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

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PCQ Bureau
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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.

Other Finalists - Green IT Projects

Company Scenario
Before Deployment
  • High operational cost of branches due to

    decentralized setup

  • Bandwidth chocking

  • Authentication problems due to duplicate naming

    conventions across branches

After Deployment

Parvinder Singh , VP and Head IT Service, MNYLI

  • Saving on power and reduce TCO cost per server per

    branch

  • Reduce operation cost of branches and enhance uptime

    to business users

  • Centralized management plus removal of installation

    overheads

What was deployed


  • Consolidation of Lotus Notes and Active Directory servers and

    implementation of NAP (Network Access Protection)
  • Data

    center upgrade
     
  • Server

    virtualization using VMware solution and Microsoft's Hyper-V
  • Batch

    automation using Tivoli workload scheduler
 
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