Stewart & Mackertich was running a legacy infrastructure with tower servers which were more than four years old. These systems were slow, unreliable and required a high amount of management and maintenance. It was running one application per server and each server had direct-attached storage.

The infrastructure was plagued by unplanned downtimes. Provisioning for a new application and extra storage required laborious manual tape backup and the infrastructure lacked a proper disaster recovery mechanism. The company was spending almost 85 percent of its IT budget to keep the infrastructure up and running and had very little left for new implementations or innovations.

To overcome these issues, Stewart & Mackertich moved its servers to a virtualized infrastructure. The company was the first one in India to implement securities trading applications live on a virtualized platform.

With virtualization, the company has reduced the number of physical servers from 26 to five, cut power and cooling costs by 65 percent, improved CPU utilization from 25 percent to 65 percent and saved up to ` 60 lakh in terms of one-time savings on floor space.

Post deployment, server provisioning time for new applications/environment has gone down from four weeks to just 15 minutes and downtime has reduced by 90 percent. Manpower requirement too has reduced from 3:1.

Note: Stewart & Mackertich is an EDGE winner. The complete list of EDGE winners is published in the October 2010 Print issue of InformationWeek India

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