Religare’s green data center

IBM’s scalable modular data center will help Religare reduce its spending on electricity by 30-35% and give it an infrastructure for BCP and DR to run its online securities business as well as other applications on a 24x7 basis says Akhtar Pasha

Religare Enterprises Ltd. is a diversified financial services group that offers a diverse bouquet of financial services extending from asset management, life insurance, wealth management to equity broking, commodity broking, investment banking, lending services, private equity and venture capital.

The company has grown its business by over 300% from two lakh customers a few years back to approxImately six lakh customers today. As per a company official, the rapid growth in business and increase in number of customers has posed a challenge to its central data center [production DC] located in Delhi. The data center was running out of rack space, rentals were high and the center was facing a severe power crisis leading to couple of instances of system downtime affecting production and sales. Additionally the Delhi DC building was quite old and it did not supported proper IT infrastructure. Further the company had already created server farms occupying 60 racks—30 racks were occupied by servers [mostly blade servers from IBM and HP], networking equipment occupied another 15-20 racks and the balance was occupied by storage. The sprawling server farms were running at poor utilization levels requiring additional workforce to manage the same. Due to multiple constraints, Religare decided to shift its existing DC facility from Delhi and a new production DC in Noida following which, Religare would convert its Mumbai site to a disaster recovery site in additional to catering to the needs of its western operations.

Another significant issue Religare was facing was that the production DC at Delhi was incapable of meeting its business expansion plans and could not scale as per the requirement because of the existing infrastructure. This included DC cooling, power, space, infrastructure growth for getting the optimum efficiency and running the operations without outages. A big chunk of DC expense was for power and air-conditioning. Religare’s first and foremost motto is customer satisfaction. In order to achieve it at a higher level and to cater to its business needs it needed a DR set-up as well.

Setting up a green data center

IBM’s Scalable Modular Data Centers or SMDC is a bouquet of services and products that includes conditioned and distributed power, equipment cooling, equipment rack systems, security and monitoring. SMDC does not require raised flooring and can be designed and installed in nearly any working environment, potentially in less time and for a lower cost than a traditional raised-floor data centre. Additionally users can readily add power, cooling and rack capacity to support their growing server and storage needs as business and IT requirements change. SMDC had proven experience in helping reduce operational costs while meeting the business continuity and resiliency requirements of clients.

Since IBM had been Religare’s technology partner for quite some time it got the job of helping and guiding Religare through the process of design finalization and product selection. IBM selected SMDC designs and then the products required to fit into the solution, which would lead to effective power utilization as well as serve the cooling requirements. IBM’s deep engagement with Religare resulted in clear understanding of the electrical cabling and path, helping reduce costs of cabling route with redundant power supply.

From Religare’s point of view it benefited from on demand scalability, lesser operational cost, efficient electrical systems and high availability. Its new DC at Noida was designed to handle three times the existing capacity of the Delhi DC with almost the same OPEX.

Executing the project

The migration of the Delhi DC to Noida is currently underway and was kicked off in December 2008. For the Noida DC, Religare had decided to create three zones: the high server density zone that can support 10-12 KW power in one rack, medium server density zone where one rack supports 4-6 KW and the network zone (staging/UAT/testing zone) where one rack supported from 2-4 KW. The decision of placing the servers will depend upon the power capability of the zone. For security there are state of art anti- intrusion, fire extinguisher (FM-200 based), advanced alarm and monitoring systems (Building Management System). Chiller based cooling and correct placement of racks with proper structured cabling support the company in reducing OPEX by 30-40% in terms of the electricity bill. The remaining two data centers, Delhi acting as a backup for the company’s Mumbai data center and vice-versa were built with normal precision ACs with proper electric and cooling design.

Lower OPEX, DR ready

The company achieved scalability of more than thrice as compared to its existing setup at the initial test run. This in turn resulted in a huge overall saving in terms of electric bills. IBM’s SMDC design leveraged high density computing and precision air-conditioning that ensure a saving of more than 3,600 units (KWH) per day in power consumption alone. The official added that post migration into the new facility [DC at Noida], which is expected to go live in mid-June 2009, Religare will save approximately Rs 30-40 lakhs on its annual power bill. Additionally overall uptime will improve leading to customer satisfaction. IBM’s SMDC has given the company a ready solution for setting up business continuity planning and disaster recovery, which will help Religare avoid legal hassles in the wake of natural disasters. With the central data center and DR solution in place, Religare will be able to run its online securities business as well as other applications on a 24x7 basis.

akhtar.pasha@expressindia.com