Other Finalists - Green IT Projects : Max New York Life Insurance : Infrastructure Redesign

Year 2008 saw a spiraling growth in the business volumes for Max New York
Life Ltd (MNYL), which resulted in a multitude of branches being opened up in
various parts of the country. As the number of branches increased, there was an
increase in the number of different servers for supporting business needs of
these new branches.  This decentralization of servers across several locations
resulted in multi-fold increase in the cost of managing the IT infrastructure,
which in turn resulted in overall inefficiency in processes.  To overcome these
inefficiencies, a complete redesign and consolidation of IT infrastructure of
MYNL was carried out. Various tasks undertaken to achieve this new setup were
consolidation of Lotus Notes and Active Directory servers and implementation of
NAP (Network Access Protection), data center upgrade, server virtualization, and
batch automation. In Notes consolidation, 14,000 mailboxes were migrated into a
single server. With this, it became easier to administer the mail system, add
new features, and integrate it with other apps like unified communication and
collaboration. In AD consolidation, the company placed read-only domain
controllers with minimal OS core installation in branch offices with 100+ users.
This also saved bandwidth due to reduced replication traffic over the WAN.
Lastly, for end point protection and NAP, Symantec Endpoint Protection was
deployed. All this resulted in reduction of servers from 500 to just 25 and
savings of 5.9 crores.  Besides this consolidation, 3 Tier Architecture design
for the datacenter was deployed which encompasses access layer, protection layer
and core layer. Network connectivity has been secured by using IPS & Firewall
for corporate users, business partners and Internet users. Inside datacenters,
virtualization solution on VMware was deployed enabling server administrators to
use the software application to divide one physical server into multiple
isolated virtual environments. This enabled elimination of server sprawl, and
make more efficient use of server resources. To control costs and reduce
dependency, apart from the VMware, Microsoft's Hyper-V was also used. 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.