Best Deployment award (Silver): Wysetek Systems Technologists : Disaster Recovery Made Easy

Wysetek Systems Technologists won the Silver award in the 'Best Deployment'
category, in the DQ Channels Excellence Awards this year. There were six
projects shortlisted in the category and parameters like uniqueness of project,
cost efficiency, and the type of solution and products offered by them were kept
in mind.

In 2009, one of India's top hospitality chains came up with a need to
implement a disaster recovery (DR) solution for its main datacenter located at
Mumbai. For this purpose, the company approached Wysetek. Wysetek won the award
for setting up a cost effective DR site with optimal performance using VMware
and IBM BladeCenter H, which enabled it to consolidate and virtualize physical
production servers to corresponding virtual machines. It implemented the DR
solution for client's primary site in Mumbai, and continues to provide the
maintenance and support for the same. The hotel group did not want to implement
the solution in Mumbai, because in the event of any disaster-either natural or
man made-both the main datacenter as well as the back-up DR would be at risk.
Bengaluru was chosen not only because it was geographically separate from
Mumbai, but with four to five hotels in and around the city, it was easily
accessible for the hotel's IT staff to get the system functional, should
anything happen in Mumbai.

Venkatesh Pai of Wysetek accepting the Best Deployment Award (Silver) from Michael ANG, Manager- Channel Business Development, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems

Rajesh Mathkar, Director, Wysetek Systems Technologists shared, "Even before
this deployment, we were involved in a server virtualization project for our
client's HR information system in 2008. Since they were looking to virtualize
their datacenter and extend it as a DR solution, they approached us along with a
few other partners. Our client chose us seeing our strong nationwide support
network and because of the financing options made available to them by us."

The project size was worth around Rs 2 crore and it took a 15-man team, a
total of around seven months to plan, implement and finally go live. Talking
about the various phases of the project, Mathkar detailed, "Even before the
contract was awarded, there were nearly two months of active brainstorming, both
within Wysetek as well as with the customer in order to understand the scale of
the project versus our internal capability to deliver results. After getting the
formal go-ahead, we spent around a month in planning and preparing the solution
design. Post-planning, around two weeks went into setting up the primary site or
the pilot, after which another two to three weeks went into testing for
performance to check for errors. After the testing phase, we carried out the
switching process where the physical environment sitting in Mumbai was exported
into an online virtualized environment in Bengaluru, and two to three weeks
later, the solution finally went live."

There were many benefits accrued to the customer through this implementation.
On the cost front, there were significant savings on capex as well as opex. "We
implemented this solution at a server consolidation ratio of 40:1, which means
that for every one physical server, we were able to virtualize and get 40
virtual servers. Not only that, our price quote was at least three to four times
more competitive than other partner's quotes. Our client was able to save at
least 60 percent on running costs. Also, by using a P2V converter, we were able
to save the customer the time of deployment by at least 70 percent," explained
Mathkar.

Finally, what is the 'wow' factor of this deployment? Mathkar said, "Not only
did we beat the industry benchmark but we raised the bar even higher. With P2V,
we were able to save the customer, the time and money involved in bringing down
the IT personnel of their different application vendors from various countries;
by merely using the phone instead, we were able to get the job done. This huge
benefit was not something that was normally expected to be derived but we were
able to do it, and for that reason, this deployment was one of a kind," signed
off Mathkar.

John Jacob

johnj@cybermedia.co.in