Reliance General Insurance - An IBM Case Study

Reliance General Insurance is one of the fastest growing private sector general insurance companies in India. It currently offers over 95 insurance products including health, home, motor, travel, fire, engineering, marine, liability and aviation.

The company was running its business applications and the related databases in a discrete environment. They had over 100 servers spanning almost 14 racks in the datacentre. Most of these servers were with islands of internal storage and there was no system-level resiliency built into the infrastructure. There were space constraints, high degree of variance in server utilisation, long lead times to provide for a new server and the IT team had to work 24x7 to ensure uptime of the application.

Moreover, servers had varying degrees of utilisation, which in turn was affecting performance on some machines. While some servers were working fine, others were subject to extremely high CPU and I/O utilisation. Due to these random demands given by the business side, the IT team were under pressure at all times to provide additional servers within zero time.

The insurance company selected IBM to develop a blueprint to transform the entire production landscape running on virtualised platform. This not only helped reduce the server footprint and power and cooling requirements but also formed a solid infrastructure with built-in high availability features.

“We had concerns on server consolidation and high availability on a set of servers. Virtualisation was a solution which addressed both concerns,” says Sudip Banerjee, VP Information Technology, Reliance General Insurance.

Both teams developed a phase-wise implementation plan to move all standalone servers onto a virtualised platform. Care was taken to make logical groups out of the existing application and database servers so that users are least affected due to migration. The solution was implemented over a period of three months starting July 2008.

“The transition was so smooth that none of the user groups came to know that the 100 odd servers had been migrated to virtualised environment,” says Banerjee. Benefits derived The solution helped Reliance General Insurance in achieving IT simplification; easy to manage virtualised platform with redundancies in the SAN storage as compared to the standalone farm of servers, single point of management as well as optimum utilisation of resources.

Moreover, dynamic resource availability for virtual machines (servers); Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) ready as well as assured uptime and high-availability were other key benefits derived.

Reliance General Insurance now has better responsiveness to business needs; improve business efficiency by scaling system, services to cater ever increasing customer base; virtually zero downtime with reduce cost of operations, administration and risk.

In addition, the new solution takes almost 80 percent less rack space as the earlier servers, much less power and cooling requirements and reduced requirement of micro-management of infrastructure. All this has helped the company achieve better utilisation rates of server and storage infrastructure.