs. Additionally we were spending close to Rs 30 lakhs on maintaining the discrete servers numbering a 100. Consolidating 100 Intel servers on 10 units of IBM x3850 servers using VMware virtualization has helped us to save costs on 19 rack spaces and maintenance and administration costs.” Additionally he said, “Now provisioning of new servers is instantaneous with better utilization of compute resources—better I/O and CPU utilization in a virtualized set-up to support new business functions as we do not need to bring down the system for test and deployment for every rollout of a new application or upgrades.”

The road from physical to virtual

Reliance General Insurance Company Ltd (RGICL) was running about 25 different functional business applications that it had developed with dedicated setups. It had over 100 servers spanning 19 racks in the data center, which was outsourced to a third party and the data center space and racks were on a rental agreement with this third party. In addition to the space constraints, the company faced a high degree of variance in server utilization, long lead times to provision a new server and the IT team had to work 24x7 to ensure uptime of the applications.

Naganathan said, “Back in 2008, when the IBM team started discussions with us, we were talking of a setup of a number of servers running various applications and databases. These were mostly 2p and 4p servers and were spanning across 19 rack space. For each of the applications we had a Web server, an application server and database servers. Invariably we ended up having 3 servers for production and one test and development server to run one set of business function applications.”

Among the topmost challenges that RGICL faced were:

• Servers with varying degrees of utilization, which in turn was affecting performance on some machines. While some servers were working fine but were operating with only 10% utilization on CPU and memory, others were subject to extremely high CPU and I/O utilization towards the month end when the load increased.
• Sprawling Server Farm. With almost 19 racks filled up in the data center, and many more servers expected to be bought in the future to run applications and databases space would soon run out. The rental costs for both space and rack servers were spiraling, which required additional resources.
• Difficult demands from business. Sudip Banerjee, Vice President & IT Head, Reliance General Insurance, said, “We are a growing organization and were experiencing 100% growth in the past two fiscals. Whenever new business functions were to be added or upgraded to support our growth plans we had to bring down the servers and it required four to five hours of downtime, which meant that no business took place during that period—leading to loss of sales or missing customer queries.” He added, “Any new application roll out would require a new server and to procure one took almost six weeks. This delayed our process to support new functions affecting business.”

Project execution

RGICL’s IT team and the team from IBM STG worked together to develop a blueprint to transform the entire production and test and development landscape and get it running on a virtualized platform. This would not only reduce the server footprint and reduce power and cooling requirement but would also form a solid infrastructure with built-in high availability features and help the company in preparing for networked storage and DR set-ups. RGICL bought 10 IBM x3850 m2 servers along with a DS 4800 SAN solution to execute the project. RGICL is using Windows 2003 as its platform and has a mix of SQL 2005 and Oracle 9i databases.

In Q3 FY 07 RGICL undertook a study using IBM CDAT (Consolidation, Discovery, and Analysis Tool) to monitor system utilization and found that many servers were running with 10% utilization while others required additional I/O and memory. The study was presented to the management and clearly helped the IT team make a case for the server virtualization project. To be doubly sure that all the applications would run without disruption in the virtualized environment, RGICL conducted a Proof-of-Concept in March 2008 and tested four key business applications for four days. Banerjee said, “In our early set-up our business application used to break with just 300 concurrent users, but in a virtualized environment it did not break and supported 1,500 concurrent users. This gave us further confidence to go ahead with the project.”

Care was taken to make logical groups out of the existing application and database servers so that users were least affected due to the migration from physical to virtual machines. The solution was implemented over a period of three months. Naganathan said, “The transition was so smooth that none of the user groups came to know that the 100 odd servers had been migrated to a virtualized environment. He added “There is no point in creating server farms in the data center. Especially with the availability of much more powerful processors on Xeon-MP platform, virtualization is inevitable.”

Benefits of virtualization

The virtualized solution has the following key benefits. The high cost of renting 19 racks, space and maintenance costs itself paid for the project costs and the return has been immediate—that was a straight saving for RGICL.

Zero downtime for upgrades and rollout of new business application was another benefit. In a virtualized set-up, on-demand resources are available to support new functions. System administration costs have reduced as RGICL needs only one administrator to manage the virtualized set-up. Naganathan added, “It is easier to manage the highly-available virtualized platform with redundancies in the SAN storage as compared to the standalone farm of servers. There is a single point of management with optimized system utilization, dynamic resource availability for VM and we are BCP and DR ready ensuring uptime and high availability.”

Since the IBM servers in the virtualized set-up require less power and cooling this has resulted in lower operational costs for the data center. The server virtualization project was executed at a cost of Rs 3.5 crores, which IBM STG gave as a package deal for 10 x3850 m2 servers, DS 4800 SAN and VMware licenses.

akhtar.pasha@expressindia.com