BANGALORE, INDIA: Reliance General Insurance has adopted VMware's virtualization platform to overcome various IT challenges and to radically reduce capital expenses and cut operating expenses by 30 to 35 percent in the current fiscal year.

A press release adds that VMware virtualization has enabled Reliance General Insurance to improve CPU utilization, overcome performance bottlenecks and ensure resources that can be quickly scaled to support new initiatives or business growth. "With VMware virtualization in action, Reliance General Insurance has successfully fixed the company's sprawling server infrastructure challenges, including reduction in server provisioning times and enhancing application performance and uptime. The company has also achieved a server consolidation ratio of 10:1, which would need only two administrators to remotely manage the entire infrastructure, further improving application availability to near 100 per cent." the company states. 

Naganathan Sriram, Chief Technology Officer, Reliance General Insurance said, "To be a market leader, we have to consistently deliver a seamless working environment to our users and development and testing teams. VMware
virtualization solution has enabled us to provide the resources required for product development, while guaranteeing high system availability for our users."

Prior to virtualization of their IT environment, Reliance General Insurance was struggling to manage a fleet of around 100 servers. Inefficient resource use slowed database and application performance, while prolonged downtime hindered the ability of staff to serve customers and undertake development work. Datacenter space was shrinking as the company added more hardware to support its growing business. Procurement and maintenance costs were also rising to unsustainable levels.

To address these issues, Reliance General Insurance turned to VMware's virtualization solutions in early 2009. The company now runs around 90 virtual servers on nine physical hosts. These servers run applications that
support software development and quality assurance, production staging and deployment, and network and web infrastructure.

"Server consolidation, apart from the cost savings, is also resulting in faster migration of applications, smoother maintenance and better uptimes. We now have a 'VMfirst' strategy in IT for deploying new applications" said
Sudip Banerjee, VP and Head – IT, Reliance General Insurance. The company now plans to deploy VMware at its disaster recovery site to ensure business continuity. It is also looking to virtualize its storage and desktop
infrastructure.