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Feature
A Penguin in the enterprise
Indian businesses have overcome their initial reluctance
to use Open Source products. Fears of poor service, support and reliability
have been dispelled by strong endorsments from server vendors such as IBM and
HP. By Varun Aggarwal
 Cost
has always been a big factor for CTOs, when they go shopping for a server OS.
Linux has always been way ahead of others in this respect.
There is always uncertainty while shifting to a new platform. Speculations about
the performance, load capabilities etc. are obvious. Enterprises that have deployed
Linux faced similar hiccups in the past.
When Central Bank of India decided to migrate to Red Hat Linux, questions were
raised by other banks over this decision. K Raghuraman, general manager-IT,
Central Bank of India says, “We found solace when we saw support for Linux
from IBM, Oracle and Red Hat. Since there is a lot of research happening in
Linux and support is easily available, it was a good bet on a long term basis.”
The bank’s pilot of the Red Hat-Oracle combination went off smoothly, so
much so that its employees were unaware that a migration had taken place from
the legacy COBOL/Btrieve/Novell NetWare environment.
Raghuraman adds “The migration went off smoothly and there was no resistance
to change. This successful deployment of Red Hat Linux prompted us to roll it
out across more than 1,115 branches.”
When Airtel decided to set-up its tele-voting backbone on Red Hat Linux it encountered
a similar cloud of FUD. Rajeev Vatsal, head, VAS, Airtel explains, “When
we first decided to evaluate Linux, apprehensions were raised immediately. People
began to speculate about the capability of the new system to handle high workloads.
In our simulations and tests, Linux proved the detractors wrong. The pilot Enterprise
Linux server could easily handle a peak load of 1,000 transactions per second
(TPS). Thus, people gradually realised that Linux can easily scale to high throughputs.”
Challenges:
UTI Bank had introduced quality services to enhance the banking experience
of its customers. As the services stack expanded, supporting customers became
a challenging task. Efficient service and timely support were the deciding
factors for customers to remain loyal to any particular bank, which meant
that UTI bank needed a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
UTI Bank decided to start a call centre that would
provide support to customers across the country. The call centre was expected
to eliminate the load of routine queries that branch operators had to
handle. A dedicated response centre would allow branch operators to divert
all customer queries to the helpdesk number and focus on their core responsibilities
instead.
The bank was also looking to avoid a situation
where customers would be put on hold for long periods of time. For handling
large call volumes, the application infrastructure was also required to
be scalable.
Solution:
UTI Bank implemented Oracle 11i e-business Suite for its CRM needs.
An IVR extracts customer data, which is populated on the call centre agent’s
desktop. With a browser based view of the customer’s record, the
agent can process the customer’s queries faster, resulting in higher
throughput. To host the mission critical database and CRM solution, UTI
Bank needed an architecture that was based on open standards, as it was
looking at customising the Oracle CRM solution to a high degree. The bank
chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for this which delivered the necessary
performance, security, flexibility and scalability that was critical for
the success of the project.
Benefits Achieved:
- Servers handle close to 7,000 calls a day with 99.99 percent uptime.
- Systems can accommodate massive growth in call volumes over the next
couple of years.
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Rock solid
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Linux is not only being deployed
for running simple applications, but also for mission critical jobs. Linux
servers have been used to run high-end, zero tolerance workloads. Companies
that hitherto employed Unix boxes are now migrating to Linux for better
performance at a lower cost
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Linux is not only being deployed for running simple applications,
but also for mission critical jobs. Linux servers have been used to run high-end,
zero tolerance workloads. Companies that hitherto employed Unix boxes are now
migrating to Linux for better performance at a lower cost.
Dr. TR Madan Mohan, director (Consulting), ICT Practice-Frost
& Sullivan, India says, "Since Linux has a large developer community,
there is no shortage of software updates, quality, technical support and bug
fixing (debugging) for an organisation adopting Linux. Therefore, we expect
Linux to grow rapidly in the enterprise for running core applications."
He continues having freely available source code addresses concerns with using
Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components such as unknown implementation quality
and long-term vendor support.
Airtel’s solution provider, Bharti Telesoft uses Linux
for most of its products. Brij Mohan, head-Switching, Bharti Telecom says that
Red Hat has been the most stable platform among others used by his company such
as Solaris and HP-UX. “The Red Hat Advanced Server 3.0 has helped us achieved
strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) like 99.999 percent uptime. Issues like
memory leaks and CPU utilisation have been taken care of with the help of Red
Hat experts and our team,” he says. The server that Bharti Telesoft has
deployed for Airtel’s Hello Tunes, is able to handle one million calls
in one hour, proving the robustness of the system.
UTI Bank hired a consultant and went through an intensive
evaluation phase before deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux. UTI Bank wanted
to go with the latest platform which comes with reliable support. Pritesh Thaker,
Assistant Vice President-IT, UTI Bank says, “We have received tangible
RoI with Linux (using Red Hat) and support from Red Hat is good. We have been
able to achieve our target of 99.99 percent uptime and we haven’t had a
single system failure since the time of deployment in 2004.”
"We have achieved our target of 99.99 percent uptime and haven’t
had a single system failure since deploying Linux in 2004"
- Pritesh Thaker Assistant Vice President-IT
UTI Bank |
"We did not want to be dependent on propriety systems. Linux had
already proved its capabilities. Getting capable administrators for Red
Hat Linux is easier than for Solaris"
- Tejinderpal Singh Miglani CTO
Indiabulls |
"Since Linux has a large developer community, there is no shortage
of software updates, quality, technical support and bug fixing (debugging)
for an organisation adopting Linux"
Dr. TR Madan Mohan
Director (Consulting), ICT Practice-Frost & Sullivan, India |
Indiabulls, a retail financial services company, runs one
of the largest Online Transaction Processing Systems in the industry and faces
a high transaction load on its servers of up to 6,000 database transactions
per second. Thus, they needed a high performance platform to match their continuous
availability needs. The company had an option of continuing with proprietary
Unix machines. After extensive evaluation, Indiabulls went in for Red Hat Enterprise
Linux. Tejinderpal Singh Miglani, CTO, Indiabulls says, “We did not want
to be dependent on propriety systems. Linux had already proved its capabilities.
Getting capable administrators for Red Hat Linux is much easier than for Solaris.”
| Challenges:
Indiabulls offers investors a secure, reliable
way to carry out their transactions remotely. Using an installable client
application provided by Indiabulls, investors can log into the Indiabulls
Professional Network from a remote PC. After their identity has been verified,
investors can send transaction data to the Stock Exchange. A confirmation
receipt is returned to the investors after the data has been transmitted.
The application server runs an Order Routing System, which manages the
transaction lifecycle.
With approximately 8,000 concurrent investors logged
on to the Indiabulls Professional Network at any given time, there is
absolutely no room for error. During peak loads, investors generate up
to 2,000 requests per minute for which 4,000 responses are triggered in
return. This puts the total peak volume of online transactions at 6,000
per minute. The database server logs the entire length of the transaction,
handling an average of 25 queries per transaction.
Originally, both the Oracle 9i Database and Order
Routing System were hosted on HP Tru64 Alpha. Being unclear about the
future of its Unix platform, Indiabulls decided to migrate to the latest
platform available.
Solution:
Indiabulls chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux. On the
hardware front, 64-bit RISC technology faced limited and slow development
over the years. Indiabulls found 32-bit x86 servers an attractive proposition.
The backend infrastructure consisting of an Oracle
9i database and an Order Routing System are both powered by Red Hat Advanced
Server 2.1. The personal loan system which falls under Indiabulls Credit
Services has also been hosted on Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1.
Benefits Achieved:
- High performance from low-cost, 32-bit x86 servers, which were available
at less than half the price of their 64-bit UNIX counterparts.
- Enterprise Linux running on x86 architecture has empowered Indiabulls
to purchase more servers and generate ten times more performance than
its earlier UNIX infrastructure.
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Services and support
Linux support exists not only from Linux vendors such as Red Hat and Novell,
but also from Oracle and Microsoft. With so many prominent players, Linux support
has become one of the easiest to get and that too at a reasonable cost. Mohan
adds, “It is much easier to find a Red Hat certified engineer than a Solaris
administrator and the service charges are also reasonable in the case of Red
Hat.”
| Challenges:
When the second season of KBC was launched in 2005,
the channel’s viewership had surged to over 61 million viewers. The
telecommunications infrastructure of the country had also witnessed massive
growth since then, with more than 50 million mobile phones active in 2005,
a quarter of them belonging to Airtel. It was the same case with the first
run of Indian Idol that drew over 55 million viewers and votes. The second
season of Indian Idol was expected to generate significantly greater SMS
traffic. Airtel had to be sure that it had the right infrastructure to
handle this. The speed of processing was also critical. When an open contest
is aired on KBC at the end of each episode, millions of viewers send an
SMS in a short span of just three to four minutes. Indian Idol generated
a similar spike . Over 30 million SMS were sent in the run-up to the final
of the show itself, with viewers sending in three votes per mobile phone
on an average.
Solution:
Bharti Telesoft designed a tele-voting application
for Airtel, that uses SMS as the media for polling votes. The application
was developed on open standards. Televoting helped Airtel’s mobile
subscribers participate in SMS contests aired on both KBC and Indian Idol.
The system handles tremendous peak loads of mobile-originated (MO) messages
generated by subscribers and processes according to a pre-configured format
specified by the two TV programs. Enterprise Linux runs on low-cost, dual
core Intel Xeon servers. The servers run both the tele-voting application
and a MySQL database at seven locations across the country. A central
server, again powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, functions as a host.
Benefits Achieved:
- The servers can handle millions of messages without any downtime.
- Significant TCO reduction by eliminating the need for proprietary
licenses and RISC based hardware.
- High throughput achieved in transaction processing.
- Servers handle average load of 300 messages per second and peak load
of 4,000 messages with ease.
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“Linux provided a hassle-free solution which is less vulnerable to virus
attacks with higher security,” claims Miglani. With absolutely no downtime
or performance delays, Enterprise Linux ensures that daily revenues remain intact
at Indiabulls, he adds. Thaker feels Red Hat is dedicated when it comes to support
and ensuring that Linux offers a good value proposition for users.
At Central Bank of India, with over 1,000 branches, spread across the country,
a platform whose support was available even in far flung areas was a must. The
bank found that Linux fits the bill as its stability eliminates the need for
heavy-duty support. Moreover, Raghraman says, “The advantage of using Red
Hat is that it’s hassle-free. In the cities, maintenance and support is
not such a challenge because you can always find people to run to the location
and resolve the problem. We have proved to the world that Linux works in a decentralised
and geographically dispersed network like ours.” Red Hat Linux requires
little maintenance and that’s a boon for a bank like CBI that has many
far-flung locations. “The system runs smoothly and we haven’t had
problems with scalability or corruption of data,” he ends.
With its strong presence in the BFSI and telecom sectors,
enterprise Linux is moving into other verticals including BPO, retail, e-governance,
and even research institutes.
| Challenges:
Canara Bank deployed a number of bank automation
tools such as a customised Total Branch Automation (TBA) package called
Integrated Branch Banking Software (IBBS), which was developed by its
subsidiary, CanBank Computer Services Ltd. (CCSL). IBBS was deployed on
Novell NetWare at close to 1,400 medium sized branches across the country.
After nearly a decade of deploying IBBS, the bank had purchased different
types of hardware from multiple vendors. As a result, standardisation
on Novell NetWare became difficult, and supporting the legacy IBBS application
became a challenging task.
With poor support for the TCP/IP protocol stack,
the NetWare servers running IBBS could not be integrated into the corporate
network easily. Regular maintenance of different versions of IBBS across
1,400 branches was a painstaking effort in the absence of network support.
Also, the availability of certified hardware on NetWare was limited, which
made adding new machines difficult.
Novell NetWare’s closed legacy environment
did not allow room to accommodate new technologies. Canara Bank had to
purchase additional machines running Microsoft Windows to interface with
these new technologies, which was extremely inefficient from a hardware
utilisation standpoint. New hardware and Microsoft Windows licenses strained
budgets and made new technology projects difficult to scale and sustain.
Canara Bank wanted to switch platforms but not
its hardware. It wanted to deploy the latest OS available, without going
into a hardware refresh cycle that would cost millions of rupees. The
heterogeneous mix of hardware that spanned across more than 1,000 servers
and 10,000 desktops made the project rather complex.
Solution:
The bank decided to modernise branch automation
by re-deploying IBBS on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. It selected
Red Hat Enterprise Linux to replace NetWare at more than 1,000 branches
across the country, after a successful pilot run. The package was ported
from NetWare onto the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform by CCSL.
The architecture of the application deployment
was changed to a server-based processing model from the earlier client
processing model. A customised, light version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux
V.3 was specially developed by the Red Hat Engineering team to suit Canara
Bank’s existing desktop hardware infrastructure.
Under the first phase of deployment, Red Hat Enterprise
Linux has been rolled out at approximately 500 branches in a record time
of three months. Close to 500 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers and 5,000
Red Hat Desktops have been deployed in this phase. As part of its vision
to introduce 100 percent modernisation into its banking services environment,
Canara Bank is actively pursuing deploying Enterprise Linux in additional
branches as well.
Benefits:
- Improvement in system performance by
over eight times.
- Significant TCO reduction by eliminating
the need for purchasing new hardware and software licenses.
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