The customer is a leading general insurance company in India. It offers an extensive range of insurance products and services that cover vehicle insurance, health, student and travel insurance segments.
The Challenge
The customer was looking to replace its ageing hardware systems. They were initially running 90 virtual machines [VMs] on 9 physical hosts. Due to increasing workloads, the number of VMs grew from 90 to 140 over a span of just three years. CPU & memory usage reached a maximum thereby becoming a major bottleneck. Thus, there was no further room for adding new workloads. Likewise, their storage capacity had reached a threshold of 90%. Rising maintenance costs of an ageing hardware system presented yet another challenge to the customer.
The Solution
Galaxy leveraged its close partnership with OEMs such as IBM, VMware and NetApp, to propose a replacement of ageing hardware and migration to a new VMware version. The customer now runs approximately 150 virtual servers on 5 IBM Blade servers with a NetApp storage system. These servers run applications that support software development and quality assurance, production staging and deployment, as well as network and web infrastructure.
This entire migration was done successfully in phases over a period of 3 months. This included storage migration, host migration, and also deploying best practices from VMware, IBM and NetApp for optimum performance.
The Benefits
Galaxy with help from VMware, reduced the customer’s annual operational expenses by over 30%. We achieved a server consolidation ratio of 30:1 and also reduced the number of server racks in the datacenter from 3 to 1. The application availability improved by nearly 100%, and user load was reduced considerably. We enabled easy management of the system IBM Blade Center and NetApp Storage. With help from Galaxy, customer was able to get future scalability for new workloads and growth in data, over the next 3 years.