Cost savings and increased turnaround time with transformed IT setup

Improved utilization of the existing IT infrastructure, cost savings, faster project deliveries, increased turnaround time for the sales with the new IT infrastructure  
- Preeti Gaur
Rolta is a leading provider of innovative IT solutions for many vertical segments, including Federal and State Governments, Defense and Homeland Security, Utilities, Process, Power, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Retail,
and Healthcare.

Project Head: Rajesh Garg
Head – IT Transformation Solutions COE
Rolta India Limited

Challenges
Rolta’s IT setup was over three decades old. Legacy IT infrastructure for an IT solutions provider translated into inefficiencies and high IT Opex and Capex and low customer satisfaction. The projects were getting delayed because of high lead time for server provisioning for any project specific requirements. So, the company decided to transform the legacy IT setup into an efficient, highly-available, scalable, state-of-the-art world class infrastructure with 99.999% uptime.
The Implementation
The Storage Infrastructure was consolidated using EMC VNX 5300 that was integrated with VMware to provide efficiency to the server and storage provisioning. Rolta chose EMC Avamar as data protection platform for consolidation of backup and DR infrastructure. The objective was to provide backup and DR with tapeless design for VMware, SAP, file-systems, Clearcase, MS SQL, My SQL, Exchange server and laptop –desktop backups. EMC Avamar comprised of server and desktop-laptop and for off-site disaster recovery.
Rolta setup Virtual Datacenter (VDC) using VMWare Suite that consolidated the overall physical servers (500+) to a completely VMWare Virtualized environment of 12 high end servers cluster with a compute capacity of 384 cores, 3 TB RAM, and 45 TB SAN (EMC). All business critical applications powering the global business operations of Rolta are enabled using VMware’s infrastructure software.
The company also setup a private cloud using 4 high-end servers, and completed the task in a record 4 months. It also setup a Unified Communication System involving integration of real-time communication services such as Data, Voice (IP Telephony), Video Conferencing & Instant Messaging seamlessly across the Rolta IT Infrastructure globally.
The Result
The overall provisioning time of servers for any project specific requirements reduced from 8 weeks to 10 minutes, which translated into faster project deliveries, increased turnaround time for the sales and pre-sales team to do the POCs and Demos of Rolta products/solutions.
The new IT infrastructure led to improved utilization of the existing IT infrastructure and cost savings by almost 65% (from existing 25% to 90%). Power & cooling requirements reduced by almost 60% leading to opex savings of about Rs. 1.3 crores per annum. Transitioning workload from Public cloud service provider to Rolta Private Cloud led to drastic reduction in the shadow IT costs, which is more than US $250,000 annually. The overall cost of
voice communication reduced by almost 25%.
Rolta has been able to improve customer service by lowering incidents by 30% percent and reduce the downtime of infrastructure and application services drastically. The new cloud environment provides 99.99% uptime.