Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Reliance General Insurance Goes the Virtual Way

reliance general insurance

Reliance General Insurance plans to deploy VMware virtualization solutions at its disaster recovery site to ensure business continuity. It is also looking to virtualize its storage and desktop infrastructure.

Earlier this year, the company had virtualized its server infrastructure to improve CPU utilization, overcome performance bottlenecks and ensure resources that can be quickly scaled to support new initiatives or business growth, a project that lead to 30-35% reduction in operating expenses. It has also achieved a server consolidation ratio of 10:1, which would need only two administrators to remotely manage the entire infrastructure, further improving application availability to near 100%.

Naganathan Sriram, CTO of Reliance General Insurance said, "To be a market leader, we have to consistently deliver a seamless working environment to our users and development and testing teams. The virtualization solution has enabled us to provide the resources required for product development, while guaranteeing high system availability for our users."

Prior to virtualization of their IT environment, Reliance General Insurance was struggling to manage a fleet of around 100 servers. Inefficient resource use slowed database and application performance, while prolonged downtime hindered the ability of staff to serve customers and undertake development work. Data center space was shrinking as the company added more hardware to support its growing business. Procurement and maintenance costs were also rising to unsustainable levels.

To address these issues, Reliance General Insurance turned to VMware's virtualization solutions in early 2009. The company now runs around 90 virtual servers on nine physical hosts. These servers run applications that support software development and quality assurance, production staging and deployment, and network and web infrastructure.

"Server consolidation, apart from the cost savings, is also resulting in faster migration of applications, smoother maintenance and better uptimes," said Sudip Banerjee, VP and head (IT) of Reliance General Insurance.