Insurance: India-first Always

With its launch in 2010, IndiaFirst Life Insurance became one of the youngest life insurance companies in India. The insurance company is a joint effort of Bank of Baroda (44% stake), Andhra Bank (30% stake), and Legal and General (26% stake). The insurance newcomer initially focused on the bancassurance model and leveraged on the existing branch network of over 4,800 branches of its promoter banks across the country. A combination of domain expertise, customer knowledge, product innovation, and nationwide enabled them to cross the mark of '900 crore in new business premium. This was done within 500 days of its operations and the insurance company covered more than 1.2 mn lives across more than 1,000 cities and towns in India. The company intends to become a life insurance and pension business leader in providing significant value for all stakeholders through true customer delight.

Even though a new entrant in the market, the IT department was faced with significant challenges in relation to server utilization. There was a need felt to improve the utilization of server resources because each server hosted just one application or database, thus resulting in low server utilization. Being a new entrant in the market, in the early days handling such scenarios would mean a smooth road ahead in the future. There was also a need to reduce the provisioning time for new servers and applications; and improve manageability of data centers. But the bigger need was to reduce capital and operating expenditures.

The Solution

The company has a primary data center at Mumbai and secondary at Hyderabad. Currently, User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and development environments are virtualized using VMware ESX 4.0, while the production environment is virtualized using VMware ESXi. VMware software operates on IBM BladeCenter HX5 servers, with 7 physical servers hosting 80 virtual servers. Prior to virtualization, 80 physical servers hosted one application each, but virtualization led to servers being freed owing to server consolidation and hosting of critical applications in the production environment. The virtualized infrastructure supports both critical and non-critical applications, such as CRM, SRMS, and call center applications.

A pilot project deployed VMware server virtualization in the UAT and development systems where 50 virtual servers were hosted on live physical servers to evaluate virtualization benefits. These benefits included improved server utilization, shortened server provisioning time, and lower power consumption. Once UAT and development systems performed successfully in the virtualized environment, the production systems were migrated to a virtualized environment.

The benefits of consolidating servers in a virtualized environment have been a driver for the company's IT team to plan towards consolidating their databases (Oracle, SQL, and MySQL) in a virtualized environment. The company foresees tremendous savings in server costs with this consolidation.