A huge conglomerate, K Raheja Corp, has representation in diverse fields of real estate, hospitality and retail. The firm is one of the fastest growing firms in the corporate world, and like any other large corporate, depends heavily on IT for sustaining its competitive edge.

As the firm started expanding its business, it realized the critical need of upgrading its IT infrastructure to support the business growth. With the huge growth in business, the organization faced issues with respect to server sprawls, utilization and manageability.

“The server room was cluttered. We were hosting more than 40 servers using a small part of server resources. A majority of these servers were based on old technologies. It was extremely difficult to maintain these servers as support to these servers had ceased from the principal company. Additionally, our capability to fulfill new requirements due to growing business needs was difficult due to limited data center space, limited UPS power and limited cooling capacity,” states Rahul Mahajan, Associate Vice President – Information Technology, K Raheja Corp.

To address these challenges, the firm decided to embark a server consolidation initiative, with the help of Orient Technologies as system integrators. The organization did a detailed analysis of the applications that could be virtualized. Another study was conducted to understand the current server resource utilization. Subsequently, the firm conducted an evaluation based on present and future requirements, features available in products and mapped this to its business needs.

Based on the evaluation, the organization decided to go ahead with VMware Vsphere 4.0 Enterprise for virtualization and IBM for servers and storage. The project was executed quickly, with the entire implementation being completed in just three months. This achievement is significant as several projects were running simultaneously on the applications side. Mahajan attributes meticulous project planning and excellent partnership between the business and IT teams as the key reasons for the quick implementation of the project.

SAP in a virtualized environment gave advantages such as load balancing and easy management in case of disaster

Rahul Mahajan Associate Vice President – Information Technology, K Raheja Corp

“While many organizations have done server consolidation and virtualization, we are among a list of few organizations that run SAP in a virtualized environment. And probably we are the only one who has SAP ECC 6.0 EHP 4 running in a virtualized environment. Also, we have not only restricted to core SAP, but have also put SAP additional products such as BW, enterprise portal, solution manager in a virtualized environment,” says Mahajan.

The server consolidation initiative helped K Raheja Corp reduce the total number of physical servers from 43 to just 13 servers. “The availability and performance of IT systems has gone up substantially in the past couple of months,” agrees Manoj Sharma, Senior VP – Finance, K Raheja Corp. The organization has also improved its ability to manage its infrastructure with reduced power and cooling costs.

“Besides removing our existing limitations, we have also got other advantages such as load balancing, easy management in case of disaster, centralized backup, high availability and scalability,” states Mahajan. A TCO calculation done by the firm estimates cost savings of close to Rs 82 lakh over a period of three years.