Insurance

Aviva India uses multiple applications like a custom-built policy administrator system, CRM and other financial applications. Most of these applications have been primarily running on the Windows Server platform. These applications coupled with the infrastructure based applications like File Serving; Mail Server Proxy Servers etc. were primarily running on multiple physical servers in their data center. They had been procuring multiple of the mid range and high end servers for their data center and branches from IBM.

The fundamental challenge was managing these multiple servers with multiple islands of storage physically and remotely. A huge recurring investment was being made on the purchase of additional infrastructural support to meet their expansion needs in India. Additionally, they were facing performance issues on the servers.

1. Better manageability through server consolidation
2. Create redundancy to support criticality of their applications
3. Flexibility to scale up servers as and when required
4. Low total cost of ownership of IT infrastructure

Aviva Life Insurance, India chose IBM as its partner in its efforts to improve business performance and enable flexible business growth. IBM has consulted Aviva on virtualization of the computing environment. "Realizing the value from storage consolidation, Aviva was geared up to introduce new and challenging concepts like server virtualization and physical consolidation", says Abir Basak, Senior Manager, IT Infrastructure and Networking. This provided ease of operations in managing virtual machines and also creating new servers on the fly, whenever the business needs increased.

Aviva's disaster recovery initiative has also been setup using IBM technologies to ensure higher productivity and optimal capacity utilization.

Phase I

The entire infrastructure running on 16 servers was consolidated by IBM onto two physical servers of x440 (8 way machines) using VMWare, and creating virtual machines on the same.

A DR site was created at Chennai using a replication link and network storage setup.

Phase II

As a secondary stage of implementation, some of the infrastructure servers like, Web Servers, File Servers, Print Servers and Mail Servers were physically consolidated into two new IBM eServer Blade Center connected to a centralized storage.

The Blade Centers had redundancy inbuilt and also assured scalability to match Aviva's future expansion plans.

Aviva has now transformed their data centre into a consolidated environment with about 40 servers. "Consolidation has enabled us to cater to needs of a growing business", says Abir Basak. "Administrators can now build up & maintain servers with ease by working with installation images rather than get into traditional installations, thus reducing turn around time".

The server consolidation has enabled the client to simplify their IT infrastructure and further their expansion plans in India by moving the existing servers to Aviva's new branches across the country. The benefits of server consolidation include - low total cost of ownership, increased availability, better manageability, enhanced scalability and freedom from redundancy.

The robust and secure IT infrastructure deployed by IBM enables Aviva to cut down the go to market time substantially and offer new customized products and services to the customers, as per changing market dynamics and demand.

"Aviva Life Insurance, currently ranked as one of the top 10 life insurers in India, believes that information technology is a key enabler for business growth. Aviva has chosen IBM as the preferred partner for all technology needs and has deployed advanced solutions in the enterprise server segment to achieve a sound framework and service delivery imperatives."

- Sanjiv Shah, Director, Information Technology,
Aviva Life Insurance, India