Paving the way for a Virtualized Environment

Having experienced the
benefits after the deployment of an advanced virtualization solution,
ENAM Securities is enjoying the praises for its par-excellent data
center in Mumbai. With this solution, ENAM has achieved increased
systems availability across the board and enterprise-class data
center management. It has also achieved additional cost savings
through reduced power consumption.

Headquartered in Mumbai,
ENAM Securities is considered as one of India's leading financial
service providers, with a long standing reputation for providing
enhanced value to businesses. It also specializes in providing
investment banking, institutional broking, corporate advisory,
equity, debt and capital market services to corporate and
institutional clients. ENAM is India's undisputed leader in
mobilizing resources for IPOs. With over 5,000 dedicated franchisees,
ENAM mobilizes approximately 25% of all funds raised in the Indian
equity markets.

However, prior to the
deployment of desired virtualization solution by ENAM Securities, it
was a tough going for the company to expand its overall business in
India and thus, it drove the need for additional applications and
servers, but data center constraints limited the ability to move to
virtualization. And, thus it was looking for a high availability
infrastructure solution for its data center.

The Requirement

In a bid to support its
growing business in a virtualized environment, ENAM needed to enhance
its IT infrastructure which would further provide an exceptionally
high level of reliability and availability to its virtualization
strategy. There were over 126 servers including IBM rack and Blade
servers deployed over different locations in Mumbai. These servers
hosted a number of applications including trading and back office
applications, Exchange 2007, Oracle 10g/11g and SQL Server databases.
But, these posed a concern for ENAM as it caused decentralization of
data and resources, which in return presented inherent challenges to
the company in availability, provisioning and management.

To address these
challenges, ENAM decided to completely overhaul its IT infrastructure
by consolidating resources into a new, high-tech data center in
Mumbai. The IT strategy devised included application, server and
storage consolidation as well as WAN optimization. Virtualization was
a key component of this strategy. “We needed to make applications,
servers, skills and resources available in the shortest possible
time, and virtualization promised to help us achieve these goals,”
said Shankar Gawade, VP, IT infrastructure, ENAM Securities.

Finding Resolution

After evaluating several
options for a right and reliable infrastructure, the hard-hitting
days were put to an end when ENAM approached Mumbai-based solution
provider Pentagon System and Services for the solution. Pentagon
System and Services is one of the leading providers of advanced IT
solutions to corporate and public-sector customers using the
technology, including hardware, software and services, to help
customers resolve their most complicated IT needs. The company
possesses expertise in enterprise architecture and high availability,
infrastructure optimization, storage and resource management,
identity management and business continuity; and provides
industry-specific software, services and expertise to the retail and
hospitality markets.

After evaluating the
entire case of the client, Pentagon provided best solution and that
too within the stipulated time period. Based on Pentagon's
recommendations, ENAM chose to implement a virtualized infrastructure
which is based on VMware technologies, for the Mumbai data center.
According to ENAM, the move to a virtualized environment was quick
and efficient and Pentagon's professional services coupled with its
experience in managing large scale deployments were key to ENAM's
successful implementation. As a result, ENAM has 10 Dell servers,
which now host 54 virtual servers. And, all business critical
applications and databases including Trading and Back Office
applications, Exchange 2007, Oracle and SQL databases have now been
virtualized.

Implementation of the
Solution

According to Pentagon
System and Services, the main objective for the implementation of
VMware-enabled technology in ENAM was for the consolidation of IT
infrastructure to support migration to new data center, ease of
manageability, high availability of critical systems while reducing
data center power, cooling and real estate. In addition to it, the
company also wanted the entire solution roll out to be smooth
sailing. Pentagon Services had its share of challenges when it came
to the deployment of the project. The first and foremost challenge
that the solution provider's team faced was in convincing the
customer. Like any other company, ENAM was also concerned about the
cost factor for this deployment and keeping the same in mind; it
asked Pentagon System and Services to ensure the lowest cost
possibilities while designing its entire infrastructure. The total
cost of deployment keeping the various aspects in mind, still
amounted to approximately as per the planned budget by ENAM. Another
challenge that Pentagon System and Services had to face was the
availability of all the resources with ENAM for a data center,
security and a non-stop performance of the operation.

However, with a goal to
offer the apt solution to his customer, Pentagon Services decided to
implement a solution that is efficient at the available resources. A
right infrastructure solution based on VMware technology that is
compact and less complex and would further support the critical
functioning of a data center in the organization. And, according to
Pentagon System and Services, the customer was again convinced for
the same and hence it did not take the team much time to go ahead and
deploy the project, which was very much to the satisfaction of the
customer.

The Solution

According to ENAM, the
VMware-technology based solution, VMware vSphere 4v, implemented by
Pentagon Services and System, has allowed the company to address all
IT challenges, including significant reduction in power, cooling and
real estate costs. And, the consolidation of servers through
virtualization has also provided significant ease of manageability.
VMware vSphere 4, built upon VMware ESX 4.0 Server has delivered new
capabilities for entire servers and storage, independent of
application and operating system workloads and of the underlying
hardware. Also, the virtualization solution comprises the VMware
Distributed Resource Scheduler, which uses VMotion technology to
dynamically aggregate hardware resources and optimally reallocates
them, allowing virtual machines to be redistributed when they
experience increased loads. Also, the VMware HA (High Availability)
has proved invaluable, contributing to 100% uptime for applications
hosted on the virtualized environment.

Hence, this virtualization
has also allowed Gawade to optimize disaster recovery plans and
facilitated the creation of an offsite DR center with significant
savings in hardware. VMware products have enabled ENAM to address all
IT challenges and provided a clear path for future growth.

The Output

After the deployment of
the desired virtualization solution, Gawade noted dramatic
improvements in the IT infrastructure including significantly reduced
server footprint, improved capacity and CPU utilization. Ease of
provisioning and management and a dramatic reduction in power and
cooling have also been observed. Deployment time for a new server has
reduced from several hours to a matter of minutes and has proved
invaluable in accommodating ENAM's rapid growth. “We have had
100% uptime since virtualizing our environment with VMware technology
and have also noted significant savings in power and cooling,”
concluded Gawade.