Infosys Technologies : Best Practices in Virtualization

Infosys hosts a digital business engine for automation of various processes
across the organization including over 180 custom built applications on
multiple platforms. These applications were critical to their business as they
enforce systems and processes amongst a diverse workforce. As the organization
grew with a CAGR of over 45%, several challenges were faced in terms of
scalability and availability of applications. Scaling up infrastructure and
supporting end-of-life servers was one of many hurdles Infosys faced.

The initial investment was very high and also they felt a requirement of a
detailed POC for risk mitigation and validation in environment. There was a need
for automated tuning to ensure smooth operations. To address all these key
issues, a virtualization solution was deployed across storage and server stacks
to address the business needs. More than 260 physical servers were consolidated
into 18 high end blade servers giving benefits of lower space, power and cooling
requirements, faster provisioning, higher availability, reduced overall TCO,
better utilization and reducing management overhead. The key benefits derived
from storage tiering were dynamic movement of high IO intensive volumes across
data centers/devices transparent to users.

Virtualization has reliably supported the challenging needs of Infosys business
engine. There has been reduction in power and cooling requirements.