Large-scale consolidation yields huge savings for Aviva Life Insurance

One of the leading insurance providers in India, Aviva Life Insurance, had been growing inorganically along with the industry. As the company grew, the complexities in operationaland sales processes increased multifold, which in turn increased the demand for business support applications. To keep up with the infrastructure requirement for the business applications, the organization had to continuously invest in the additional infrastructure. Due to these ad hoc infrastructure addition, the company was burdened with infrastructure growth in silos. Keeping in mind these factors, the management initiated the process of re-engineering the business and thus committed investments around a large-scale technology transformation.
A team of experts decided to evaluate the compute infrastructure which was piled up over a period of 10 years, spread across multiple rack-based servers and multivendor storage models. The physical hosting space require-ment, technology efficiencies of storage and compute, and cost of maintenance (opex) were evaluated.
“It was important for us to relook at the complete compute and storage infrastructure to identify inefficiencies in terms of space occupancy and requirement of power and cooling infrastructure,” informs Harnath Babu, CIO, Aviva Life Insurance.
CONSOLIDATING THE INFRASTRUCTURE
On the basis of the study, the company decided to consolidate the complete storage and servers available in the datacenter. The consolidation strategy considered the availability of high-performance processing capabilities and efficient storage technologies in the marketplace. The revised architecture now has compressed the older infrastructure by replacing 90 odd physical rack-based servers with less than 14 blades of IBM PureFlex and 3 racks of different storage to 1 rack of IBM v7k storage (with 50% more storage capacity), resulting in total compression of around 84%. Virtualization technologies such as Microsoft Hyper V and Red Hat KVM were used for the project.

REAPING THE BENEFITS
Post migration, the organization has witnessed a number  of benefits. It has not only been able to reduce software licensing requirement at the datacenter level but has also reduced the dependencies and logistics challenges as the new infrastructure has been moved from the company-owned captive datacenter to a co-located datacenterThis has reduced dependencies and helps the company in avoiding technical and logistics challenges of an inhouse datacenter.
Earlier, the company had to invest an additional capex of more than a crore for the upgradation of the existing datacenter for cooling and fire safety in addition to more than `2 crore yearly in annual maintenance contract for storage and server infrastructure. With the implementation of virtualization and hardware consolidation, the company has been able to project a saving of approximately `5 crore over a period of three years. The newly implemented solution is scalable and future proof (cloud ready). With consolidation, operational costs in personnel and licensing requirements are also being saved.

Today, Aviva is able to allocate compute resources on a need basis, eg, during peak business period, customers and distribution forces are serviced without bumping into performance issues of application due to hardware constraints scalability of compute infrastructure.
The consolidation has resulted in saving of nearly 50% of the total cost of maintenance (TCO) and additionally brought in superior and efficient technology for future scalability.
Further, the DC team is now able to respond to user needs for server and storage arising for testing of new applications, enhancements or meeting regulatory reporting requirements. With the removal of hardware abstraction layer, the DR site is reusing few of the older and lower configuration hardware. It has also become easier to test the DR failover.