Case Study

A smart DR plan

Syntel's DR plans make the best use of its existing infrastructure By Aditya Kelekar

When Pune was in the throes of swine flu, it was feared that the administration might ask businesses to shut down so as to contain the pandemic. But at Syntel, the IT team was prepared for the worst.

“Our DR drills, held once in six months, test our DR plans,” said Muralidharan Ramachandran, CIO of Syntel. Syntel's 86-acre Pune Campus is situated on the banks of the Indrayani river at the Software Technology Park in Talawade. It opened in 2006 and has a current capacity of 3,000+ seats.

Ramachandran pointed out that those DR plans could be structured differently according to client requirements; nonetheless, high uptime levels at the company's various facilities and a basic state of readiness remained a common feature.

Business drills are also conducted depending upon the criticality of the process. “For the more critical processes we do a live BCP drill,” Ramachandran said, adding that it also depended on the nature of the contract with the client. If it's purely a development project, it won't be as critical.

For the base level redundancy plan, Syntel has a redundant power infrastructure as well as generator sets for backup.

However, Ramachandran stressed, it is not always required to do a 100 % DR. “A DR plan that covers everything can be prohibitively expensive,” he added.

Syntel performs automated off-site backups of its internal company related and project data.

To deliver scalable networks with good performance, Syntel future-proofed its technology investment with 10 GbE. That helped to ensure that the network could scale to accommodate the plan of seven buildings, three of which are occupied.

Syntel's campus in Pune has an intelligent building management system, consisting of wide closed-circuit monitoring using both fixed and high-speed dome cameras. It also has a fire detection system using intelligent fire detectors, smart card programmable access control system and authentication to data centers using biometric and retina scanners

For its LAN, Syntel has redundant core switches that are 10G and 40G ready with terabit switching backplane capacity. The campus is Wi-Fi enabled using 802.11a/b/g.

At Syntel's video conferencing facility, the video stations can conference up to five locations and can connect either on 512 Kbps ISDN or on IP with latest video codec. Conference rooms are fully automatic and equipped with automatic controllers which maintain the ambient light, acoustics and focus of the camera based on voice detection.

To optimize resources, Syntel plans to use existing infrastructure for possible DR scenarios. “We have equipped our training rooms with essential resources required for working in emergency-like situations,” Ramachandran said.

aditya.kelekar@expressindia.com