Reliance General Insurance Banks On VMware Virtualisation

Reliance General Insurance has adopted VMware’s virtualisation platform to overcome various IT challenges and to reduce capital expenses and cut operating expenses by 30 to 35 percent in the current fiscal year.

VMware virtualisation has enabled Reliance General Insurance to improve CPU utilisation, overcome performance bottlenecks and ensure resources that can be quickly scaled to support new initiatives or business growth. With VMware virtualisation in action, Reliance General Insurance has successfully fixed the company’s sprawling server infrastructure challenges, including reduction in server provisioning times and enhancing application performance and uptime. The company has also achieved a server consolidation ratio of 10:1, which would need only two administrators to remotely manage the entire infrastructure, further improving application availability.

Naganathan Sriram, chief technology officer, Reliance General Insurance, said, “To be a market leader, we have to consistently deliver a seamless working environment to our users and development and testing teams. The VMware virtualisation solution has enabled us to provide the resources required for product development, while guaranteeing high system availability for our users.”

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Prior to virtualisation of its IT environment, Reliance General Insurance was struggling to manage a fleet of around 100 servers. Inefficient resource use slowed database and application performance, while prolonged downtime hindered the ability of staff to serve customers and undertake development work. Data centre space was shrinking as the company added more hardware to support its growing business. Procurement and maintenance costs were also rising to unsustainable levels.

To address these issues, Reliance General Insurance turned to VMware’s virtualisation solutions in early 2009. The company now runs around 90 virtual servers on nine physical hosts. These servers run applications that support software development and quality assurance, production staging and deployment, and network and Web infrastructure.

“Server consolidation, apart from cost savings, is also resulting in faster migration of applications, smoother maintenance and better uptime. We now have a ‘VMfirst’ strategy in IT for deploying new applications,” said Sudip Banerjee, VP and head-IT, Reliance General Insurance.

The company now plans to deploy VMware at its disaster recovery site to ensure business continuity. It is also looking to virtualise its storage and desktop infrastructure.