Server Optimization Ensures On-demand Scalability for Fidelity
A case study on Virtualization in FinanceReader ROI
Executive Summary
CIO 100 Winner: Fidelity Business Services India is growing at a fast pace but in the last four to five years, dynamic business needs were putting pressure on IT. This ingenious CIO catered to multiple such problems - dynamic business needs and staying ahead of competition - with one solution: virtualization.
Delhi-based Fidelity Business Services India, a provider of investment solutions, launched operations in September 2001. With over 6,500 employees the company operates from Gurgaon, Bangalore and Chennai.
Case Study Highlights
The company is growing at a fast pace but in the last four to five years, dynamic business needs were putting pressure on IT. The IT team had to respond to business's growing needs - like faster provisioning, providing on-demand scalability, optimizing the system performance - at lower cost.
"Each business team had its own justification for a dedicated physical IT hardware, as a result of which, we had close to more than 1,000 servers and average utilization of these servers was a dismal two to three percent," says Amit Gupta, head-technology infrastructure services, Fidelity Business Services India.
The IT team was battling several issues. There were frequent requests for upgrade in memory, processor or disk space.
"I was convinced that virtualization would address these challenges. It could also optimize our spend on servers, inclusive of hardware and software," says Gupta.
However, the project brought with it a set of challenges. It was difficult for Gupta to secure buy-in of all stakeholders. There were technology know-how related challenges with in-house resources as well as vendors.
"Ensuring an effective program management for a project that touched almost everybody within the organization was challenging. Finding a project sponsor during recessionary times was another prickly issue," he says.
Gupta finally embarked on the project in a gradual manner by migrating low-risk platforms to a virtualized environment. Implemented in a phased manner, the project delivered considerable results. It reduced technology costs including support costs by 20 percent. "It led to cost avoidance due to hardware sharing as well as software re-deployment. It affected a 30 percent reduction in power consumption and increased availability of space within the datacenter by 20 percent," says Gupta. Post-implementation, the number of physical servers reduced by almost 35 percent (from over 1,000 to 660). Not only that, the project ensured on-demand scalability and reduced provisioning time by 60 percent.
The Person Behind It
"Being able to reduce resources and expenses, yet increase output was worth it."
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