Max New York Life Insurance : Server Virtualization

High growth trajectory in MNYL led to unprecedented pressure on the IT

Infrastructure resulting in the increase in purchase of IT hardware which was

decentralized in various locations. This led to a server sprawl situation

leading to increase in the datacenter space, higher cooling needs and more power

bills. Manageability costs shot up and the need to reduce the data center space

and storage, and lowering down the high resource utilization of the servers

became a pressing need.

A virtualization solution on VMware platform was deployed to resolve this

enabling the server administrator to use the software application to divide one

physical server into multiple isolated virtual environments. This enabled

elimination of server sprawl, to make more efficient use of server resources. To

control costs and reduce dependency, apart from the VMware solution they also

started using Microsoft's Hyper-V.

Benefits of the project included reduction in the number of servers -15 blade

servers in place of 96 (48 mid range server replacement from data center & 48
desktops) saving 714U of Rack space. Reduction in energy consumption and

reduction in overall costs/TCO energy and datacenter costs was also noted. Fewer

administrators now needed to manage fewer servers and save software licensing

fees (per server, per processor licenses) and also reduced physical footprints

and in turn added to Green IT.