Galaxy Office Automation

Category: Case Studies

Galaxy Office Automation Pvt Ltd Drives Performance and Efficiency with EBS Volumes for EXFO

Posted on by Marketing

About the Company

Galaxy Office Automation Pvt Ltd Drives
Performance and Efficiency with EBS Volumes for EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering India Pvt Ltd

  • Client: EXFO, a leading provider of test, monitoring, and analytics solutions for global communications service providers
  • Industry: Telecommunications

The Challenge

EXFO’s rapidly growing business and data-intensive workloads demanded high-performance storage solutions. Their existing traditional storage infrastructure was struggling to keep up, leading to performance bottlenecks and operational inefficiencies.

The Solution

Galaxy Office Automation Pvt Ltd, recommended and implemented Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes as EXFO’s primary storage solution.

How Galaxy Successfully Solved the Company’s Challenges

Implementation

  • Galaxy Team conducted a thorough assessment of EXFO’s IT environment, storage requirements, and performance needs.
  • Based on the findings, Galaxy Team proposed a migration plan to move EXFO’s critical data and applications to EBS volumes, optimized for their specific workload demands.
  • Galaxy Team experienced engineers seamlessly migrated EXFO’s data to EBS, minimizing downtime and disruption to their operations.

Results

  • Enhanced Performance: EBS volumes delivered significant performance improvements, reducing application response times by up to 50%. EXFO’s engineers and data analysts experienced faster data access and retrieval, boosting their productivity.
  • Increased Scalability and Flexibility: EBS volumes easily scaled to accommodate EXFO’s growing data volume, eliminating the need for frequent hardware upgrades. With EBS, EXFO could provision new storage on-demand, providing agility and flexibility to adapt to changing business needs.
  • Improved Cost Efficiency: EBS pay-per-use model eliminated upfront capital expenditures and ongoing maintenance costs associated with traditional storage solutions. EXFO only paid for the storage they used, leading to significant cost savings.
  • Enhanced Data Availability and Reliability: EBS volumes offer high availability and redundancy features, ensuring EXFO’s critical data is always accessible and protected against hardware failures.
  • Simplified Management: EBS simplifies storage management with an intuitive web interface. EXFO’s IT team gained centralized control over storage provisioning, monitoring, and scaling, reducing administrative overhead.

Benefits

  • High IOPS and throughput: EBS volumes come in various types, each offering different IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) and throughput levels. You can choose the type that best suits your application’s performance needs, ensuring consistent and fast data access. For instance, Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes deliver ultra-low latency for mission-critical applications, while General Purpose SSD volumes offer a balance of performance and cost for everyday workloads.
  • Elastic scalability: EBS volumes can be easily scaled up or down in size on the fly, without downtime or data loss. This allows you to adapt your storage capacity to your evolving needs, eliminating the need for over-provisioning and associated costs.

Overall, EBS volumes offer a compelling solution for primary storage, providing a combination of high performance, scalability, reliability, cost-effectiveness, security, and flexibility. Whether you’re running mission-critical applications or everyday workloads, EBS can help you optimize your storage infrastructure and achieve your business objectives.

Conclusion

This case study showcases how Galaxy Office Automation Pvt Ltd, as a trusted AWS partner, helped EXFO unlock the potential of EBS volumes to optimize their storage infrastructure and achieve significant performance, scalability, and cost benefits. EBS proved to be a perfect fit for EXFO’s demanding workloads, paving the way for their continued success in the telecommunications industry.

Testimonial

“Galaxy Office Automation’s expertise in AWS and their efficient migration process made our transition to EBS volumes seamless and painless. EBS has transformed our storage infrastructure, providing us with the performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency we need to support our continued growth”

IT Manager

EXFO India Pvt Ltd

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Galaxy Office Automation Helps Media Company Optimize S3 Storage for AWS Account

Posted on by Marketing

About the Company

Galaxy Office Automation Pvt Ltd Implements
Commvault Backup for Epic Channel

  • Client: Epic Channel, a leading Media Company for streaming videos.

As Epic Channel data needs grew, relying solely on on-premises backup became impractical. Galaxy Office Automation, leveraging their Commvault expertise, proposed a hybrid solution utilizing Commvault in conjunction with AWS

The Challenge

Epic Channel’s growing business and critical data necessitated a robust and reliable backup solution. Their existing system was manual, time-consuming, and prone to errors.

The Solution

Galaxy Office Automation Pvt Ltd, a Commvault AWS certified partner, recommended and implemented Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery solution.

How Galaxy Successfully Solved the Company’s Challenges

Implementation

  • Galaxy OA conducted a thorough needs assessment to understand Epic Channel’s data environment, backup requirements, and recovery time objectives (RTOs).
  • Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery was deployed seamlessly, integrating with Epic Channel’s existing infrastructure and applications.
  • Galaxy OA trained Epic Channel’s IT staff on Commvault’s user-friendly interface and best practices for data backup and recovery.

Results

  • Streamlined data protection: Commvault automated Epic Channel’s backup processes, eliminating manual tasks and minimizing errors.
  • Enhanced data security: Commvault’s multi-layered security features, including encryption and access controls, safeguard Epic Channel’s sensitive data.
  • Improved data availability: Commvault’s granular recovery capabilities allow Epic Channel to quickly restore individual files, folders, or entire systems, minimizing downtime and data loss.
  • Scalability and flexibility: Commvault scales easily to accommodate Epic Channel’s future data growth and evolving needs.
  • Reduced IT costs: Commvault’s centralized management and automation saved Epic Channel time and resources, lowering IT operational costs.

Benefits

  • Enhanced Data Security: Commvault’s multi-layered security features, including encryption, access controls, and audit trails, safeguard Epic Channel’s data both on-premises and in the cloud.
  • Improved Scalability and Flexibility: The hybrid architecture allows Epic Channel to easily scale their backup capacity and adapt to changing data needs, both on-premises and in the cloud.
  • Reduced Costs: Utilizing cost-effective AWS storage classes and Commvault’s efficient data management features, Epic Channel achieved significant cost savings compared to traditional on-premises backup solutions.
  • Faster Recovery Times: Granular recovery capabilities within Commvault allow Epic Channel to quickly restore individual files, folders, or entire systems, minimizing downtime and data loss.
  • Increased Business Continuity: With backups securely stored in AWS, Epic Channel gained access to disaster recovery capabilities, ensuring business continuity even in the event of on-premises infrastructure failures.

Conclusion

This case study demonstrates how Galaxy Office Automation Pvt Ltd, a Commvault’s helped Epic Channel achieve its data protection goals by implementing Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery. Commvault’s robust features, scalability, and ease of use make it an ideal solution for businesses of all sizes looking to protect their critical data and ensure business continuity.

Testimonial

“Galaxy Office Automation’s expertise in Commvault and their efficient implementation process were instrumental in our successful backup upgrade. Commvault has given us peace of mind knowing our critical data is safe and readily available”

IT Manager

Epic Channel

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Co-operative Bank reduces its operational costs by implementing Datacenter Modernisation

Posted on by akash

The Challenge

This cooperative bank not only have 58 branches, but also boasts of having its own data center. Given the sensitive nature of its business, it was very important for the bank to maximize the uptime of its core banking applications and lower the RPO and RTO in the eventuality of a disaster.

Some of the other challenges were as follows:

 

  • The equipment at the bank’s data center i.e., storage, networking, and servers, was aging and posed a security risk to the bank. It was due for a tech refresh
  • The anti-virus solution was outdated and needed to be upgraded
  • There was a lack of structured cabling, hence troubleshooting time was very high.
  • Backups were done manually with no automated backup facility. There was an urgent need for an automated backup solution
  • Non-existence of a Disaster Recovery (DR) site
  • The firewall rules were not properly configured, which made them prone to a cyberattack
  • Inadequate Business Continuity Planning (BCP)

The Solution

The bank’s evaluation criteria for the selection of a suitable vendor for tech modernization were stringent.  It wanted solutions vendors who were established, and well-known in the market. Competitively priced, the vendors needed to have experience in HCI and the necessary prowess in providing cutting-edge tech services. Sustainability and present market share was also factored in while shortlisting the vendor. The technical team was insistent on the selection of a vendor that had previously implemented the HCI solution for at least two customers in the banking sector. A detailed technical presentation was required from the SIs before they could submit their commercial tenders. A decision was taken in favor of an HCI solution, moving from the erstwhile 3-tier architecture. The reasons for this were many — easy operation, high performance, flexibility in maintenance, and working from a single pane of glass (compute, storage, and network).

The Benefits

Galaxy provided consulting services to the bank to help modernize its data center and its operations with the latest cutting-edge technologies to achieve its IT and financial goals. Highly skilled teams were provided for networking, operations, and security..

Some of the main benefits accruing from the new solution and highlighted by the bank are:

  1. Lenovo Nutanix helped achieve a highly available and scalable compute and storage solution
  2. Bank applications are now protected with local backup copies and secondary DR replicated copy
  3. One-click DR operations (applications can run from the DR Site in no time)
  4. High security with core and perimeter firewall
  5. Improved performance of the applications with the help of an application load balancer
  6. Secured web applications with WAF
  7. Structure network cabling which helps to identify issues quickly
  8. Reduced data center management operational cost
  9. The potential of achieving the ROI within three years
  10. Reduced incidences of an outage with a better customer experience
  11. Reduced time to the market owing to single-click application flow
  12. Better security compliance with this new next-generation setup

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Freight & Parcel Services simplified their IT operations by implementing Enterprise Storage Solution

Posted on by akash

The Challenge

With around 20000+ employees in more than 200 countries, a leading courier service company was facing many challenges with the data storage. Their main challenge was Storage tower of User Data. Due to so many employees, using their individual laptops and desktops there was huge amount of data deduplications, which was difficult to manage.

Another challenge for them was that there was no central Shared Storage system in the organization for collaborative sharing of data, which lead them to make multiple copies of data. There was also no mechanism of backing up user data at one particular place. Another concern for IT department was Manageability of data, since there was no centralized solution for storing user data, employees were taking backs up there on laptops, and security of that data was at stake. They started looking for a complete solution, which give solution to all their pain points and can be easily manageable.

The Solution

Galaxy suggested EMC Enterprise EMC Unified Storage with Replication Software to them. They also considered EMC Solution over others, as EMC has been market leaders in Storage Solution with its world class always ON backend support online. Enterprise Class storage with No single point of Failure and local protection of Data using Snaps/Clones for efficient backup, which fulfilled the customer challenges of central consolidated storage with replication to other regions as a backup solution.

“What differentiates EMC from its competition is not only the company depth of technology offerings but also knowledge and ability of its people.” Says IT Head of the courier company.

Galaxy team faced challenges while binding the storage with Active Directory, as there were some permission, which needed Head Office approvals. In the end project of central storage with backup at major location is achieved, along with backup replicated among them.

The Benefits

Productivity improvement: Since the implementation of central shared storage each department have their own folders to save their data which was shared amongst department users leading to effective collaboration and information sharing while reducing deduplicated copies of data.

Ensured business continuity: The solution was designed with replication of Tier1 cities data, while every location data was replicated ensuring additional backup copy ensuring business continuity.

User friendly – easy to use: Proposed solution provides an easy self-explanatory wizard based option to self-configure the system functions with monitoring tools with dashboard by which IT administrator could easily manage and monitor the Storage system.

Backup Solution: Local Protection Suite as part of solution enable administrator to take point in time copies of the data which is used as backup copies and replicated to other storage systems providing time stamps to help rollback in case of restoration of data.

High availability: EMC Storage is built with no single point of failure ensuring no downtime and 24x7availability. Using EMC Remote Protection Suite the replication of data provided.

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A leading television network company saved millions on videotape archiving by implementing IBM Trivoli Storage Manager

Posted on by akash

The Challenge

The media company faced major storage and data management challenges caused by a large volume of legacy content and the adoption of file-based workflows, with a significant amount of content being delivered as XDCAM, ProRes and RED files. As space on the company’s shared storage platform quickly ran out, it became critical to find a high performance LTO LTFS archiving solution to help manage the massive amounts of file-based content.

“It was clear, we needed an efficient and intelligent archiving solution to help us lower storage costs,” said IT Head. “However, we also needed to address the increasing difficulty our users’ encountered finding content, as no central search mechanism existed.”

The Solution

The leading television network company recognized the coming challenges of archiving HD content, and turned to IBM and IBM Business Partner Galaxy Office Automation for a state-of-the-art digital storage and archive system to handle HD programming.

To meet the increased data handling demands of high definition television (HDTV), the company needed to increase storage dramatically and improve its archive and retrieval capabilities while lowering costs.

The Company installed IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for direct-to-digital storage solution for HD video that eliminated the need for costly videotape recorders and media. The solution not only saved considerable amounts of money and physical space, it also offered a much more efficient way to handle video. This makes it possible to locate and retrieve clips quickly and enhances company’s ability to distribute programming.

The Benefits

Lowes OPEX cost: With IBM TMS, the company could save more than 70 percent of cost on storage media. It helps controlling storage management costs with ease-of-use features and integration with IBM network attached storage (NAS) products

 

Easy Backup system: The tape backups scheduling was done in IBM TMS software. In this the files were automatic compressed and is stored in backup tapes on the scheduled dates. This helped them in reducing a lot of manual work and thus saved the cost on work force.

 

High Availability: IBM TMS improves business continuity by shortening backup and recovery times and maximizing application availability with advanced data recovery management technologies. It also employ data de-duplication and a hierarchy of storage to increase efficiencies and conserve resources. Thus, it makes archived HD content available on demand.

 

Easy to use: Tivoli Storage Manager is a true enterprise product, and as such, can be configured many different ways to meet an organization’s needs.

 

Backup on any kind of media: IBM Tivoli Storage Manager can manage backup and archive data across disk arrays, tape libraries, or optical storage and can automatically move data as it ages to lower performance storage.

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Financial Company secures crucial data by implementing Airwatch Solution

Posted on by akash

The Challenge

For the financial industry, security is a top priority. Especially for banking institutions, financial records and portfolio decisions hold sensitive information that must be safeguarded. Mobile devices provide the ideal platform for the bank to deliver its mission of providing top tier banking services, while drawing in a new generation of tech-savvy clients.

The leading bank introduced a new application to make the Account Opening Process with ease. This application is carried by every account opening executive throughout INDIA. The bank was concerned about securing the sensitive information stored on the devices by the executives for opening the new accounts and were also concerned about the security and confidentiality of the email service provided to the bank officials.

The bank’s IT security team came up with decision to bring Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM)solutions and started evaluating EMM solutions with various vendors.

The Solution

The Bank looked at a number of EMM providers before selecting AirWatch® by VMware® with Galaxy involved as a partner. After extensive research, the bank’s IT Security team found AirWatch® to be the best option as Enterprise Mobility Solution, combining security and an easy to use management console. We helped the customer’s IT team to understand how AirWatch will help the bank in mitigating their problem and how the use of AirWatch can benefit the bank.

The company was impressed by the extensive application controlling policies than other vendors, which was crucial for the bank.

AirWatch allows simplicity to maintain tighter controls and more effectively manage their mobile device. With AirWatch, the bank had control over company-owned mobile devices completely along with personal devices that is bring your own device (BYOD). The company counts on AirWatch’s flexible policy deployment options to manage devices and remain compliant without hindering employee’s ability to use their devices to the fullest extent.

Galaxy team implemented and deployed the solution in the bank’s environment. Additionally, the company was impressed with the responsiveness and customer support provided by the Galaxy team.

The Benefits

With the help of Galaxy, the leading financial company used the feature of secure launcher for securing their corporate owned Android device with banking application pushed centrally on the device. Galaxy team helped the client in securing the bank officials emails by using AirWatch Inbox, which secured and containerized the bank official’s email providing complete separation of enterprise and personal data. The other advantages that company ripped from the solutions were:

  • The bank achieved device level security.
  • Bank was able to protect the secure information.
  • The policy control for corporate owned devices and BYOD helped manage the bank with ease.
  • They were able to enhance the security features of their banking applications.
  • Containerization of emails in AirWatch Inbox helped them securing the confidential documents and emails on mobile devices.
 

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Automobile manufacturing company implemented a high-speed network environment

Posted on by akash

The Project

The company started a new plant at Dharwad. In this new site, the IT department undertook to install and implement state-of-the-art technology to cater to the company’s growth path in the coming years. The IT team worked on a migration plan to transition its legacy cabling network and consequently charted out superior network requirements to provide for a reliable and high-speed network environment in the factory which would connect and run the main office, design studio, manufacturing units, shops etc.

Admin Building, TCF Shop, BIW Shop, Engine Shop, Paint Shop, Oil & Paint Store, LCV Shop, and Frame Line are the main constructions in the campus; apart from these more than 20 small individual buildings.

A server room was planned in the TCF Shop, which was directly connect to all the main locations through fiber backbone. The small buildings were also connected through fiber either from the Admin Building or from the Oil & Paint Stores. Accordingly, they designed the location of Hub Rooms calculating the maximum work area utilization as per telecommunication standards.

The IT team decided that to design a network on this scale they had to meet the following criteria:

  • A scalable and reliable network.
  • Optimised bandwidth connectivity for the smooth functioning of the system, several customized and complex computer applications, CCTV operations and voice communications.
  • Green environment sustainability and energy savings.
  • Lowest total cost of ownership.
  • Automated processes for administration and security.

In short, a redundant, fail-proof system had to be developed, along with a cabling system that would enable future upgrades. This seemed to be a challenge, as the campus infrastructure was already established and functioning on its full strength. Full-scale production was on and many hurdles seemed imminent. It was very important that this task be carried out in a very short time frame without affecting the normal functioning of the production processes.

Galaxy was chosen after careful assessment of its product portfolio. Galaxy worked with the company and the installation company to ensure a seamless execution of the project, throughout which they were able to achieve 100% network uptime. This consultative approach is a good example of how the company prefers to work with its customers.

Project Plan / Schedule

A detailed project schedule had been prepared in coordination with the company’s IT Team including deliveries, implementation, testing, commissioning, and handover of the project. The first phase was scheduled for 6 months, which included Admin office, TCF Shop, Engine Shop, BIW Shop, and Entry/Exit gates. Full project was completed in one and a half years.

  • Installation: Total 7000 meters overhead pathways was installed for entire project and used more than 20000 meters 12 core SM fiber cable with more than 1500 fiber splices. Along with this, 2000 Data nodes were installed, for installing 80000 meters approx. CAT 6 data cable used. Other than this, 50 NW Racks (42U, 32U, 15U, 9U) were installed in entire campus. For Active part, mounting, patching, Labeling of 78 switches installed out of which 4 nos C 4510 Series Cores switches were used at TCF, BIW & Engine Shops; 12 nos C 3750 Series switches were used at all main locations and C 2960 Series Edge switches all over.
  • Delivery Schedule: All the materials were delivered at site as per the delivery schedule so that the progress of work never affected.
  • Manpower: Galaxy deployed a team of 8 skilled technicians under a site supervisor for the project. The supervisor was responsible for arranging daily work permits, ensuring safety procedures and all communication/coordination within the plant authorities. A team of other 6 skilled employees were also deployed for the installation of Pathways; hence it was completely mechanical fabrication works including welding, fitting, threading etc.
  • Safety: The site is practicing strict safety measures especially for overhead works. Compulsory safety harnesses were allotted to all team members including safety shoes, jackets, helmets, gloves, safety belts etc. Even it was difficult to get permission in the productive areas, we managed to complete the works during non-productive hours.
  • Work Procedure:Galaxy complete the pathways first in all the shops; hence, it was the pre-requisite for cabling inside the shop floors. Meanwhile the fiber backbone cabling for the campus outside the shops was in progress. Client’s Civil Engineering team provided the raceways and Chambers by digging for backbone cabling.
  • Testing & Commissioning: End to end Fiber cores and Copper UTP nodes were tested with Fluke DTX Cable Analyzer before connecting to the computers and other equipment’s. All the Fiber and copper were successfully passed in the tests and the reports were generated in the testing equipment. In the end, IT In-charge of the manufacturing company concluded: “We were impressed by Galaxy’s close attention to detail and efficiency to roll out our network to time and to budget. It is good to know that they are just a phone call away when we require assistance. We are confident that we have invested in an infrastructure that will ensure that we can maintain our reputation as a leading automobile manufacturing company in India.” He further added, “This has been a lengthy installation using the latest technology products. We have been very pleased with the levels of service and support that we have received from Galaxy and the installed performance of the cabling solution, which has been tested and warranted for best performance.”

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Leading financial company executed smooth Datacenter Migration

Posted on by akash

The Challenge

Migration of all systems and Data with minimal downtime from one datacenter.

Client lacked the expertise and experience to conduct a migration of this size internally.

Existing Production Data Centre existed in its current state, lacking standardization, efficiencies & growth scalability & unable to meet end to end level objectives.

Existing Production center had obsolete facilities infrastructure either in terms of high power consumption, a large chuck of legacy / unsupported equipments, or poor availability benchmarks.

Setup Details

Mumbai (Site-A): VMAX with 40TB(Production)

 

PUNE (Site-C): VMAX with 40TB (DR)

 

MAHAPE (Site-B): New site to be setup (New Production)

The Solution

Asset Management.

Multi-Phased Migration

Project and Vendor Management

System Design and Installation

Storage Design and Migration

Relocation of existing Production(FORT, Mumbai) to new DC (MAHAPE, Mumbai)

The Result

Successful Migration, test and turn up.

Project completed on schedule and within budget

Significant operational cost savings

Zero unscheduled downtime of systems

A highly available and redundant systems architecture

Migrated 26TB data across datacentres from dissimilar storage subsystems and cutover to new storage at new datacentre with zero data loss

Migrated 94 servers comprising of Wintel and Unix across datacenters.

Setup Racks and power systems with passive cabling with unique colour coding in 1 week migration

Storage Migration Methodology

  • Step 1: Set up new VSP G Series and virtualize existing VMAX
  • Step 2: Set up Remote Replication from FORT to PUNE(*subject to replication performance. If performance is not good, would need to do VM from external to internal)
  • Step 3-4: Create Local Clone in PUNE and create Remote replication from PUNE to MAHAPE
  • Step 5: Zone DR host path to VSP G800 (*break SRDF) and configure PUNE to test access DR using Local clone copy
  • Step 6-7: Shutdown FORT servers (by Applications) and boot up DR using Local Clone
  • Step 8: Relocate Fort Servers to Mahape and activate the servers
  •  

Achievements

Our services enabled clients to achieve the following goals:

  • Move dependent applications and equipment together
  • Meet critical application availability requirements using specialized data migration techniques
  • Reduce cost and improve operational efficiencies by centralizing the IT environment
  • Limit risk by leveraging the skills of the agency, experienced Galaxy relocation practitioners, and third parties
  • Allow IT operations to focus efforts and resources on more critical operational areas

Our data center migration service supported planning and execution of moves for applications, data, IT equipment (such as servers and storage arrays) and the data center infrastructure (such as racks and power systems). These services can helped customer move from one data center to another data center.

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Financial services company improved the business application uptime by implementing 3-way BCP & DR

Posted on by akash

The Challenge

The customer is one of the largest financial services companies in India, and delivers a wide range of comprehensive financial solutions to its end clients. Given the sensitive nature of this business, it is extremely important for the customer to maximize uptime of its business-critical applications, and lower RPO & RTO in case of any disaster. The company has built a private cloud to serve their own IT requirements as well as those of their group companies and clients. However, they lacked an established framework to safeguard investors’ money, such as IT systems processes or business continuity plans and processes. Maximum system tolerable downtime for the company is 30 minutes. Till last year, they had been using traditional data centers and an un-consolidated infrastructure. Their Backup, replication and BCP-DR systems were not as per the industry requirements.

The Solution

Galaxy provided consulting services to client for creating and following a business continuity planning framework. Since last year, Galaxy has been working with their Chief Technology Officer to come up with, and implement a plan to setup a private cloud with the help of industry leading OEM’s like VMware, Brocade, EMC, Hitachi and Lenovo. Along with this, we also implemented a three-way Business Continuity Planning – Disaster Recovery [BCP-DR] solution, with its primary data center located at their Navi Mumbai office, a near BCP-DR site implemented at less than 5 kilometers from the primary data center, far BCP-DR site at Bangalore. At all three locations, they are using EMC Unity Storage along with Recover Point Appliance for the synchronous replication between DC & Near DR, and asynchronous replication between near DR & far DR.

The Benefits

 EMC Recover Point provides continuous data protection to customer, with multiple recovery points to restore applications instantly to a specific point in time.

Customer’s applications are now protected with bi-directional synchronous and asynchronous replication and digital video recorder(DVR)-like recovery in physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures.

Customer was able to minimize network utilization with unique bandwidth compression and de-duplication, significantly reducing replication of data over the network.

Customer was also able to streamline disaster recovery testing of the application environment while production replication continued unaffected.

 

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Financial services company increases its security and reduce time to market by implementing Micro-segmentation & IT Automation

Posted on by akash

The customer is one of the largest financial services companies in India offering a comprehensive range of financial solutions to its clients. Since many of their operating units and divisions handle highly sensitive data both on and off their office premises, data security is fast becoming a key area of concern for them.

The Challenge

The customer wanted to reap the efficiencies, scalability and agility of the cloud to lower their operational costs and serve their end clients better, without sacrificing security or performance. They were looking to build a private cloud and install automation tools to onboard end clients quickly, and also deliver faster services to them.

A Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) approach was the key to achieving their goals. An SDDC would enable the company to turn its new data center into a highly agile, secure, and scalable cloud using its existing hardware, while supporting both current and future applications. A big obstacle to their plan was the immediate need to address several cloud networking and security issues. Many of the company’s core applications were based on legacy technologies that are neither inherently multi-tenant, nor designed for today’s modern cloud infrastructure. The challenge before them was to find products, design applications and solutions for the entire gamut of their clients. However, financial applications frequently don’t mesh with multi-tenancy. Thus, quite often, they had to install hardware at a customer’s location and co-manage it – a tedious and an expensive process. Thus, it was highly desirable for the customer to find a way to do everything from their own data center. They could not wait for immature, proprietary, hardware-defined solutions to address these challenges, and wanted to virtualize their legacy applications and take multi-tenant security into its infrastructure via micro-segmentation.

The Solution

The customer decided to create a cloud-based multi-tenant environment built on VMware vCloud Suite, and deploy VMware NSX to virtualize its network. Galaxy provided consulting services to the client and provided deep insights on NSX features. The customer was familiar with the power of server virtualization, and quickly understood the benefits that network virtualization could bring to them.

VMware NSX virtualizes the network to deliver the entire networking and security model from L2 – L7 in software. The platform decouples the network from the underlying hardware, while taking advantage of the existing network infrastructure without changes to enable new levels of service delivery speed, agility and cost reductions.

VMware NSX also delivers a completely new operational model for networking that breaks through current network barriers and enables data center operators to achieve better agility and improved economics. The NSX platform’s unique policy-based distributed firewalling and L3 routing enable multi-tenancy for the financial services applications that the customer hosts for its end clients.

“Given our work in the financial sector, security is very important to us, and the ability to do micro-segmentation was critical to our selection of VMware NSX,” says their Chief Technology Officer.

They even tried doing the same at the hardware level, but realized soon enough that it was not feasible. The proven success of the NSX platform, and the integration of other industry leaders such as Arista Networks and Palo Alto Networks, helped solidify their decision. In addition to VMware NSX, the customer also deployed VMware vCloud Suite Advanced for compute virtualization and cloud management.

With a small IT staff to run their new data center, IT automation and agility were essential for them to effectively support and secure a multi-tenant environment. vCloud Suite gave them that desired IT automation and IT management agility necessary to scale the business and reduce capital expenditures.

The Benefits

In just about 3-4 weeks, client successfully deployed and integrated all the VMware solutions it selected. The VMware NSX platform allowed them to decouple their data center network from the underlying physical hardware to gain massive scale, while simplifying network design and operations. More importantly, it works seamlessly with the firm’s existing compute and networking infrastructure, applications and security products.

The data center virtualization and standardization achieved results in lower capital expenditures. VMware NSX also enabled the client to implement micro-segmentation based on fine-grained policies to enable security inside and outside of their data center. Client now enjoys superior operational control and increased availability and security. “I like that security follows each virtual machine around,” says their Chief Technology Officer.

VMware empowered them to implement a secure and agile SDDC, and respond more quickly to customers and improve their time-to market. With VMware NSX, they can now deploy applications for multiple customers without needing additional physical infrastructure at a customer site, now or in the future. The VMware NSX platform makes it possible for them to easily remotely provision, manage, orchestrate and securely control their applications.

 “We’ve reduced provisioning times for new virtual machines and scale quickly, and we achieved our goal for average cost-per-virtual machine and more manageable costs,” says CTO.

VMware NSX has delivered the operational model of a virtual machine to client’s data center network, transforming the economics of their network and security operations.

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