Government of Maharashtra leverages benefits of virtualization and Cloud

Various departments across the Government of Maharashtra enjoyed the benefits of virtualization and Cloud. Powered by Maharashtra State Data Centre, the MahaGov Cloud hosts over 150 websites and offers faster and economical project deployments

- Preeti Gaur

Maharashtra State Information Technology department enables project in IT and ITES for electronic delivery of Govt. Services to the Citizen in the State. All the departments own the IT infrastructure but individual administrative control was difficult. Apart from that individual procurement of IT infrastructure led to inefficient resource utilization and delay in projects.

Project Head

Rajesh Aggarwal IAS,

Ex-Secretary (IT), Government of Maharashtra,

Currently Joint Secretary (Financial Services) at Government of India, Delhi

Challenges

The User Departments faced challenges in terms of long IT Infrastructure procurement cycles, building silo applications, procuring IT Infrastructure, underutilization of computing resources, hiring external agencies / expertise for running the individual ICT applications and infrastructure, scalability, reliability, Disaster recovery, provisioning, availability, etc. Some of the other challenges were:

•    Departments were required to procure their own IT Infrastructure and resources for managing.

•    Time to provision a server along with OS and Database was very high resulting in days to weeks.

•    Computing resources, storage, memory, etc were not efficiently utilized.

•    Maintenance required high planned downtime for applications.

•    Upgradation and Updation of new technology was difficult as each component by each department had to carry out the same. Dedicated personnel were required for monitoring and updations.

The Implementation

A Proof of Concept on virtualization was started in November 2011 by using VMWare and Microsoft Hyper V. The overall capacity for each of the resources was increased to a desirable level which ranged from CPU, RAM, NIC, licenses, software, etc. For effective operations and management, training sessions were held for the Data Center team.

The benefits of virtualization were achieved after the PoC and soon the next step of moving to complete implementation of Cloud Setup was initiated. The fully operational cloud was commissioned in May 2012. With all the modules of Cloud implementation, the stakeholders could realize the value of using shared resources from the State Data Centre. It has surely improved the major constraints of operation with better quality of service, reduced time for infra provisioning and lower cost of hosting.

The Microsoft Private Cloud Architecture included 13 physical servers and 44 virtual machines for 37 applications. The VMWare Private Cloud Architecture consisted of 40 physical servers and 450 virtual machines for 165 applications.

The Result

The Government of Maharashtra gained efficiencies both in terms of time and cost after moving to the cloud. Project deployments took place faster and in a more economical manner. More than 150 websites and applications from various state departments have been hosted on MahaGov cloud.