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Server Consolidation
Continued from page: 1
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Server Consolidation at NSE
NSE had a collection of servers from various vendors about two years ago, spread across an area of 1200 sq feet. With so many servers across such a large area, keeping track of their utilization was quite a challenge. Then NSE decided to go for server consolidation. It was done for its clearing and settlement and offline applications. These applications are a part of the trading system, but not a part of the trading engine itself. They handle the listings, memberships, etc.
 Before consolidation, NSE had 15 servers in their setup at Mumbai from various vendors. The consolidation brought it down to 11, which were from HP and IBM. This may not seem like a major consolidation on the face of it, but in reality, NSE derived huge benefits from it. For one, they were initially running Unix based servers with 15U form factors. So imagine the space saving if four such servers are removed from racks? That's exactly what happened, and NSE was able to put in more powerful servers in less than half the space. There was a dramatic reduction in the AMC, so much so that the cost saving justified the consolidation. The consolidated machines were far more powerful than previous ones, and NSE was able to gain 30% improvement in performance due to this. It also improved their overall system availability. Finally, the real benefit, which NSE claims they received from this consolidation was the scalability. The new servers are not only capable of running NSE's current applications, but they would be able to handle future applications as well.
Lastly, such benefits don't come without hardships, and NSE had its share of them to face during this exercise. The biggest challenge for them for this exercise was the migration of everything from existing servers to the new ones. Secondly, since most of the applications were home grown, they had to be ported to the new platform. As you can well imagine, this is not an easy exercise, because code has to be ripped from one machine and run on a new platform. As you can imagine, consolidation didn't come easy for NSE, and it took almost a year to complete.
With inputs from Ashish Dandekar, Senior Manager Enterprise Management, NSE.IT
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