Hindustan Dorr Oliver's Virtual Answer To Downtime

In today’s connected times, the wider organisations spread their wings, the more integral IT’s role becomes as the common or linking factor among employees, management, remote offices and overall operations. Consider a company that runs 16-17 projects spanning the length and breadth of the country, which are tightly tied with the IT infrastructure. The company faces hardware failures about two to three times a month resulting in non-adherence of project completion dates, which comes with a penalty attached to it. In such a scenario, the organisation could be up for a roller coaster ride. Mumbai-based engineering company Hindustan Dorr Oliver was in a similar muddle and found its way out through the adoption of virtualisation technology.

“The company had a routine employee gathering in Mumbai where this issue came up for discussion. I gave a presentation of this technology to the management and it got approved after the completion of multi-level negotiations,” says Ajay Khanvilkar, Sr Assistant GM-IT, Hindustan Dorr Oliver.

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Subsequent to the approval, the idea was discussed with Dell, the company’s business partner, for consolidating the servers into one box for better manageability. The servers were running on different operating systems like Windows, Linux, and IBM AIX; the company wanted to port over to a more reliable platform. Dell provided Dorr Oliver with blade server technology that mirrors the data onto other machines. The company’s projects have not reported any delay in the last six months after implementing this technology. Dell has customised the solution on the basis of the number of users logging on to the server, data type and the kind of applications running on them.

Downtime, Storage Space and Cooling: Major Hurdles

Downtime was a major problem. “At times, we have even stretched our operations for a week without the servers being in a functional stage,” says Khanvilkar. The company lost time while the vendor responded to the problem and things got back on track. The downtime resulted in a loss of engineering man-hours. “With the old servers, we had about two to three instances of downtime in a month,” says Khanvilkar.

The company is currently running about 16-17 projects across the country, which have pre-set completion dates. If the projects get pushed beyond these deadlines, the penalty clause gets activated leading to further losses.

Another challenge was the space constraint in terms of employees finding it difficult to view the engineering drawings on their machines. “Now we have a 4TB SAN box that provides ample storage, which will probably suffice for the next four to five years,” says Khanvilkar.

Cooling was also an issue with the old servers. Two ACs of 1.5 tons were required round-the-clock to keep the servers cool at a particular temperature; for the current blade servers the two ACs are used alternatively after two to three hours. The heat sinks on the CPUs now arrest the heat generated inside the servers. “We have reduced the power cost by about 40 percent due to restricted usage of ACs,” says Khanvilkar.

The transition of data from the old servers to the new ones was a challenge. Certain applications were hardware locked while some of them had a software lock. The respective software vendors provided the activation keys. On the whole, the shifting of DMS was a major task along with the transfer of engineering applications.

Dell’s Seven-Day Implementation Plan

During the first visit, the Dell team evaluated the mission-critical applications; the database, including the size and location of data and the data type; the operating systems etc. They came up with the hardware requirements accordingly and presented a commercial proposal, which was agreed upon after consultation. It took about four to five weeks for Dell to design the tailor-made hardware cut out for the company’s requirements. Dell came up with a well laid out seven-day implementation plan, which was completed as scheduled, and the blade servers were up and running in a week’s time.

Blade servers have now replaced the regular servers. The old servers are used at other project locations. Each blade is running a different operating system and the other blade servers mirror the data and take over the operations in case the host server is down. So even if one blade server faces downtime, it is work as usual for the users. VMware, the solution provider, has deployed a dedicated server at the company that is connected online with vendor quarters. The blade servers keep getting regular updates from VMware through this server.

The technology has also taken care of the space constraint. “All our engineering and third-party applications are stored on the blade servers, which are connected to the newly bought 4TB Dell SAN Box,” says Khanvilkar. The Data Management System (DMS) and other data-heavy applications have also been ported on the SAN along with the databases. All engineering-related activities like creation of engineering drawings, material procurement and other information gets stored on the SAN box through the DMS. The SAN box has enough space to meet the scaling requirements of the company for the next three to four years.

Downtime Reduction: A Major Plus

The biggest advantage is the drastic reduction of business downtime. “Not a single incident of downtime has been reported in the last six months since this technology has been implemented,” says Khanvilkar. The manageability of data has improved with back-ups getting centralised and happening faster than before. This is because the back-up process has been totally automated without any kind of human intervention involved. Previously, the back-up was done on the Ultrium Linear Tape Open Technology (LTO). It has now been moved to the tape library. “We have invested in Symantec back-up software, which pulls data from the engineering database and the Oracle agent,” explains Khanvilkar.

The other advantage has been effective usage of the available space for servers. Currently, there are four blade servers that can scale up to 16 on one rack. The overall project cost was Rs 22 lakh.

“As an IT head, I now spend a peaceful night,” says Khanvilkar.