Reliance General Insurance Collects Virtualisation Premium

Keeping up with the BFSI sector’s technological advances can leave others panting and grasping for air. Continuing this trend, Reliance General Insurance has shaken hands with VMware to reduce capital expenditure and cut operating expenses by 30 to 35 percent in the current fiscal year by opting for virtualisation.

Naganathan Sriram, Chief Technology Officer, Reliance General Insurance, says, “Our IT team studied various technologies and solutions, then zeroed in on server consolidation and virtualisation, which helped us to reduce the server sprawl, and eventually eased out IT administration, maintenance, resource management and uptime availability, as well as led to re-utilisation of existing hardware for BCP and DR.”

Challenge: Managing 100 Servers

Reliance General Insurance was struggling to manage a fleet of around 100 servers. Inefficient resource allocation 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.

“We had to contend with a sprawling server infrastructure that was causing database and application performance bottlenecks. We also had to address prolonged downtime, rising procurement and maintenance costs, poor resource use and shrinking data centre space,” says Sriram.

Implementation Phase

VMware offered Reliance General Insurance easy provisioning, efficient management, migration resource utilisation capabilities, re-utilisation of existing hardware, high availability, dynamic resource allocation and a VCB-consolidated back-up.

The implementation phase was smooth because of a systematic adoption process, which included a careful study of existing servers, identifying eligible servers for virtualisation, PoC for extensive testing of the hardware that had to be procured, checking how applications will behave in a virtual environment and planning how the deployment should be done.

Reliance General Insurance now runs around 90 virtual servers on nine physical hosts. These servers run applications that support tasks such as software development and quality assurance, production staging and deployment, and network and Web infrastructure.

Benefits

Sriram says, “We have achieved a server consolidation ratio of 10:1 and have also resolved space issues by reducing the number of server racks in the data centre from around 12-14 to three. The new set-up has cut deployment time for servers and new applications from six to eight hours to one to two hours (excluding procurement time).”

Reliance General Insurance has provisioned a virtual server in one hour, compared to weeks taken earlier to provision and deploy physical servers and has improved application availability to near 100 percent. This solution has enabled a situation where only two administrators can remotely manage the entire infrastructure. It has also enhanced application performance levels and increased user load can now be supported with ease.

Going forward, the insurance company plans to deploy VMware at its disaster recovery site to ensure business continuity. It is also looking to virtualise its storage and desktop infrastructure.