Virtualization keeps Oracle Financial Fiscally Fit
A case study on Virtualization in Financial ServicesReader ROI
Executive Summary
CIO 100 Winner: Oracle was suffering from a server sprawl, where servers were unused or underutilized most of the time. By virtualizing 225 servers to 15 and consolidating three datacenters into one, S.hariharan unleashed a host of cost and efficiency benefits.
Oracle Financial Services Software(OFSS) caters to banking and capital market companies across the world. Part of what it offers its customers is the ability to cut costs and respond rapidly. But it was having a hard time practicing what it was preaching.
Case Study Highlights
Part of the reason was the ever-increasing demand from business users for development and testing environments. Their constant requests had created a 225-server sprawl. "Many of these servers were underutilized and even unused at times," says S. Hariharan, Sr. VP Infrastructure Solutions and Services Group, Oracle Financial Services Software.
This situation also put the company's datacenter under stress. It was a challenge, says Hariharan, to control and manage the costs of multiple servers at multiple locations and also to ensure they had effective security controls and to be able to scale up.
The state of affairs begged for virtualization and datacenter consolidation. The IT facility management team used in-house virtualization software to shrink the physical server count from 225 to 15. This cut facility costs by 50 percent and annual maintenance costs by 60 percent.
The IT team then consolidated three active datacenters in Mumbai to a single location. The process involved moving over 180 servers from three locations to a newly-built datacenter. This big move enabled better security, overall control, scalability, and trimmed datacenter costs.
But these wins didn't come without challenges. The datacenter consolidation project came with technical as well as legal issues. The migration, for instance, needed clearance from the customs department and approval for downtime had to be sought from clients and project heads since most of the servers were production servers. "The migration had to be planned meticulously keeping in mind global operations and different time zones," says Hariharan.
Put together, the two projects cost about Rs 1.75 crore but they enabled the company to put their assets to optimal use. After migrating data from standalone servers to virtual servers with shared storage, OFSS saved 5TB of disk space and will save Rs 3.8 crore annually. It's made it easier to meet storage demands. Finally, the project cut provisioning time for new test environments to five hours from six weeks.
The Person Behind It
“The migration was not easy, but the rise in our flexibility and overall manageability justified it."
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