Best Green IT Project : NIIT LTD : Project Pulse

NIIT has strategic partnership with various technology companies such as

Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, etc. Under these partnerships, NIIT offers

higher end state of art curriculum to working professionals and career aspirants

in IT. NIIT offers the use of hardware and software resources to ensure

participants have real time hands on experience. To provide hands on experience

to all of its students, espcially in networking courses, a networking

infrastructure was required. However deploying identical infrastructure across

all NIIT Education Centers was neither cost effective nor green, as it would

result in underutilization of network infrastructure as well as create

management over head. To address the situation NIIT decided to set up a Virtual

Lab.

Pankaj Dikshit General Manager QWhat were the key challenges you faced in this project ? Technically the challenge was to ensure automation of lab launch and lab scrubbing, ensuring Infrastructure scalability and to find know how to setup and manage Virtual Labs. In terms of business, we faced the following challenges: Change in deployment methodology from Localized to Centralized Time share mode VS All time availability Remote Infrastructure Management High degree of Automation QPlease tell us about the benefits NIIT has drieved from this project ? NIIT has maintained its endeavor to constantly innovate and leverage technology to help create world class services and experience for our customers. We had rolled out a WAN 2 years back, connecting all our education centres and offices with a view to centralize services and consolidate with a view towards "Green IT" and reducing investments and carbon footprint. We setup a complete Virtual Lab Infrastructure for students learning Hi-End Networking Technology by centralizing all equipment and providing Real-Time access to the same through our connected education centres. This helped us save on investments, power consumption, reduce carbon footprint, while giving students a superior learning experience.

This virtual lab has been co-hosted at Reliance Communication

Infrastructure's Data Center in Mumbai. NIIT students can remotely access the

lab using Internet connection. One point worth mentioning here is that no

virtualization was used in this lab. A complete test lab has been set up at

Reliance data center and NIIT centers to access them remotely on time sharing

basis. Also the lab has been built using Cisco gear and NIIT claims that the

setup done under the project will be life time. However, it will undergo regular

changes as and when Cisco updates the technologies.

Note: 1. Server emit Co2 @ 8 tonnes per annum 2. Routers emit Co2 @ 20 tonnes per annum 3. Ethernet switches emit Co2 @ 5 tonnes per annum

While Virtual Lab has helped in reducing the number of deployments by having

centralized infrastructure, it also contributes to Green IT by reducing the CO2

emission that would have got generated due to the massive deployment at

education centers. This was the precise reason why jury decided to put this

project in Green IT category.

During the implementation, NIIT faced challenges like change in deployment

and training methodology from localized to centralized. Other big challenge was

time sharing between various NIIT centers for the use of Virtual Lab. Also as

soon as time for a hands on lab is up, routers and other infrastructure are

automatically set to default settings with help of scripts created by NIIT.

Currently NIIT has completed Cisco CCNA Module setup i.e CCNA students are

now using this Virtual Lab gear to practice their lab exercises as part of the

CCNA training. NIIT claims that it has trained over 6000 students through this

Virtual Lab.

Total cost of implementation of this project was Rs. 1.30 Crores and NIIT

expects the returns of Rs 7.7 Crores over next 1.5 years.