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WNS leverages NetApp and VMware to deliver high availability and low cost data center infrastructure

Posted On : Feb-24-2011 | seen (387) times | Article Word Count : 914 |

As the leading provider of business process outsourcing services, WNS required high availability and security of data.
Customer Profile
WNS Global Services is a leading global business process outsourcing company. With over 200 global clients, and 21 global delivery centers located across, UK, India, Sri Lanka, Philippines, and Costa Rica, WNS offers its expertise to companies across a diverse range of services from the health care, insurance, logistics, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, banking and financial sectors to the retail and consumer products and the travel and leisure sectors. Through its operations, it extends the enterprise of some of the world’s best brands.WNS delivers the entire spectrum of business processes – from shared back office processes, such as finance and accounting, human resource administration and customer care; industry-specific front and middle office processes, to complex, actionable research and analytics.WNS has also been awarded the CIO 100Award for Innovative Storage Solutions in2008 and 2009.
Challenge
To deliver high availability and low cost data center infrastructure
As the leading provider of business process outsourcing services, WNS required high availability and security of data. Until 2008, WNS used direct attached storage (DAS) to store business critical data on separate servers for each of its 200+ clients across over600 processes. As WNS’s client base grew, domain management became increasingly complex and management overheads increased significantly. The company had outgrown the DAS structure. Backing up each individual server became a tedious task and data recovery was slow and sometimes incomplete. Says Mr Sanjay Jain, CIO and Head – Global Transformation Practice, WNS Global Services, “Creating backups for each server individually was a time consuming task. It took significant time and effort to backup servers with large volume of data. But the real challenge was in data recovery.WNS required a storage platform that would minimize capacity requirements, provide as callable solution to address future growth, help in file server consolidation and offer a backup solution that would centralize backup across multiple data centres. They also wanted a solution that would minimize their data loss (RPO) and enable recovery of activity (RTO) within one hour.“We chose Netapp for its unified storage solution, for its high performance SnapShot solution, and for its RAID DP functionality which has proven to be highly effective as well as simple to implement and manage. Netapp’s solutions offer comprehensive data protection,” said Mr Jain.

Solution

The biggest deciding factors were Netapp’s ability to integrate with multiple Windows Active Directories (domains) while keeping security intact and the virtualization of file servers with single
physical storage

NetApp recommended FAS 3000 series unified storage system to achieve file server consolidation. The MultiStore functionality virtualizes a single Storage system into multiple Fileservers. Every virtual Fileserver presented a secure environment for the users, which was completely isolated from the rest of the users. In addition to this, RAID-DP offered better data protection and capacity utilization than RAID 5 or RAID 1+0 versions. RAID-DP offers protection against a simultaneous double disk failure, where traditional RAID implementations would have lost business critical data. WNS began server virtualization with VMWare and followed it up with the deployment of Netapp’s FAS 3000 series.

Unified storage system for their Shared Services domain that provides Active Directory Services to 20000+ employees spread across close to 150 distinct business environments. etworks saved us a lot of time. With Snapmirror we were able to take instant backups of all our transactions,” says MrJain. WNS now relies on Netapp’s SnapMirror technology to back-up data over IPnetworks. SnapMirror also helps in centralizing the backup of data to tape from multiple data centres by replicating data from multiple data centers. This brings down WNS’s investment in tape infrastructure. NetApp also recommended SnapShots, which could be leveraged for instant data back up and user data recovery without having to go to tapes.

Scaling with NetApp
After gaining comfort with NAS storage, WNS wanted NetApp to provide them a solution for their Exchange environment. For this NetApp recommended a solution based on FAS 3140 system with FCP protocol (FC SAN). This solution would allow WNS to take faster exchange back-ups as well as improve the speed of restoration and exchange data replication.

Business Benefits

Industry Recognition
Every year, IDG’s CIO magazine selects organizations that exhibit the highest level of operational and strategic excellence in information technology (IT). WNS was awarded the Storage Award 2008 and 2009 by CIO magazine India for its commitment towards implementing innovative data storage solutions based on the deployment of Netapp’s storage solutions. This was an important recognition of WNS’s commitment to use information technology to provide innovative business solutions to its clients.

Storage optimization saves hundreds of terabytes dramatically reducing management overheads
Right in the early stages of the storage optimization project, WNS witnessed a substantive reclamation of 50 TB of space with the implementation of NAS. After deploying Netapp’s deduplication technology
a further saving of _more than 10 TB was made, making it possible to achieve 80% of utilization across 269 TB of storage space.

Faster Data Recovery
Data recovery was achieved much faster and became much more reliable. Business intelligence reporting became faster and back-up time was reduced considerably. In addition to this, the re-allocation and scaling of data became much faster and simpler. As a direct result of all these factors, there was over 30% reduction in operational costs and management overheads.

Dedicated to keeping business running
Netapp’s reliable performance in the form of ensuring application availability and integration and providing professional support around the clock makes them a business partner in WNS’ growth.

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Keywords : office processes, storage solutions, outsourcing, research and analytics, Innovative Storage Solutions, WNS, BPO,

Category : Business : Business

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