Cybage Deploys IBM Rack Servers & Achieve a Server/Desktop Consolidation Ratio of 1:213

Cybage Software is an offshore software services company that is based in India. Headquartered in Pune, the company has five deployment centers in India, five offices in USA and one office in UK. Cybage was ranked among the top 100 innovative service providers in the 2009 Global Services 100 list and ranked among the top 100 outsourcing providers by IAOP for four years in a row.

Challenges they faced
Two major challenges for Cybage after analyzing their IT infrastructure includes specific end-to-end solution set-up required at the test lab. A major QA project at Cybage was using 500 desktops and 1000 virtual machines. They faced the following issues:
·  Growing sprawl of physical machines
·  Constant requests from the project for additional computing resources  on existing machines
· Shortage of physical space to house the machines
· Increasing IT efforts to manage the physical environments
·Increasing power, cooling and LAN connectivity requirements

The other challenge was infrastructure upgradation at Cybage's data   center. The servers and services hosted in the datacenter of Cybage were facing the following issues:

· Constant requests from the project to host additional machines
· Threat of running out of physical space to host additional machines
· Increasing IT efforts to manage the physical environments
· Increasing power, cooling and LAN connectivity requirements
· Frequent downtimes leading to disruption in critical services
· Inability to upgrade existing servers

The solution
Test lab solution offered by IBM: Cybage installed IBM rack server using VMware and tested the features of ESX.

Data center solution offered by IBM: Cybage decided to deploy three IBM 3850 X5 series rack servers powered by Nehalem-EX processors and 256 GB RAM and NetApp FAS 2040 unified storage. Cybage used VMware ESX to virtualize the server setup.

Benefits they achieved
The offshore software services company achieved several benefits including the following:
· Server/desktop consolidation ratio of 1:213
· Significant savings in capital and operating expenditure
· Significant reduction in down time of provisioning of servers - from 10 days to 30 minutes
· Zero unplanned downtime after implementing VMware
· CPU utilization improved from 20% to 80%
· Improved IT performance at reduced cost
· Simplified deployment