Galaxy Office Automation

Category: Case Studies

Financial services company increases its security and reduce time to market by implementing Micro-segmentation & IT Automation

Posted on by akash

The customer is one of the largest financial services companies in India offering a comprehensive range of financial solutions to its clients. Since many of their operating units and divisions handle highly sensitive data both on and off their office premises, data security is fast becoming a key area of concern for them.

The Challenge

The customer wanted to reap the efficiencies, scalability and agility of the cloud to lower their operational costs and serve their end clients better, without sacrificing security or performance. They were looking to build a private cloud and install automation tools to onboard end clients quickly, and also deliver faster services to them.

A Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) approach was the key to achieving their goals. An SDDC would enable the company to turn its new data center into a highly agile, secure, and scalable cloud using its existing hardware, while supporting both current and future applications. A big obstacle to their plan was the immediate need to address several cloud networking and security issues. Many of the company’s core applications were based on legacy technologies that are neither inherently multi-tenant, nor designed for today’s modern cloud infrastructure. The challenge before them was to find products, design applications and solutions for the entire gamut of their clients. However, financial applications frequently don’t mesh with multi-tenancy. Thus, quite often, they had to install hardware at a customer’s location and co-manage it – a tedious and an expensive process. Thus, it was highly desirable for the customer to find a way to do everything from their own data center. They could not wait for immature, proprietary, hardware-defined solutions to address these challenges, and wanted to virtualize their legacy applications and take multi-tenant security into its infrastructure via micro-segmentation.

The Solution

The customer decided to create a cloud-based multi-tenant environment built on VMware vCloud Suite, and deploy VMware NSX to virtualize its network. Galaxy provided consulting services to the client and provided deep insights on NSX features. The customer was familiar with the power of server virtualization, and quickly understood the benefits that network virtualization could bring to them.

VMware NSX virtualizes the network to deliver the entire networking and security model from L2 – L7 in software. The platform decouples the network from the underlying hardware, while taking advantage of the existing network infrastructure without changes to enable new levels of service delivery speed, agility and cost reductions.

VMware NSX also delivers a completely new operational model for networking that breaks through current network barriers and enables data center operators to achieve better agility and improved economics. The NSX platform’s unique policy-based distributed firewalling and L3 routing enable multi-tenancy for the financial services applications that the customer hosts for its end clients.

“Given our work in the financial sector, security is very important to us, and the ability to do micro-segmentation was critical to our selection of VMware NSX,” says their Chief Technology Officer.

They even tried doing the same at the hardware level, but realized soon enough that it was not feasible. The proven success of the NSX platform, and the integration of other industry leaders such as Arista Networks and Palo Alto Networks, helped solidify their decision. In addition to VMware NSX, the customer also deployed VMware vCloud Suite Advanced for compute virtualization and cloud management.

With a small IT staff to run their new data center, IT automation and agility were essential for them to effectively support and secure a multi-tenant environment. vCloud Suite gave them that desired IT automation and IT management agility necessary to scale the business and reduce capital expenditures.

The Benefits

In just about 3-4 weeks, client successfully deployed and integrated all the VMware solutions it selected. The VMware NSX platform allowed them to decouple their data center network from the underlying physical hardware to gain massive scale, while simplifying network design and operations. More importantly, it works seamlessly with the firm’s existing compute and networking infrastructure, applications and security products.

The data center virtualization and standardization achieved results in lower capital expenditures. VMware NSX also enabled the client to implement micro-segmentation based on fine-grained policies to enable security inside and outside of their data center. Client now enjoys superior operational control and increased availability and security. “I like that security follows each virtual machine around,” says their Chief Technology Officer.

VMware empowered them to implement a secure and agile SDDC, and respond more quickly to customers and improve their time-to market. With VMware NSX, they can now deploy applications for multiple customers without needing additional physical infrastructure at a customer site, now or in the future. The VMware NSX platform makes it possible for them to easily remotely provision, manage, orchestrate and securely control their applications.

 “We’ve reduced provisioning times for new virtual machines and scale quickly, and we achieved our goal for average cost-per-virtual machine and more manageable costs,” says CTO.

VMware NSX has delivered the operational model of a virtual machine to client’s data center network, transforming the economics of their network and security operations.

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Leading Indian bank increased its productivity by implementing Workspace suite

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The Challenge

Our customer is one of the largest public sector banks in India, operating out of more than 14000 branch offices and serving more than 100 million customers. The biggest challenge before them was the need to secure all mobile devices used by their employees, from malicious software, data thefts and unauthorized use. They wanted to facilitate easy, secure and instant access to their critical corporate resources like mail, TAB banking and intranet applications for all their employees using different types of devices, and distributed across various locations. There was a growing need to have a centrally managed, secured VPN environment with easy access to employees from all locations, to increase their productivity.

The Solution

Galaxy offered a holistic, end-to-end solution to the customer using VMware’s Workspace Suite. It comprises of Workspace One and AirWatch, and combines application, device and data management with features such as centralized identity management and policy enforcement. This empowers employees with anytime, anywhere access to corporate resources and transforms workflows to simplify the process of IT management.

This enabled the bank’s employees to have easy, consistent and secure access to emails, content and applications from any device such as a smartphone, laptop, or a tablet device running on any operating system. Galaxy offered secure access to the bank’s critical internal applications such as CRM and Social Media Management applications, settlement, reconciliation and complaint management applications, etc. AirWatch solutions help employees in staying connected, and also in securely accessing all required corporate information on the job. When employees enroll their own devices into AirWatch, an email is automatically provisioned based on their Active Directory credentials. This makes it easier for the employees to receive corporate communications without the need to maintain complicated passwords and/ or additional steps. AirWatch also helps the bank deliver applications to devices remotely.

The Benefits

Galaxy was able to deliver a solution that addresses each customer requirement within assigned timelines, with reliability and using a minimum budget.

Galaxy’s solution helped the customer to:

  • Empower their employees with flexible work locations and timings, leading to an increased productivity across the organization. Likewise, instead of most employees carrying multiple devices that are difficult to manage, many employees now use a single phone/tablet.
  • While device configuration used to take more than 30 minutes per device earlier, the VMware Workspace suite has reduced this time to less than 5 minutes. Thus, customer’s IT team is now able to deliver the same experience securely and reliably across applications on each device. This has led to better management and security.

This project was rolled out for a group of 20000 employees chosen by the client. Based on positive outcomes of this implementation and tangible business benefits therein, the bank is planning the next phase of roll out to cover almost 3 – 4 Lac employees across the country.

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Global leaders in printing technology increased its efficiency in operation by implementing next generation BackUp & Recovery solution

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Customer is a global leader for solutions in commercial printing, custom labelling and publishing solutions. They provide an entire range of services right from design and content management, to fulfillment and distribution. They are headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut [US], with approximately 8,100 employees worldwide. In India, they have operations in Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, and Noida near Delhi.

The Challenge

The customer’s IT team structure is planned and distributed with an objective to maximize support across its geographically dispersed locations, and various business operations. Their backup infrastructure was based on tape, and managing and handling tape was not just labor intensive but also vulnerable to human errors. Moreover, taking a full back up of Servers & NAS data took around 40 to 48 hours to complete, and was prone to failure due to various reasons.

Challenges faced by client were common to users of legacy tape backup, such as:

  • Manual Errors: Manual backup and recovery regularly needed dedicated IT resources. This manual intervention resulted in human errors such as incorrect labeling of tapes. This was more so in case of manual labeling that happened across various distributed locations.
  • Additional Manpower for Backup process: Full backups were completed once on a weekly basis. Two backup copies were made; the first was kept in-house and the second sent to a secure location. This required additional manpower and cost to extract, package, transport, and house the backup tapes.
  • Slow Recovery: The recovery process was slow and laborious due to organizational complexities such as distributed locations and due to disparate media. Additional time was required to bring secondary tapes from the secure location, and once recovered, the tape sometimes suffered physical degradation, adding to issues of reliability.
  • Performance Impacted by Server Sprawl: The existing tape resources were insufficient in coping with the growing virtualized environment. Server sprawl impacted performance and made the management of storage requirements untenable.

The Solution

Galaxy engaged with the customer to understand their IT environment, conducted data assessments and recommended a solution to integrate data domain as a backup appliance. We helped them initiate a project to gradually replace legacy tape libraries with EMC Data Domain (Disk-based in-line De-Dupe Backup Appliance), and eliminate the use of tape for backup of virtualized / Physical servers & NAS data with EMC Data Domain. Till date, virtualized/physical servers and NAS data at the customer’s side no longer use tapes to backup. They now have data domain as a target of Backup Software in all their locations in India i.e. Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Noida [Delhi]. They have also set up replication of backed-up data between all four locations.

The Benefits

Customer is looking to replace tape gradually over time for both its physical and virtual servers. As of March 2017, they had achieved 90% of overall goal of complete tape elimination. Looking back at business benefits, they have realized increased efficiencies and savings from backup transformation, such as: –

  • Faster Backups: Back-up times are now cut down by 50% due to Data Domain, compared to traditional tape back-up solutions.
  • Significantly Fast Recoveries: Disaster recovery procedures are simpler to run and consolidate an alternate data center. Data Domain improved recovery and disaster recovery speed by 30%.
  • Reduced Disk Utilization: Customer previously used SATA disks as a backup target before transferring to the tape library, and could free up 30TB of SATA capacity overall with the change to Data Domain.
  • Cost Savings on Bandwidth: Replication of Data between data domains between two sites reduces the bandwidth cost as it sends only non-redundant data
  • Reduced administrative costs: Customer can absorb growth in business with the same number of technicians. The process of managing tape has been automated, saving time and allowing their IT staff to concentrate on higher end systems.

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Indian FMCG company secured confidential data by implementing Next generation Threat extraction application

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The Challenge

Our Customer is a leading manufacturer of oleo chemicals for use in various industries. It manufactures edible oils, Vanaspati and bakery fats. It has its headquarters in India and exports its products to several countries.The customer’s IT team was using a single Fortigate firewall on perimeter of their network as the gateway to Internet. With an increase in network traffic due to stellar business growth over the years, they needed a more secure, scalable and reliable solution in a fault-tolerant architecture, with all the firewall rules optimized and benchmarked to best industry practices.

The Solution

After a rigorous evaluation and assessment activity with help from Galaxy, customer decided to replace legacy firewall with Check Point NGTX gateways in cluster. This provides best-in-class security, and also protects their internal servers and user systems from external attacks. Galaxy recommended a Security Management pre-defined system managing 2 gateways and 5 blades Solution. We also suggested a 12600 Next Generation Threat Extraction Appliance Solution.

Galaxy Business Solutions team worked on: –

  • Understanding and gathering complete information of current network architecture and policy configuration
  • New appliances configuration, policy and routing migration based on current setup
  • Policy review and verification
  • Scheduling connection of these new appliances to the production network and rigorous testing of all traffic
  • Creating IPsec VPN and testing the connectivity
  • Enabling of new security blades and policy configuration based on requirements
  • Monitoring the above setup

The Benefits

  • 12600 Security Appliance Provides Comprehensive Security

Customer relies on the Check Point 12600 Appliance with Firewall, Intrusion Prevention (IPS), IPsec VPN, Application Control, Antivirus, Anti-Bot, URL Filtering, Email Security, advanced next-gen zero-day threat prevention, Threat Emulation and Threat Extraction Software Blades to provide robust network protection and accessibility to network resources. With features including hot-swappable redundant power supplies and hard drives as well as high-availability technologies such as Check Point ClusterXL and Load-Sharing, the 12600 appliances provide the customer with a high level of business continuity and serviceability. Moreover, with a number of Software Blades at its disposal, the customer can easily add new layers of protection and functionality as and when needed to change and evolve.

  • Integrated IPS Software Blade Provides Unrivaled Network Protection

The Check Point IPS Software Blade provides Sinopec with comprehensive, integrated protection against malicious and unwanted network traffic. Incorporated with various advanced technologies and up to 6 GBPS of IPS throughput, the IPS Software Blade delivers dynamic threat protection to secure the customer network from potential threats.

  • Advanced Management Solution Enhances Visibility and Control

With the Check Point Smart-1 205 security management appliance, the customer is able to administer network policy management, track and analyze events, run reports and more, from a single user interface. Moreover, with Management Software Blades such as Smart Event and Smart Reporter, it can centrally monitor all its Check Point devices to get a complete visual picture of changes to gateways, remote users, and security activities. This enables administrators to immediately identify changes in network traffic flow patterns and stop malicious activity

 Galaxy team conducted an assessment of customer’s network architecture and policy configuration setup, and drew up a thorough project plan to configure new appliances, policies and routing migration. We meticulously completed the migration & testing activity over the assigned weekend to ensure a minimal downtime. Likewise, we also provided monitoring and support services, resulting in enhanced network security and customer satisfaction.

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Renewable energy solution provider increased its business productivity by Modernizing the Datacentre

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The Challenge

The Customer is a leading renewable energy solution provider across the globe, with a presence in many countries. Headquartered in India, it offers end-to-end wind-based and solar-based energy solutions right from land acquisition and lifecycle asset management, to design and construction of infrastructure necessary to tap renewable energy. This helps their own end customers optimize their desired outcomes with minimum effort and investment.  The customer’s IT team was used to functioning with an array of physical servers that put a strain on available space and a few other resources as well. Likewise, their IT hardware was very old and towards end of its support life. They wanted to drive down their IT costs, improve agility as well as have scalability of IT platform to support growth. Moreover, they wanted end-to-end visibility in terms of investments in, and usage of, their overall IT infrastructure.

The Solution

Galaxy’s Data Center practice conducted a meticulous assessment of customer’s overall IT infrastructure. We recommended and also deployed vSphere with Operations Manager, on 48 hosts and 200 virtual machines within a very short timeframe. The hardware used included EMC VNX 5600 SAN, HP 3PAR All Flesh Array, 6 HP C7000 Chassis, and 48 *HP BL460G9 Blade Servers. Galaxy ensured 100% server uptime with a reliable virtualized infrastructure and maximized system performance with vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler™ (DRS).

The Benefits

With consulting, deployment and support services offered by Galaxy, the customer reaped the following benefits:

  • They now have a comprehensive visibility into their own IT hardware landscape, along with associated costs and outcomes
  • It takes lesser time and resources for the customer to identify and resolve system issues post-deployment
  • Their overall IT hardware costs have come down by 70%
  • An improved resource planning process is in place for them to make well-informed IT investment decisions

 Customer’s Chief Technology Officer said, “For the first time ever we’re able to capacity plan, to look ahead and forecast what we’re going to need for the next one, three, or five years”.

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Leading NBFC secured sensitive information by implementing Enterprise Mobility solution

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The customer is a leading non-banking financial institution [NBFC] in India with an extensive network of more than 1000 branch offices across 22 Indian States and 3 Union Territories.

The Challenge

Each of the customer’s 1000+ branch offices had earmarked employees to frequently commute from their individual branch office to the dealer location and back, with hard copies of documents such as “Know-Your-Customer” [KYC] policy, address proofs of retail customers, etc. Likewise, the customer’s loan dispersal process was manual and cumbersome, resulting in a long time-lag while disbursing loans to their end clients. There was a dire need to simplify and digitize the entire process, to enhance employee productivity and also increase sales revenues. Also, with information security being a top priority for NBFC institutions in general, their financial records held highly sensitive information that had to be secured at all costs.

The Solution

Galaxy performed a feasibility test, and proposed VMware’s Enterprise Mobility Management solution to help address all these challenges. Some features of the proposed solution included: –

  • A mobility-based solution that works on a 7-inch Android Tablet. This enables the salesforce to capture customer documents on a real-time basis using its 1500 on-field devices.
  • VMware’s AirWatch Mobile Application Management (MAM) solution helps distribute, secure, install, update and track mobile applications across the customer’s fleet of devices.
  • Using VMWare’s AirWatch, the company can monitor activities carried out on all on-field devices, from a single console.

The Benefits

Customer could use the secure launch feature with help from Galaxy, for all their corporate-owned Android devices. They could also have their on-field sales workforce use the company’s core applications that were pushed centrally on their individual devices. Thus, the main advantages of our solution are: –

  • Field force i.e. salesforce can capture and share data from the field on real-time basis. Thus they do not need to commute to office for logging or recording their daily transactions. This has led to an increased productivity across the organization due to savings in man-hours and travel costs.
  • Better data management and security due to process automation, with less likelihood of human errors.
  • Also, as soon as a customer’s details are captured, the system automatically triggers an instant request to CIBIL to know the financial history of the customer and then check their loan eligibility, which helps in countering bad debts.

Galaxy team thus helped the customer in replacing labor-intensive data gathering process by electronic recording and tracking of data.

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Insurance company reduces maintenance costs by replacing its ageing hardware

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The customer is a leading general insurance company in India. It offers an extensive range of insurance products and services that cover vehicle insurance, health, student and travel insurance segments.

The Challenge

The customer was looking to replace its ageing hardware systems. They were initially running 90 virtual machines [VMs] on 9 physical hosts. Due to increasing workloads, the number of VMs grew from 90 to 140 over a span of just three years. CPU & memory usage reached a maximum thereby becoming a major bottleneck. Thus, there was no further room for adding new workloads. Likewise, their storage capacity had reached a threshold of 90%. Rising maintenance costs of an ageing hardware system presented yet another challenge to the customer.

The Solution

Galaxy leveraged its close partnership with OEMs such as IBM, VMware and NetApp, to propose a replacement of ageing hardware and migration to a new VMware version. The customer now runs approximately 150 virtual servers on 5 IBM Blade servers with a NetApp storage system. These servers run applications that support software development and quality assurance, production staging and deployment, as well as network and web infrastructure.

This entire migration was done successfully in phases over a period of 3 months. This included storage migration, host migration, and also deploying best practices from VMware, IBM and NetApp for optimum performance.

The Benefits

Galaxy with help from VMware, reduced the customer’s annual operational expenses by over 30%. We achieved a server consolidation ratio of 30:1 and also reduced the number of server racks in the datacenter from 3 to 1. The application availability improved by nearly 100%, and user load was reduced considerably. We enabled easy management of the system IBM Blade Center and NetApp Storage. With help from Galaxy, customer was able to get future scalability for new workloads and growth in data, over the next 3 years.

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Financial Institution achieves operational and acquisition cost savings by implementing Hyper-converged architecture

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The Challenge

Hyper Converged Architecture – Case Study:
The customer provides guaranteed clearing and settlement functions for transactions in G-Securities, Foreign Exchange and Derivatives markets. They also offer non-guaranteed settlement for Rupee interest-rate derivatives and cross-currency transactions. They have been ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certified in 2015 by DNV GL, a global quality assurance and risk management company, for securing their information assets. Likewise, they are now recognized as a Qualified Central Counterparty (QCCP) by the Reserve Bank of India in 2014. The customer had an aging inventory that needed refresh/renewals. They were looking for a design solution to helped them save on their datacenter space, reduce the number of software licenses, and lower their power/cooling costs. They were looking for a solution that is in line with the latest technology, and also priced within their desired budget.

The Solution

Galaxy team analyzed their existing design and suggested a hyper converged architecture based on the Dell FX platform. This infrastructure system has a software-centric architecture that tightly integrates compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources and other technologies from scratch, in a commodity hardware box supported by a single vendor. It primarily allows the integrated technologies to be managed as a single system through a common toolset.

VMware vRealize is the virtualization solution that was recommended to the customer. vRealize software provides operations management across physical, virtual and cloud environments, and these can be based on anything from vSphere, Hyper-V to Amazon Web Services. We installed a Dell PowerEdge modular storage & server, which enables demanding workloads with powerful, highly dense, and scalable computing. This IT service platform helps scale efficiently and predictably while drastically reducing complexity. It provides plenty of compute, memory, storage, connectivity and chassis options to let you configure servers for specific workloads.

The Benefits

Galaxy could bring significant cost-savings for the company, associated with regular business operations. The hyper-converged architecture is fairly compact, and its server and storage systems reside in the same box. Therefore, we do not require a separate SAN storage to be installed with additional complexity of external SAN switches and cables. This new solution also reduced their power consumption considerably, which was one of their pain areas earlier. On the VMware side, because we could pack more cores onto the same physical platform, we were able to reduce the license window substantially. All this was provided within the allotted budget the customer had set aside for the inventory renewal.

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Galaxy helped business to focus on revenue generation by implementing Workspace ONE for a leading media conglomerate

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The Challenge

A reputed media conglomerate in India has the largest circulation of any English-language newspaper in the world, with 3,321,702 average qualifying sales, and over 15000 employees. Their new Chief Information Security Officer [CISO] first analyzed all loopholes in their IT system from a security stand point, and framed different approaches to address each issue.

There was no data security mechanism in place for hand-held devices, especially while accessing corporate email and mobile applications. Their internal users such as news reporters, back office users, leadership as well as their internal IT team members had access to email, intranet apps and internally developed mobile apps on their handheld devices without any security. Thus, there were many instances of data leakage. It was a major challenge for them to ensure that data isn’t leaked out before being published, keeping in mind sensitivities of media industry where the shelf of life of information is extremely short-lived. Likewise, there were more challenges, like no multi-factor authentication solution in place, all the apps being scattered, and users having to remember different user names and passwords for various apps and portals.

The Solution

Galaxy is a premier VMware partner with competency in end-user computing technology since last few years. We are VMware’s directly managed partner, and have won their Mobility Partner of the Year award for outstanding performance in 2017.

Galaxy recommended VMware’s Workspace One Solution [Advanced Edition]. In addition, we also suggested the following: –

  • VMware Horizon 7 Enterprise:
  • vSphere
  • NSX Advanced Edition per Processor

Customer was expecting specific use cases to be addressed by solution providers. Here, Galaxy/VMware was able to address more use cases than other solution providers. Likewise, Galaxy/VMware was able to provide more large-scale deployment references in India, vis-à-vis other competitors.

Customer is a diversified group, where various group companies would be on-boarded using the same platform but would have different management controls. The Galaxy/VMware solution provided better management capabilities from deployment, management and multi tenancy perspective. Galaxy as a partner, shared an excellent relationship with the customer which greatly helped strengthen VMware’s value proposition.

The Benefits

The digital workspace provides our customer more visibility and control over endpoint devices, as well as information access. By enabling employees to access their content from anywhere and at any time, customer is giving them the tools they need to do their jobs more efficiently.

Here, there are several important business benefits for the customer such as: –

  • Increased security of the device (for BYOD – it’s app management only).
  • Enablement of additional functionality and features, integration with OEM-specific APIs and policies.
  • VMware Workspace One provides increased usability by the end user for things that are device specific, e.g. Wi-Fi and VPN access at the device level.

VMware Workspace One solution is preferable from an RoI standpoint, and provides a great user experience.

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Financial securities company reduced management overheads by implementing Hyperconverged infrastructure

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Batlivala & Karani [B & K] Securities India Pvt. Ltd. is a leading financial research and advisory firm in India. Established in 1875, B & K Securities leverages their research strengths, keen business insights and years of experience to offer unbiased and in-depth financial advice to institutional and corporate customers. Their scope of services includes providing Equity Advisory & Research services, Mutual Fund Analysis & Distribution, Strategic Consulting, Insurance Advisory & Broking, and Investment Banking.
Mukesh Mehta joined B & K Securities as Chief Technology Officer [CTO] in 2017. Since then, they’ve embarked on a digital journey by migrating traditional IT to hyper converged infrastructure. Mukesh says, “Traditional Infrastructures take potentially months of planning prior to an install, and can take weeks to even months whereas Hyper-Converged solutions can be sized to current needs, reducing planning time, installs typically take days or even hours.”

The Challenge

Prior to virtual DC Infrastructure migration, B & K Securities had over 30 servers in their office [both Windows and Linux-based], with mixed bag of virtualized & stand-alone Servers. Thus, Warranty and end-of-life issues across components, product, as well as software used to be a major issue. Further, individual downtime & dependencies, scalability and handling issues with multiple consoles like admin/management modules (username/password & respective policies) turned out to be a hurdle in their smooth operations. On the other hand, Mukesh Mehta wanted to bring down the TCO (i.e. IT opex) costs linked to more space and electrical power consumption, as well as air-conditioned cooling requirements needed for so many physical servers. In addition, there were other operational costs linked to periodic maintenance, and additional resources needed to manage servers in different environments – Windows and Linux.

The Solution

Mukesh says,” Hyper-convergence solutions leverage Intel x86-based servers to natively integrate compute, storage, virtualization and management into a single turnkey platform. This replaces silos of servers, storage and virtualization, along with the need for having separate management tools and processes. A 100% software-defined storage solution runs on a hypervisor that aggregates the storage and compute performance between nodes and servers, thereby merging these discrete tiers into a single tier. As workload requirements grow, organizations simply add another node to an existing hyper-converged deployment to aggregate the additional resources into the cluster. A single vendor provides the hardware and software, eliminating all the complexity that comes with procuring and provisioning these components. Overall management and day-to-day operations are greatly simplified with only one system to manage. It’s easy to see how businesses can attain enormous cost savings by eliminating expensive storage, overprovisioning, hypervisor licensing costs and the need for specialized skill sets to manage all the complexity. The end result of this shift is accelerated deployment, improved performance, and cloud-like consumption and management, all at a fraction of the cost of legacy system architectures.”

Galaxy Office Automation Pvt. Ltd. was the preferred implementation partner for B & K Securities for this project. IT Infra team at B&K Securities along with Galaxy initiated HCI Implementation project.  Galaxy team prepared the detailed blue print of the project with a tight and realistic timeline to migrate existing setup. A core team was formed which configured 3 Node cluster with Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), enabled Deduplication and compression features of CVM level and created a container to store different workloads of VMs i.e. App-Store, DB-Store and ISO-Store. Next step was to connect the port of each nodes 10G SFP+ interface with Two Mellanox 10G switch as Active and Passive (backup). Port of each nodes 1G connected on interface with Mellanox switch as an IPMI management and 10G – Uplink between both the Mellanox switch and single 10G cable connectivity with Cisco Core switch. In the final stage, the project team configured Nutanix Pulse and Remote support and created New VMs as per workload of application and database to migrate existing Physical servers (P2V) and KVM VM (V2V) to Nutanix appliance. Thus, all their old servers have now been replaced with just a single physical cluster box [2U] in their on-premises DC.

The Benefits

Mehta elaborated that deploying HCI helped in simplifying operations as it empowered them with a single console to manage all layers, Dashboard, VM & Storage Summary. Other advantages were optimized Hosts, Controllers, IOPS, Latency and CPU – memory utilization. With various alerts, now 100s of predefined scheduled checks, as well as real-time monitoring is done after the deployment.

So far, B & K Securities team has only virtualized their existing infrastructure using Nutanix AHV. Although they haven’t yet put their infrastructure on the cloud, they may do so in future using AWS, or Microsoft Azure. Migration to cloud can ensure a steady data backup and recovery in case of a disaster. Mukesh says, “This has been an excellent journey with Galaxy as partner, and Nutanix solution implementation has brought about an operational and cost efficiency, along with improved application performance, by moving existing workloads from legacy traditional three-tier datacenter infrastructures and placing new workloads on Nutanix HCI. Nutanix environment provides the agility and scalability they need to grow their businesses. This helps in working more for the business. So, B & K Securities IT team has now become more of a business enabler rather than a hindrance.”

Mukesh was all praise for Galaxy as well as Nutanix Acropolis & Nutanix Prism, saying that they are far ahead in the competition and enable substantial efficiencies in terms of deploying, managing, and troubleshooting Nutanix solutions, especially for storage.

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