Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Firm Shrinks 120 Servers to 20, Reduces Cost and Cuts Energy Usage with Virtualization
Overview
Country or Region:India
Industry:ITServices
Customer Profile
KPIT Cummins is a global IT consulting and product engineering partner company focused on the Manufacturing (Automotive, Industrial and Hi-Tech) and Diversified Financial Services industries.
.
Business Situation
KPIT Cummins wanted to cut capex and opex expenses, reduce the number of physical servers it operated, and optimize system flexibility and maintenance to best serve its business requirements.
Solution
To optimize the growing data centers operations, KPIT Cummins implemented a virtualization solution centered on Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ technology to consolidate hardware, minimize rack space and ownership and software cost.
Benefits
Consolidates multiple servers
Reduces power consumption
Reduces opex and capex cost
Improves service quality / “Virtualization has helped to reduce the provisioning time for new applications by almost 6-8 weeks helping us to deploy applications within 4 hours on the virtualized platform.”
Mandar Marulkar,Head, Technical Infrastructure Management Services, KPIT Cummins
Headquartered in Pune, India, KPIT Cummins is an emerging leader in providing consulting, solutions and services in the fields of finance, accounts and manufacturing. It is one of the world’s first few companies to achieve the BS25999:2007, ISO9001, ISO 27001:2005, CMMI- level 5 certifications. With accumulation of servers, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the company to manage costs and handle issues like high expenditure on technology hardware, software licensing, power consumption, and physical space. Hence, KPIT Cummins decided to migrate operations to Windows Server® 2008 with Hyper-V™ technology to take advantage of server virtualization efficiencies. With its new optimized infrastructure, the company can grow faster and dramatically reduce IT costs. The company has virtualized 120 of its physical servers to 20 servers and thus has optimized space and power use.
Situation
Founded in 1990, KPIT Cummins specializes in consulting in Governance and Regulatory Compliance, high end transactional BPO/KPO and Enterprise Support to global customers. The company is focused on co-innovating domain intensive technology solutions for manufacturing corporations in automotive, industrials, hi-tech verticals and diversified financial services. It has established state of art eco friendly facility equipped with advanced technologies, processes, and equipment - complying with international standards.
With 4500 employees worldwide and more than 95 active global clients, the company has offshore centers in Pune and Bangalore in India. Besides, it has onsite presence in United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Singapore, South Africa and Poland.
KPIT Cummins operates multiple data centers in its Pune and Bangalore centers. To help meet the needs of more than 5000 users across the globe, the company manages more than 200 servers, storage area networks and business applications such as SAP R/3 ERP, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 with unified communication. In addition, it manages configuration management servers, project management applications, intranet and portal applications, development and testing servers supporting customer projects.
The company has a network operations centre that takes care of network and perimeter security and client services which takes care of desktop and peripheral devices support.
KPIT Cummins realized that more than 150 servers had reached the end of their life, they had hardware which was older the 3 years.At the same time, there were more than 50 servers that had less than 30 percent utilisation. Initially the managers planned to replace some of them by new hardware and renew the annual maintenance contract (AMC) of remaining servers, but these options required considerable capital and operating expenses.“Our goal was to deploy Green IT solutions, reduce capex and opex expenses by at least 15percent and improve asset utilization by 20 percent,” explains Mandar Marulkar,Head, Technical Infrastructure Management Services, KPIT Cummins.“The growing number of servers, however, was resulting in more energy consumption and increased data centre energyconsumption.”
With growing server network, the company was incurring huge costs for technology hardware, software licensing, and power consumption. It recognized that its IT environment had become too large and complex to be managed effectively and efficiently in a traditional manner. The company also wanted to cut back on the number of physical servers it operated, improve server performance, and optimize system flexibility and maintenance to best serve its business requirements.
Solution
KPIT Cummins recognized that it could use virtualization technology to reduce the number of physical servers in its data center, and enhance the availability of applications and services. Shrikant Kulkarni, CIO, KPIT Cummins concluded that rather than paying for many under-utilized server machines or less efficient server machines, each dedicated to a specific workload, server virtualization would allow consolidating all the workloads onto a smaller number of more fully used machines. Not only this, he convinced the business users the benefits of this technology.
The IT team at KPIT Cummins evaluated several products, including the Hyper-V™ technology included with the Windows Server® 2008 operating system, VMware, and others. Considering the business requirement, licensing model, cost factor and technical support available, the company ultimately decided to deploy Hyper-V as it provides all the functionality needed and meets all the requirements.
Deployment took place in Pune and Bangalore centers. The process commenced in April 2009 and was 90 percent completed by Oct 2009. The implementation dramatically prune its physical server holdings, from 120 to 20 systems. The company can now efficiently deploy, scale, and manage a virtualized server infrastructure without the extra cost of a third-party solution.
Initially the team faced some issues to understand the technology, manage virtualized setups and convince the business users to move the application on virtualized platform.But later on,after 3-4 application migrations, the team was quite comfortable in migrating the applications without any down times and dynamically allocating appropriate resources.“Virtualization has helped to reduce the provisioning time for new applications by almost 6-8 weeks helping us to deploy applications within 4 hours on the virtualized platform,”says Mandar Marulkar,Head, Technical Infrastructure Management Services, KPIT Cummins.
Benefits
By using Hyper-V technology to virtualize its physical servers, KPIT Cummins optimized its server environment, cut hardware costs and power consumption, enhanced server reliability and utilization, and reduced maintenance and support costs.
Consolidates Multiple Servers
KPIT Cummins decided to use Microsoft Hyper-V solution for virtualization instead of paying for many under-utilized server machines.Consolidations helped in running multiple applications on the same server in single operating system by eliminating some of the servers. By using Hyper-V to virtualize servers, the company is able to significantly reduce hardware costs and decrease the hardware footprint at its data centers. Now the IT department can support the business with less hardware, which means lower equipment costs, reduced electrical consumption for server power and cooling, and less physical space.
“We have trimmed our physical server holdings—from 120 to merely 20 servers. Currently the entire setup is running on 20 infrastructure servers virtualized on Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008. The expenses on server boxes have dropped drastically by 40percent of our data center budget,” elaborates Sandeep Gandhi, Sr. Manager, Data center operations, KPIT Cummins.
Reduces Power Consumption
The significant reduction in servers contributes hugely to KPIT Cummins “green” initiatives. “By reducing the number of physical servers with the help of Microsoft Hyper-V solution, we are able to reduce the power consumption enormously and thus helped the company in going green,” says Sandeep Gandhi, Sr. Manager, Data center operations, KPIT Cummins.
Consolidation and virtualization has aided the company in its objective to deploy green data centre solutions by reducing carbon footprint in turn giving cost savings as a part of reducing energy consumption.Along with reduced power requirements, lesser cooling facilities need to be deployed for the servers.
Reduces Opex and Capex Cost
The operating and capital cost of deploying new servers, and maintaining and running more than 200 servers is much higher than fully utilizing 20 servers for all the applications. Virtualization has helped consolidating practically 10 servers into a single virtual server. Loading different operatingsystems and applications on a single virtual server has resulted into improving the utilisation upto 70 percent of the less utilised servers.
“Server virtualization has brought in significant reduction in capital expenditure. We have consolidated physical servers by more than 40 percent, reduced physical rack space by 60 percent resulting in savings of more than 40 percentin data center budget,”says Mandar Marulkar, Head, TIMS, KPIT Cummins.
Improves Service Quality
“Consolidation and virtualization reduced the time needed to provision servers from several months to just 4 hour, restored data in 10% of the time previously required, and created a highly reliable environment, improving its quality of service,” says Mandar Marulkar, Head, TIMS, KPIT Cummins.
The time taken in tracking the AMCs and other issues with servers is now brought down considerably. Fewer people are required to mange the lesser number of servers.
During the consolidation process, the IT team got a chance to review all the existing applications and this helped in deactivating some of the old development and testing servers, thus improving the service.Consolidation, virtualisation and deactivation of the applications helped in reutilisationthe existing servers more efficiently for critical applications avoiding new hardware investments. With reduced hardware, lesser operating cost, the company can offer better and competitive prices to its customers.
Microsoft Virtualization
Microsoft virtualization is an end-to-end strategy that can profoundly affect nearly every aspect of the IT infrastructure management lifecycle. It can drive greater efficiencies, flexibility, and cost effectiveness throughout your organization. From accelerating application deployments; to ensuring systems, applications, and data are always available; to taking the hassle out of rebuilding and shutting down servers and desktops for testing and development; to reducing risk, slashing costs, and improving the agility of your entire environment—virtualization has the power to transform your infrastructure, from the data center to the desktop.
For more information about Microsoft virtualization solutions, go to: