IBM Case Study
STG Suite insured with virtualization of IBM BladeCenter® JS21/JS22
Overview
Challenge
Consolidate hardware and enhance remote server management capabilities to reduce deployment times and help reduce costs; simplify access to servers and drive improved productivity.
Solution
Consolidation of the servers on an IBM BladeCenter® H chassis and vitalizing the environment with Power Virtualization on IBM Power Blade JS21/JS22.
Key Benefits
Reduced server deployment and image creation time; lowered cabling requirements; reduced server footprint ; enhanced productivity ; easier maintenance and management; provides flexibility and scalability for future growth.
“ IBM’s blade solution along with highly reliable virtualization technology offered via VIO has allowed our organization take a leap towards a high performance infrastructure. Power consumption has also reduced considerably. The advantages are reasonably good in terms of ROI, Performance and Manageability.”
Mr. Sushil Vyas ,Group Manager – Technology
MajescoMastek
MajescoMastek has been developing enterprise wide solutions for Life & Annuity and Property & Casualty Insurance, Financial Services and Government customers for over 26 years.
MajescoMastek maintains a stable organization, built on a foundation of experience, expertise, IT solutions and services that provide measurable return on customers’ investments. MajescoMastek will remain committed to give customers the benefits of emerging technologies, without losing focus on their core businesses.
“ Migrating to IBM’s Power based Blades has brought in multi grounded benefits.”
- MajescoMastek
Think-time to Ink-time
Price to performance was the major criteria used by MajescoMastek to determine their investment in advance technology. IBM, along with Business Partner helped MajescoMastek test STG Suite on a IBM Power Blade JS21 at the System Solution Center, Bangalore. MajescoMastek as well as the dedicated IBM team worked on the POC (Proof-of-Concept) to achieve the objective.
Ten different instances of STG Suite were running on ten separate LPARs on a single JS21 Blade server. MajescoMastek was won over by the ruggedness and reliability of VIO (Virtual I/O Server). During the POC the MajescoMastek team gained the expertise needed to create an LPAR on a blade server, deploy applications and manage blade server remotely.
“We appreciate IBM and its channel partner’s commitment towards this Initiative wherein it was IBM and its channel partner who worked with us in a highly committed manner and went beyond the call of duty to provide us with any kind of help and support we needed with respect to technical explanation, fact sheets, Lab arrangements with respect to our requirement to perform the POC using our own application.”
- MajescoMastek
The result of the POC was that MajescoMastek was convinced enough to select the proven VIO technology offered on Power Blade.
“We now have a highly reliable infrastructure with good performance and the ability to provide additional firepower to any virtual node at will. Prior to zeroing in on IBM’s solution we had evaluated VMWare and Xen as the virtualized solution but we found VIO to be the best. The resources consumed by VIO were almost negligible whereas VMWare at that time was highly resource intensive and Xen wasn’t stable enough to put our 30+ environment at risk. IBM’s VIO has been extremely good with respect to virtualization of the solution.”
- MajescoMastek
Power to Virtualize
Today all server vendors talk big on virtualization, but IBM has proven its virtualization technology over a period of 40 years. MajescoMastek wanted to virtualize its environment in order to get the multiple benefits of virtualization such as lower power consumption, lower footprint, easy resource management and maximized resource utilization - without compromising on performance.
“VIO was the deciding factor in making our bet on PowerPC based blades. We had discussed P5 servers but found the Blade solution to be highly suitable to our kind of environment wherein we needed various setups with a lowered hardware resource requirement for each LPAR since we use it for our Development and Test environments.”
- MajescoMastek
Currently MajescoMastek, using IBM’s virtualization technology, replaced thirty physical servers with JS21/JS22 Power Blades mounted on a single BladeCenter Chassis connected to an external storage DS4700. Using VIO’s partition capability, MajescoMastek is running multiple environments on a single blade.
Better Manageability
“A surprise benefit was server manageability. By replacing 30 entry level machines with a single chasis and the remote management capabilities of the Blade via the Management Module, the advantage with respect to managing the environments has been remarkable. Our administrators don’t move from their desk even if they have to power ON any of the virtual node whereas in the case of physical servers we never had that option. Using other solutions like IPKVM were far too expensive for 80 environments.”
- MajescoMastek
Using the Web-SM (System Management) admin console helps MajescoMastek efficiently install and setup of blade servers remotely. Administrators perform deployment tasks via the network that previously required a visit to each system, saving valuable time.
Green Solution
The IBM BladeCenter H used at MajescoMastek is a dense 9U chassis holding the Power Blade JS21/JS22 servers. The highly integrated infrastructure with network and switch fabric reduces the cable requirement by 80% - and thus helps with reducing power and cooling requirements at the Data Center (DC).
“MajescoMastek understands the necessity and the advantage of Green IT and has been one of the early starters since we had Green IT as one of our prime objectives in 2007 and presently the DC at our Mumbai based Offshore development centre is slowly and steadily progressing towards the same.”
- MajescoMastek
The IBM BladeCenter H uses power supplies that are as much as 90 percent efficient, so less power is wasted and more power is available for the chassis and servers. Blower/fan modules in the chassis adjust to compensate for changing thermal characteristics drawing less power at lower speeds – adding to the efficiency of the blade server solution.
For MajescoMastek, the provisioning of test servers has become simple and easy. MajescoMastek often needs to set up test servers, a process that used to take up to an hour - Now they can set one up in less than five minutes, which saves MajescoMastek many hours per week with the ability to set up a server without having to think about available hardware.
The new solution also runs faster than MajescoMastek’s former systems. The increased performance and reliability of the solution allows the IT staff to focus on new development.
Cost Advantage
IBM BladeCentre H has reduced MajescoMastek costs with respect to power, floor space and reduced the cable complexity for multiple servers. Easier manageability from a single location has helped reduce the administrators’ valuable time spent on server maintenance.
Within a period of 14 months MajescoMastek has experienced a 100% Return on Investment (ROI).
“ROI on the IBM Blades solution has been awesome. Returns matched 100% of the total investment in a period of 14 months and we still have spare capacity”
- Mr. Vyas, MajescoMastek
Prior to implementing the IBM Solution, MajescoMastek devoted a substantial amount of time towards system maintenance. After the IBM Solution was implemented, MajescoMastek redirected the time and effort of its server administrators towards company’s growth.
Better to Best
With growth in business MajescoMastek required additional hardware. It procured the next generation power blade i.e IBM BladeCenter JS22 which was added to the existing BladeCenter Chassis. Each IBM BladeCenter JS22 now supports 50% more environment compared to IBM BladeCenter JS21.
Room to grow
The IT infrastructure at MajescoMastek is now in a better position to accommodate the companys’ future growth. The BladeCenter H is easy to scale-out horizontally with additional blades with minimal investment, and the existing storage has headroom to grow with the business.
BladeCenter H can host Intel/AMD based IBM blades for application requirements in the future, which will provide platform options for for MajescoMastek.
For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner.
Visit us at : www.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter
For more information about the MajescoMastek,
visit: www.stgmastek.com
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