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Awards & Honours Info-Tech - Storage
Preethi J.
The winning team
Recently at Sunnyvale Wine and storage-talk are a heady mix. Discussing them after playing a round of golf at the green expanses of a vineyard on the outskirts of Sunnyvale, California, executives trooped into the awards ceremony hosted by the US-based Network Appliances (NetApp). They rose to applaud as Infosys Technologies was awarded the `Innovator of the Year'.
$2-m savings
The team from Infosys used NetApp's storage and data management products while redesigning its data centre and observed an overall direct cost savings of $2 million. The team succeeded in conserving space, reducing time taken to backup data, while improving efficiency of services being offered to employees and improving the performance of servers. "We plan to duplicate the model at other development centres," a beaming Mr Pritam Kumar Sinha, Senior Project Manager, Infosys Technologies, told Business Line at the ceremony last week. Infosys has 44 global development centres, of which 24 are in India. Using NetApp's Snapshot, his team reduced the time taken to backup data from 12 hours to less than 10 minutes. This saved three hours per day in administrative overhead (and over 500 hours a year). The overall data centre footprint was reduced by 70 per cent from 1,500 to 500 sq. ft. in area, by consolidation of servers and storage. From 130 individual servers that processed 20 applications, the team reduced the number to just 30, efficiently performing the same tasks. Storage was consolidated into a single repository on a NetApp FAS3020 device with 8TB of capacity. Thinking on its feet after data migration, the team changed the DNS server to point to the NetApp storage instead of the existing file servers, and sailed through with zero downtime. The team recorded an annual savings of $41,000 on maintenance contracts. With the shift to NetApp storage and tape usage, it cut recurring spending on business continuity by 95 per cent. The company applied for a lesser category and was surprised to be nominated to the highest award. It is the first time an Indian firm is winning the innovation award.
SIMPLY IT
Data centres house the most precious equity of all - information. Termed `critical', these glass-enclosed, temperature moderated environments housing a maze of servers and storage devices are awe-inspiring. Imagine if a non-IT specialist - like a professor or doctor, could someday run them? Soon (in about five years' time) it will be possible - thanks to efforts by NetApp in simplifying IT infrastructure and data management. The $2.8-billion firm specialises in building hardware and software that "expand manageability horizons". Its solutions allow customers like Yahoo! to offer unlimited storage on e-mail inboxes. "Storage has come a long way since the `80s," said Mr James Lau, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder, NetApp, adding, "Data management is at an exciting stage. Three years ago, it meant just backup, and `storage' was used to refer to disk drives." Now, with disk-to-disk backup and virtualisation going full steam ahead, the whole industry is in an upswing, he said. APAC presents a "tremendous opportunity" and there is a lot of market to expand into, in the region. "NetApp is well positioned in India and though China will be a bigger market, it is harder to crack. We are doing better in India," he said. The company is betting on integrating its products with applications such as Exchange, Oracle databases and SAP ERP software to give it an edge in the competitive marketplace. Most of this work is being done at its India development centre in Bangalore.
More Stories on : Awards & Honours | Storage | Infosys Technologies Ltd | Software
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