A USD 2 billion company, JSL (BSE: 532508 | NSE: JSL) is also
India’s largest integrated stainless steel manufacturer. As a
fast growing company, JSL has grown from an indigenous single unit
steel plant in Hisar, Haryana, into a multi-billion, multi-national
and multi-product steel conglomerate.
With a presence in eight locations across India, JSL’s
business operations are supported by a complex mesh of systems and
networks. As the manufacturing processes are tightly integrated and
enabled through IT, the availability of the IT infrastructure is
crucial for the functioning of the business. Hence, the IT
administrators needed to know what was happening on their networks
at all times, including real-time information on usage, performance
and status of every device or application on the network.
However,
in the absence of an automated network monitoring tool, the IT
administrators became aware of problems in the network only when
users reported problems. To explain the problem of being reactive
to IT infrastructure problems, Ajay Dhir, Group CIO, JSL Limited
gives the example of a redundant WAN link that goes down without
affecting the connectivity to the datacenter, as connectivity needs
are being addressed by the primary WAN link. Now, when the primary
link goes down, the team realizes that the redundant link was
already down causing IT services disruption, which further lead to
lost productivity and missed deadlines. “The problem would
not have occurred, had there been some mechanism in place whereby
the failure of redundant link could have been notified, the moment
it occurred,” opines Dhir.
Finding a needle in a haystack
In an IT landscape that consisted of over hundred servers, 2500
desktops, 50 network printers and 20 Wi-Fi devices, manually
finding out possible faults was an inefficient and time consuming
process. “Every component in the network represents a
potential point of failure. It becomes hard to identify any point
of failure using manual diagnosis processes,” says Dhir. For
example, if a server is unreachable from the Intranet, one may not
be able to tell if the problem is with the server, any of the
switches in between the server and user community, WAN link or the
router itself. This was akin to finding a needle in a haystack.
Walking on an unexplored open road
Operating in a business where downtime could severely affect the
business performance of the company, JSL needed a proactive fault
identification and reporting mechanism to monitor the IT
infrastructure. While the business need was apparent, the high cost
of commercial IT infrastructure management tools was a huge
deterrent. In times of recession, this was an absolute expense that
could be avoided.
However, Dhir, a perennial optimist saw an opportunity that could
not only help his company monitor the IT infrastructure more
proactively, but also give his team motivation to do something out
of the ordinary. Dhir decided that he would go in for an open
source IT infrastructure management tool, after making all the
necessary tests. “We were treading on a new path where few
organizations in India had walked on. However, this gave us an
ideal opportunity to not only save huge amounts of money in license
related costs, but also give our IT team the chance to do something
out of the box,” says Dhir.
About Author
An award-winning journalist with more than 14 years of experience, Srikanth RP is Senior Associate Editor with InformationWeek India. Srikanth is passionate about writing on topics which clearly show the business impact of technology.
More articles by Srikanth RP