The year was 2007. Reliance General Insurance Company Limited (RGICL) wanted to consolidate and virtualize their 100 server datacenter consisting of 2p and 4p servers. The opportunity of the contract was out and vendors were invited to provide a solution. The stage was set for a clash of server heavyweights Sun, HP, and IBM. After a tough competition, Galaxy Office Automation Pvt. Ltd. (GOAPL), an IBM partner, bagged the deal.

Arun Roongta, VP-Marketing & Business Development, GOAPL says, “Sun was represented directly, while HP was represented by a partner for getting this contract. RGICL’s pain areas were the space constraints caused by 19 racks and it also faced a high degree of variance in server utilization, along with long lead times to provision for a new server. They were looking for a solution to all these problems.” Additionally, the 100 servers were being hosted at an IDC office elsewhere,  and the datacenter space and racks were on a rental agreement with this IDC. It was the extensive PoC approach GOAPL followed that tilted the scales in their favor.

GOING THAT EXTRA MILE

Deciding that a proactive approach was the way ahead, the IBM and GOAPL team tried to understand the exact nature of the customer’s needs. For doing so they deployed IBM CDAT (Consolidation, Discovery, and Analysis Tool) to monitor RGICL’s system utilization. This tool not only shed light on the utilization percentages of existing servers, processing and RAM utilization but also helped GOAPL make a case for storage virtualization coupled with server virtualization. The findings of the tool indicated that many servers were running with 10 percent utilization while others required additional I/O and memory.  These findings also helped GOAPL convince the customer to deploy 10 servers with a virtualization platform to reduce their IDC costs and take care of their future project requirements.

The analysis had paid off but there was another hurdle. Back in September, 2007, virtualization hadn’t been deployed by too many Indian companies and convincing RGICL to be one of the first to do so was going to require extensive PoC. “IBM invited us to their lab in Bangalore to see the quality of the solution for ourselves.  Their teams had set up a complete working solution in a similar environment to help us understand the usability of the solution. While Sun and HP went for the design and architect mode and came up with a proposal, what impressed us was the pro-active approach of GOAPL towards understanding our requirements,” says Sriram Naganathan, Chief Technology & Operations Officer (CTOO), RGICL.

PAVING THE ROAD AHEAD

RGICL finally decided to go in for virtualization against blade servers for solving their space issue. “Virtualization provides an organization with flexibility, in blades we would still need to dedicate hardware. Also, virtualization gave us the guarantee of an on-demand application wherein if we wanted extra processing capacity at the end of the month, we could have it,” says Naganathan. The solution has been up and running in RGICL smoothly for the last 18 months and the company has 80-odd virtual machines in their setup, which includes development, UAT, and production servers.

The effort paid off. GOAPL won the contract and used VMware virtualization solution on 10 IBM x3850 M2 servers, along with a DS 4800 SAN solution to migrate the 100 physical servers. RGICL disposed off the existing servers, within and outside the Reliance Group, resulting in operational savings of Rs. 85 lakhs.

The implementation was completed in three months and RGICL and GOAPL’s IT teams worked in tandem to develop a blueprint, changing the earlier production, test, and development setting to a virtualized platform.

While IBM and GOAPL worked together for the project, their teams were fighting against time to complete the project in three months. After the client approved a phase-by-phase deployment plan, the teams had to work in shifts 24x7 to ensure that the work was completed on time, without affecting the thousands of users logged onto the systems. Elaborating on his key learnings from the project, Roongta says, “IBM and our teams worked well together and if it hadn’t been for a combined effort, we wouldn’t have been able to deliver on time. A technical issue with the SAN configuration was also tided over, thanks to IBM’s expertise and every component was delivered on time.” Though confident from the start of completing the project, Roongta believes unless one actually does a project of this magnitude and complexity, a company cannot zero-in on a go-to-market strategy.

ANOTHER MILESTONE

With the virtualized environment fully ready, RGICL was able to reduce its server footprint and cooling requirements. However, another major requirement that needed to be met was to build a datacenter with Disaster Recovery (DR)-ready servers. “It was imperative for us to have DR-ready servers so that we could retrieve backups and improve performance. We have had a problem earlier where our datacenters weren’t able to come up with the data required for our operations. In an insurance company, we cannot afford to lose data as thousands of customers depend on us and deploying a DMVK file on a DR environment is also easy. We haven’t faced a minute’s downtime since,” says Naganathan.

RGICL at the time had also leased out SAN from their datacenter for various applications. The result was a spread out SAN which hadn’t been designed properly. “As part of the virtualization deployment, we got the opportunity to design the SAN when we bought our own SAN box. We managed to shift some of the applications on the new SAN and also managed to reduce storage along the way,” he added.

Besides winning the contract for deploying server virtualization, GOAPL now also has been awarded the storage virtualization implementation and a three-year support contract with RGICL. “The 10 servers we deployed have been scalable enough to take care of RGICL’s growing requirements and for the last 18 months they have not needed any new hardware,” says a proud Roongta.  In fact, when RGICL was designing a DR solution a few months ago, they realized that they could take out two of the ten servers for that implementation.

FINANCIAL BENEFITS

While the IT industry has lost the momentum it enjoyed a year ago, GOAPL has managed to find a solution to help RGICL minimize their costs. “Whenever new projects come up, RGICL now creates servers on a virtual platform; utilizes it and shelves it again if the platform is no longer required. This helps them cut down on costs,” says Roongta. Similarly in the storage virtualization implementation, GOAPL helped the client re-look at their applications, while they were porting it onto the new SAN. “This exercise made us realize that 300 GB of fiber channel SAN HD of storage was unnecessary and 146 GB instead would suffice for RGICL’s needs and provide better efficiency. We had to re-evaluate the design to some extent, but the number of HD’s increased and this gave the client better throughput,” he added.

THE ROAD AHEAD
Even after crossing many hurdles, the GOAPL-RGICL journey is not yet over. Roongta’s company still has a job at hand that needs to be completed by January, 2010 – the task of completing RGICL’s DR implementation. Roongta believes they were selected above other contenders for this one, due to the quality of the work done for the earlier project. “Whenever you do quality work it speaks for the commitment of the team. I believe we were given a preference due to our long association with RGICL and the lengths we go to, to ensure the best possible implementation,” says a beaming Roongta.

MANTRA FOR CUSTOMER RETENTION

Customer retention gives many partners sleepless nights. There is no sure shot formula which can help you. Holding on to a customer requires giving them value for money, ensuring you help them with their long-term requirements and ensuring cost savings. However, even after doing these the customer may choose to find a new partner. Yet, most partners agree that retaining and cultivating a long-term relationship is crucial. Galaxy Office Automation Pvt. Ltd. (GOAPL) has had Reliance General Insurance Company Limited (RGICL) as its customer for five years now. So what is it that a partner should do?

“We have been working with RGICL for so long that we have an understanding on issues and a good working relationship. I did have to compromise on my margins for the server virtualization implementation, but what mattered to me the most was retaining RGICL as a customer,” says Arun Roongta, VP-Marketing & Business Development, GOAPL. Relationships should always be valued more than financial gains, he added.

To ensure that RGICL would be convinced of the benefits of the solution, GOAPL went ahead and did a PoC at IBM’s lab in Bangalore. The production environment was set up on the proposed hardware and GOAPL tested the applications to the hilt for extended hours. It was only after being convinced of the benefits that RGICL agreed to give the contract to GOAPL, as opposed to HP and Sun, who followed the design and architect mode.

Putting in that extra effort goes a long way in helping the customer realize the value he holds for a partner. Sriram Naganathan, CTOO, RGICL bears testimony to the pro-active approach of GOAPL. “They put in every effort possible to help us realize the potential of virtualization. We haven’t had any company do such an extensive PoC, where they actually simulated the datacenter environment.” Of course, the relationship we share with them also makes it comfortable to work with them.

GOAPL has now also been given the contract of DR implementation, which is expected to be completed by January 2010. “We were given a preference above others as RGICL had seen the quality of the work we do. We will keep trying to do better every time so that RGICL remains one of our valued customers,” says a proud Roongta.