Infosys Technologies-IT Infrastructure Consolidation

Sunday, June 17, 2007

With the IT industry growing at around 25 percent, there is tremendous strain on the IT resources of all major IT software service providers. Companies such as Infosys need to look at innovative solutions to consolidate their IT infrastructure. This project was conceptualized about two years back when the company's IT infrastructure was slated for a significant ramp up. The constraints were many: zero space availability, end-of-life servers, and inefficient backup/ recovery mechanism to provide business continuity. Also, the IS staff was under tremendous stress in terms of bandwidth to support user needs due to the wide range of services offered and the heterogeneous systems. Procurement of new servers was costing huge money and impacting the profitability of various projects.

Four focus areas emerged while conceptualizing the project design: server consolidation, storage consolidation, backup consolidation, and space consolidation. Multiple small servers were replaced with fewer high-capacity servers to improve efficiencies in utilization and IT management bandwidth. DNS round robin concept was used for load balancing and redundancy by leveraging three existing DNS servers to avoid SPOF. To ensure a future-proof solution, products that support current, mature technologies like FC/CIFS/NFS, as well as emerging next-gen technologies like iSCSI, were procured. After procurement, data was migrated from DAS and servers to the centralized storage.

Project Specs Business problem:The increased R&D activity at OSDC in Bangalore put a lot of strain on the datacenter resources. IT solution:Virtualization techniques for consolidating servers,centralized storage using LTO3 based backup solutions. Impact:The datacenter footprint was reduced by 70 percent. The consolidation of computing and storage capacity resulted in overall cost savings of $2 million. IT Implementation partner:In-house.

Pritam Kr. Sinha, Sr. Project Mgr - IT

Apart from the obvious efficiency benefits, this also yielded direct cost savings by reducing AMC costs by 45 percent. To reduce the backup window time and the stress on LAN, a Quantum Auto loader with NDMP option was introduced to connect to the storage for LAN-free backup, and LTO3 (the latest technology) was enabled. A VERITAS netbackup solution for centralized backup and monitoring was also implemented. Snapshot technology was leveraged and configured for disk-based backup. This used advanced concepts such as block-based incremental backup to reduce the backup windows from 12 hours to less than 10 minutes. To reduce datacenter space, the team put in place plans to move from table-type racks to the latest shelf-type racks.

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