Other Finalists - Green IT Projects : Infosys Technologies : Go Green

The Information System (IS) division hosts IT infrastructure that is

extensively used to automate various processes across the organization. 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 IS faced. Apart from

this, the space crunch in the existing data centers, along with cooling and

power limitations became the major enabler of a Green IT & virtualization

strategy.

The solution



A virtualization solution was deployed across storage and server stacks.

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, and reducing management overhead. The

division also virtualized over 250 TB of storage across enterprise through

Storage virtualization. Presentation virtualization has been done using Load

Balancer and Caching Devices for HA, to improve the application availability and

performance. Microsoft Terminal Services gateway has been deployed to reduce

multiple round trips for applications over WAN. This has resulted in enhanced

experience for WAN users with a highly secure interface over RDP.

The project required higher initial investment, a detailed POC for risk

mitigation and validation in production environment. Also, complex vendor

licensing requirements including the need to reproduce issues in a physical

environment were challenging roadblocks. Plus, there had to be a one time

disruption to services during deployment.

Benefits to organization



The application scalability was greatly enhanced due to deployment of this

infrastructure platform. They were able to handle 30% more end users using the

same amount of servers and storage. The application response time has improve by

30-80% and there have been bandwidth savings of over 20%. All this optimization

has led to 70,000 man hours/annum being saved in productivity. The reduction in

physical servers has been to the tune of 83%, the power and cooling savings have

been a whopping 90%. Also, some 85% of data center space has been saved.