Amit Sethi, senior president & CIO, Yes Bank

My Wow moment happened with the rollout of the Private Cloud Project in 2012. As part of the ver­sion 2.0 initiative, the bank decided to move all its applications to the private cloud by the first half of 2012 to achieve efficient and dynamic IT service delivery capability and cost optimization. We started with the evaluation phase and feasibility analysis which consisted of a proof of concept with key vendors.

With the success of proof of concept we shortlisted technology based on VMware, Cisco UCS as the platform, for scalability and ease of manage­ment, storage virtualization, using Hitachi USPVM for tiered storage and automation of monitoring using multiple tools.

In the YES BANK private cloud implementation, key hardware re­sources-compute, storage, and net­working-are pooled and abstracted into units that enable the technology team to dynamically provide and scale applications and resources.

The initial deployment and migra­tion was completed in 6 months.

The project is a great success and we have achieved 100% uptime in the last six months and have sub­sequently launched 12 new applica­tions on the virtual environment. The private cloud project deploy­ment resulted in various benefits like quicker provisioning of appli­cations.

It also resulted in signifi­cant cost reduction and enhanced capacity utilization with almost 50% reduction in cost of server hardware and its hosting charges. Without the need to purchase any additional space or power for Production Data Center, the IT department was able to cater to exponential growth pro­jections of the bank.

With virtuali­zation, the IT department was able to utilize spare capability in the ‘server-farm' to activate the appli­cation from an alternate server, in case of hardware failure. It enabled power savings of about 42 KVA, in line with Green IT initiatives.

The project has been a great learning experience for me and my team and has further strengthened my belief that focused approach with a right mix of planning, moni­toring, and controlling, can make a difference in completing a project on time, on budget, and with high quality.­