The customer
Our customer is a leading global investment banking and securities firm, with a worldwide presence in more than 90 countries.

The challenge
The company had a huge data center with a variety of servers - from old generation platform servers for legacy applications to latest generation servers supporting Sybase databases. The data center had grown from a few servers to a few hundred servers over a period of time leading to critical issues such as improper space utilization, inefficient resource utilization, scalability and reliability. Amongst the objectives of the project were:

• Need to reduce foot prints in the data center
• Deploy rack mountable servers to save data center space
• Formation of a group of servers running similar application and or services
• Architect new consolidated servers with respect to sizing and capacity planning, current performance and future growth
• Migrate data and services from various servers in the group into a new consolidated environment

The solution
Our methodology consists of the following phases:

Architect: During this phase we carried out a detailed study of the existing infrastructure and collected information on currently deployed operating systems, revision and patch levels, details on databases, custom software and package applications deployed in each of the target systems. We then used industry standard capacity planning tools or system specific sizing tools and utilities for planning the new consolidated infrastructure.

Integrate: Following the architect phase, migration to the new consolidated environment was carried out by our team

The server consolidation project reduced foot prints in the data center to more than 30% of the data center space . We achieved efficient resource utilization by sharing commonly used services like NIS, NFS and Print services leading to directly reduced server count.

We also recommended and implemented servers with newer technology for better performance, reliability , availability and scalability for future needs. This activity will help the customer implement SAN technology for an efficient, future backup strategy.