Mahindra & Mahindra : Hosted Setup on VMware Platform

Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd is a part of Mahindra Group, which deals in frame

equipment, automotive business and international operations. Lack of space and

the need to reduce recurring cost were the prime factors for this project.

Previously, the company had a hosted model that lacked many features that they

wanted. For example, the inability to host Internet servers due to space

constraints. SLAs for resolution were not as per their business requirements

since the servers were hosted at a third party data center, and cost was another

factor which persuaded them to go for this project. Apart from this, the

deployment time required for a new application was very high because of factors

such as procurement of new space, delivery of hardware, installation and

commissioning of the hardware, subsequent application, configuration, etc. Plus

they were also looking to consolidate the SAP 4.6B servers along with archived

data.

The older system was not able to handle the continuous growth of the

organization. During the deployment, they faced trouble in moving applications

from physical servers to virtual servers. Apart from this, they were not able to

back up data. However, with the VMWare utility, the problem was taken care of.

Another challenge was to find the right skill to use these tools and resolve the

issues quickly.

Finally, they implemented a hosted environment on a virtualized platform and

created a service oriented infrastructure for deployment of business

applications with hosting as a service as compared to traditional deployments of

one server per application. In future, they look forward to deploy DR scenario

for the High Availability setup that they have created.