Universally Scalable

After the sub-prime crisis and thesubsequent turmoil in the financialmarket, several businesses in India werefeeling the heat for a long time. One amongsuch category was the Universal Corporation,which witnessed a down economy with arevenue loss of Rs 50 to 60 lakh in FY '09-10due to its failed IT infrastructure. Also, at timesit faced some security threats and loss of data.In order to avoid the above scenario, thecompany started to look for a more secureplatform. When the going became too toughfor the company, it appointed Kolkata-basedChabria Infotech to facilitate the infrastructuremanagement-a project that took a week, butmet their expectations. Afterundergoing a strategic deve-lopment in their IT infrastructure,Universal Corporation is now oneof the pioneers in the FMCG sector.Chabria Infotech provides totalsoftware solutions, with specialemphasis on marketing of a widerange of software. It provides custo-mized software developmentservices and training mainly in theInternet domain. It offers profe-ssional Web services ranging fromdomain name registration towebsite designing and hostingincluding services like search enginesubmission and ranking, Web trendanalysis, Virtual Private Network(VPN) solutions, software export andoffshore software developmentservices.

IMPLEMENTATION OFTHE SOLUTION

The entire project was valued forRs 35 lakh. Chabria Infotech leveraged the taskof building the scalable infrastructure toovercome all the critical business challengesfaced by Universal Corporation. Chabriaproposed for two redundant ISP links toincrease the business continuity of Universal.Chabria had to ensure that the deployed IT infrastructure management solution couldhandle high growth and consequentrequirements of the client.

The project posed a lot of challenges forChabria, working in a widespread networkenvironment with remote connectivity was nomean feat. The biggest obstacle that thecompany faced for the deployment was thedowntime. As the company operated on a 24x7basis, a single hour of downtime could createa great loss in revenue. Since the deploymentconsisted of restructuring of both networkingand servers therefore, without downtime it wasnext to impossible to terminate the links andrebuild the servers.

Now, the IT infrastructure of UniversalCorporation consists of all the latest techno-logies starting from latest networking devicesending edge cutting VoIP solution. The totalinfrastructure consists of high-end BladeCenterservers, Windows 2008 enterprise servers,Microsoft Dynamics and Navision running asERP, high-end Cisco routers, SQL serverenterprise edition, Symantec Backup Exec forback-up of the crucial data and IBM tape drives.

THE NEED FOR THE SOLUTION

The major concern for Universal Corporationwas that there were multiple issues connectedto the data security and real-time transaction.Moreover, the systems were taking a lot ofprocessing time, which was increasing the costof ownership. Once the client was briefed about how the entire solution would be deployedand the cost involved in the project was fina-lized, Chabria Infotech designated AvijitChakraborty, Sr Technical Consultant to managethe deployment process. The solution provider(SP) realized that all the consumer requirementsshould be addressed within the time frame ofthe project rollout. As the migration systemneeded new processes to step into the client'sinfrastructure, the client also needed compa-tible and a new set of hardware and softwareinfrastructure.

Soon, Chakraborty along with the entire ITteam of Universal Corporation stepped in witha complete plan for the various solutions thatwere needed. Then, Universaldecided to go ahead with themakeover in the first phase and laterconsider infrastructural change andassimilate new servers on the go.Speaking on the necessities putforward by Universal Corporation,Hemant Chabria, CEO of ChabriaInfotech said, “With Windows asits platform, the company wasprimarily looking at redundantcentralized management of their ITinfrastructure. But while planningthis project, we soon realized thatnot only was migration a majorconcern of the client, but it alsocalled for complete infrastructuralchange.”

THE SOLUTION

The entire infrastructure is basedon seven Blade servers. To increaseredundancy the domain controlleris back-boned with an additionaldomain controller which will act asa substitute during a fail-over in case of DisasterRecovery. The database server is clustered inactive-passive mode with automatic fail-overcapability. The ERP is published in outsideworld, having a 128bit encryption, to increasesecurity. To add to the security, the entirenetwork is protected with a Gateway-levelfirewall which has content filtering (restrictionto browse unethical sites which does not haveany business interest) and Gateway-level anti-virus (to prevent unknown virus in the Gatewayitself).

A SATISFIED CLIENT

Anindya Banerjee, IT Manager, UniversalCorporation, said, “Chabria has good consultingskills. They do not oversell neither do theyunnecessarily increase the TCO. Their solutionfitment and customer-centric approach helpedme and my team to work with ease with them.The team, lead by Chakraborty, has really skilledtechnicians and their untiring efforts helpedus to start an undisturbed operation.”

SIKTA SAMANTARAY
(siktas@cybermedia.co.in)