Swan Solutions assisted the company in migrating its servers to a virtual environment, thereby ensuring more efficient management of resources
Swan Solutions, a leading provider of end-to-end Information 
Technology solutions, today announced the migration of Centrum Capital’s servers to a virtual environment. The migration ensures that its data is available 24/7 and that server issues do not affect users in the form of downtime. Centrum Capital is one of India’s leading financial companies with a network of 80 branches spread all over the country. The company, which has a cumulative experience of deals worth Rs 10 trillion from over 1,600 billion transactions, has to manage large volumes of data on a daily basis.
Mr Altaf Hussain, Solutions Head, Swan Solutions says, “Data availability is mission critical to financial companies. Virtualization has helped ensure that data is always available to users at Centrum Capital. It has also steeply lowered data center infrastructure costs.”
Centrum realized that they could not afford any downtime and data must be available 24/7 to ensure smooth delivery of services to customers. Moreover, data centers and racks utilized a large amount of physical space, while the cost of real estate kept increasing. Centrum Capital turned to Swan Solutions to handle their data center and infrastructure management.
Swan Solutions assessed the situation and identified that management of physical servers was the main issue. Firstly, managing the hardware with over 60 servers was a technical challenge as each server had to be monitored individually on a daily basis. If one server failed, users could not access the database for 5-6 hours while the issue was getting fixed. Besides, they had to maintain at least 120 network points to access these servers. This added an issue of managing a high number of switches. Scalability was also an ongoing challenge and it wasn’t possible to quickly provide hardware resources on demand.
Swan Solutions migrated 60 physical servers into a virtual environment by installing and configuring HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosure with five HP Blade servers. They installed VMware Hypervisor 5.0 update 1, which consumes lower electricity and lesser manpower to manage the system. With the VMware vCenter Server installed, they can now add additional memory space or a faster processor as per the business demand. High Availability mode for the application and vMotion were added to avoid hardware downtime. vLAN environments were configured with eight cables in redundancy mode.
Virtualization of servers has ensured that Centrum Capital no longer faces server downtime and is able to meet customer demands more efficiently. A unified single-pane-of-glass management is used for monitoring the entire network. The maintenance costs have reduced drastically as there are fewer servers. The implementation also increased redundancy in switching, along with faster processing power and memory on-demand.
Mr Milin Abraham, IT Manager, Centrum Capital explains, “While cost is the most visible benefit, server downtimes are now being avoided. If a server fails, users need not wait until it gets fixed as the data is readily available on their system. Additionally, it is easy to manage the entire network.”
