Infosys transforms its IT Infrastructure to Improve Alignment with Business Needs

The global IT giant transformed its IT infrastructure to cater to needs of its 165,000 strong global user base.

Infosys is a global leader in consulting, technology, and outsourcing solutions. It offers solutions in mobility, sustainability, big data, and cloud computing. Infosys has a global presence with more than 165,000+ employees.

Challenges

The organization was witnessing rapidly changing business paradigms with very demanding, agile, high performing IT solutions for OTLP, real-time analytics, mobility and social resulting in disappearing boundaries between personal and official life. It is more imperative than ever for Business and IT to understand and rapidly align in an iterative manner to cater to all stakeholders including the end customers, partners and employees.

For Infosys, this translated into needs to improve performance of transactional systems, reduce processing time for critical cycles like year-end and quarter-end, real-time & self-service analytics for large data volumes, face-lift the corporate website for adaptive design with cross geography disaster recovery, ubiquitous and seamless access of corporate applications and BYOD.

Being such a large organization with a massive IT infrastructure, the company was also struggling with a lot of duplicate data. Transactional throughputs were reducing due to blocks at database level and there was ample opportunity due to:

• Limited self-service BI

• Requirement for real time reporting

• Analytics for large data volumes and unstructured data

Technologies in areas of in-memory computing, massively parallel computing, application virtualization, cloud computing could aptly serve these needs.

The Implementation

The digital business engine at Infosys comprises 300+ closely integrated applications centrally hosted in multiple data centers with 1200+ physical and virtual servers, over two petabytes of storage, 75+ million files, heterogeneous technology platforms including HP, Hitachi, VMware, HyperV, Microsoft SQL Server, .Net, SAP, Weblogic, Skelta, Symantec and many more.

Significant investments on hardware and software were made to transform the existing IT landscape, catering to requirements of 165000 global users at all the layers. The implementation included the following:

Embraced Cloud

The corporate website was transformed from a responsive to adaptive design. The IT team chose Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model over on-premises hosting and hosted the website on a Public Cloud.

Parallel Data Warehouse

Infosys implemented Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) that works on Massively Parallel Processing architecture. This has increased the speed of data warehousing workloads up to 600 times.

Database platform was upgraded to leverage real time reporting and segregate reporting and OLTP workloads to a large extent. Finally, portal farms were migrated to SharePoint 2013 with PowerView.

Mobility, Application Virtualization & BYOD

The IT team deployed Citrix XenApp along with XenMobile for the enterprise to enable BYOD and deliver a seamless user experience of mission critical applications in branch offices.

Transformed Processing of Critical Business Cycles

SAP HANA was deployed for all critical SAP solutions including ECC, BI & SRM on Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (6TB RAM). IBM TM1 & Cognos was chosen for speed fire financial planning and analysis.

Transformation at the Core Datacenter layer

With business demanding agility and latest features, it was important to transform the core layer – the datacenter. This was not only important to overcome application performance issues, manage exponential unstructured data growth but also enable seamless plug and play for the new technologies. Hence, the following significant changes were carried out to revamp the datacenters:

• Deployed Dynamic Tier with flash storage for improved storage performance

• 16Gbps SAN fabric and 10Gbps Ethernet network

• Archival platform for unstructured data

• Isolated datacenters for Production and DEV/Test workloads

• Segregated storage subsystems for BI and OLTP workloads

The Result

There is 60% improvement for the Infosys.com home page. It loads the fastest when compared with the competitors like Accenture, IBM, TCS and CTS.

The time for content publishing has been reduced as well as the dependency of a central team for content publishing has been reduced due to the new architecture of the website. The time required to publish the quarterly results has been reduced by more than 50%. Other benefits include:

• Seamless DR & BCP capability – even in case of a complete datacenter or continent level disaster the infra will be accessible

• Scalable and elastic infrastructure

• Significant reduction in TCO – Successfully avoided upfront investment by 1.5 Million USD

• Net savings of half a million+ USD over next 5 years

• Simplification of hosting, On-demand infrastructure provisioning capabilities, modular architecture for faster time-to-market, scalable, elastic and cost effective solution

• Unified, high performance, secured and reliable user experience of corporate applications to all 165000+ global Infoscions on any device, from anywhere

• Near real time reporting – reporting latency of 2 hours is now real time

• Reduced Time To Market.